Event

Munch & his Mentor

Kristiania (Oslo), Norway, in the early eighteen nineties: Edvard Munch is around thirty years of age and truly a struggling artist. The establishment criticizes his experiments in form and content and calls him a fraud. Sales are so low Munch has to exchange paintings for a meal, and he has great doubts about his quest as an artist: to paint his life. On top of this is his personal life on a low; every woman he meets seems to steal him away from his work and he ends up running away and with the end of the bohemian era, his social life is dramatically reduced and many of his friends are long gone. Munch especially misses his mentor, Hans Jaeger, the chief bohemian of Kristiania.

The bohemians inspired each other to jump onto lifes pages in full color, gave each other the courage to describe life as they saw it, and moved each other from being critical of the establishment to make their own original creations, from being copycats and followers to originals, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Munch and his Mentor combines the personal story of Munch with universal bohemian issues. The bohemian movement was international and raised the same questions all over the western world, and the play investigates two hypotheses:

1.The bohemian era is the cradle of the modern sentiment.
2.Several writers and artists were successful because of being part of the bohemian movement.

The play also has underlying arguments that should be of inspiration to anyone today:

Finding oneself requires continuously introspection
The most common form of despair is not being true to yourself
For the world to move forward every new generation has to look critically at the establishment, the ruling generation
Lifes greatest aspects cannot be measured nor calculated