Originally published in the Winter 1999-2000 issue of Edda . Used by permission.

It is especially in the next phase of Bjørneboe's training that many of the central themes of his writing emerge. At this time, Bjørneboe developed a friendship with Karl Brodersen, a devout student of the anthroposophical teachings of Austrian-born Rudolf Steiner. Brodersen exposed Bjørneboe to both Kierkegaard and Steiner, an influence that would have a far- reaching effect. [2] Bjørneboe also became familiar with anthroposophy through his cousin André Bjerke, who exposed him to the Oslo-based Anthroposophical Society in 1941. This connection is particularly illuminating when dealing with Bjørneboe's colorific sense, for Bjerke (who eventually renounced Steiner's syncretistic metaphysics) wrote a book on Goethe's Farbenlehre (1810; Theory of Colours, 1840), further evidence of the strong effect of Goethe's chromatic theorizing on the anthroposophical movement. [3]

Drawn to Goethe's emphasis on a qualitative not a quantitative study of nature, Rudolf Steiner spent years editing Goethe's works. In 1913 Steiner built the Goetheanum, his school of ""spiritual science," at Dornach, Switzerland; he gave no fewer than ten lectures on color there, including "Das Wesen der Farben" [The Essence of Color] in 1923. The blending of spiritual and "scientific" approaches in Goethe's Farbenlehre spoke directly to Steiner's metaphysical sense. Steiner opposed science's over-reliance on the application of formulas and viewed Goethe's theorizing about color as an effort to explain sensory perception as the link between subjective quality and objective quantity.

A second important chromatic influence on Bjørneboe occurred in Sweden. Refusing to work for the Germans, Bjørneboe, along with Brodersen, fled in 1943 to neutral Sweden, where he studied for the following two years at Stockholm's Kungliga kunsthögskolan and with the Swedish Expressionist painter Isaac Grünewald. Grünewald, who had studied under Matisse in Paris, ran his own school in Stockholm, and was an eloquent spokesperson for Matisse's expressionistic liberation of color. Not only did he include his own manifesto on Expressionism in his 1918 exhibit at Stockholm's Liljevalchs Konsthall, but he was also the author of numerous essays on art, among them "On color," "Matisse's manifesto," and "The genius Matisse." Grünewald's influence surfaces in Bjørneboe's first published article, an essay about the Swedish painter Ernst Josephson (in Aftenposten, 26 August 1947). In his essay "Om Matisses teckning" [On Matisse's drawing], Grünewald had already compared Josephson's line drawings to those of Matisse. [4] Bjørneboe's training in color theory would eventually surface in his artist novel, Blåmann (1959).

Though the expressionistic nature of his prose owes much to his spiritualist studies, a significant tension arises in Bjørneboe's work that also rests on an equally strong non-metaphysical sensibility, a social and political engagement. In the introduction to Aske, vind og jord [Ashes, Wind and Earth] (1968), a collection of his songs and poems, Bjørneboe writes:

The most obvious conflict in my writing since my debut in 1951 has been the tension between a strong, inward, definitely metaphysical bent on the one hand--and an equally strong, outward, polemical and documentary, contemporarily engaged, and truly revolutionary position on the other hand. For me, no real contradiction exists in these two extremes. (6)

This tension, among many others (most notably that between good and evil, artist and person, and victim and abuser), contributes to the urgency of Bjørneboe's expressionistic imagery. In his 1971 lecture Literature and reality , Bjørneboe describes subjective reality as an "inner world of feelings, thoughts, pictures and experiences", yet he recognizes the necessity of a pictorial language that can "convey reality." In their struggle to do so, artists must reach toward some communicable objectivity: ". . . this complete rendering of a particular and subjective truth, along with being communicated with sufficient honesty, is suddenly transformed into an objective truth. One that can be shared by other people" (175).

Bjørneboe's pictorial imagery solves the very tension (metaphysics/ polemics) he alludes to in his introduction to Aske, vind og jord: he communicates his own (or his character's own) singular truth with imagery that speaks to most, if not all, readers about conditions that are often political, if not at least social, in nature. Color functions as an important tool in the dance between subjective artistry and objective communication. This struggle becomes the basis for the conflict between artistic talent and communication that defines Blåmann. Bjørneboe wrote the novel after he had gone to Dornach in 1957 and severed his public ties to anthroposophy; Brodersen contends that the novel represents a struggle to return to a pre-Steiner period in Bjørneboe's life.

Blåmann's focus on the protagonist Sem Tangstad's early development discloses Bjørneboe's deep understanding of childhood as a defining factor in one's life, an understanding accompanied by an uncanny insight into child psychology. [5] ". . .childhood is the point of departure in our lives," Bjørneboe explained in a 1959 interview about Blåmann. "Everything that is alive within us flows from sources that sprang up in childhood." [6] As an artist novel Blåmann also illustrates Bjørneboe's belief in the creative individual and what happens when society hampers a person's "right to be different, to go his own way." Here, shades of Sigurd Hoel and Aksel Sandemose also emerge; in this sense, as in many of his themes and images, Bjørneboe seems closer to the psychoanalytical Scandinavian authors of the 1930s and 1940s.

In Blåmann the genetic propensity for artistry in the Tangstad family appears in bright red hair that marks the family's more artistic members (along with a tendency toward bad stomachs and early death, including suicide). Sem's environment is openly antagonistic to his nature as an artist, represented first and foremost by his own "abnormal" and "flame- red" hair (his son Olemann also has "intense red hair" (107). [7] The repeated use of flame-red hair also functions as a sign for the spiritual and visionary aspect of an artist's talent. It is a Pentecostal image (the Holy Spirit descends in tongues of flame on the heads of the disciples in the New Testament and red vestments are worn in most Christian churches at Pentecost), reinforced by Bjørneboe's discussion in Moment of Freedom of what truly matters when writing books: "Naturally, there is only one thing that matters when it comes to books — whether or not they have been written on Patmos, that is, if they have come into existence through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit" (15, E18f). One is reminded of Blake's maxim, "His opinions, who does not see spiritual agency, is not worth any man's reading" (1809). Despite a checkered career filled with proclamations of nihilism and anarchism, Bjørneboe's literary output does, as Kristiansen argues, reveal an undeniable spiritual nature. It is probably safe to say that Bjørneboe never stopped seeing spiritual agency in the personal and political events around him.

The use of red to indicate the spiritual aspect of Sem's gift reflects the color's long history of association with the divine. John Gage, in Color and Culture, notes that this quality dates to ancient views of red as the color of the sun, of light itself. [8] In his Farbenlehre, Goethe observes that "Whoever is acquainted with the prismatic origin of red, will not think it paradoxical if we assert that this colour partly actu, partly potentiâ, includes all the other colours" (313, 793). More pertinent is Goethe's pyramidal notion of the "soul power" of colors, in which the top third of a triangle, the red section, represents the imagination (Phantasie). As it was for many Romantics, in Bjørneboe's artistic reading the Holy Spirit becomes an aeolian harp image, a metaphysical source of inspiration objectified in red imagery. At one point later in Blåmann, when Sem's wife Elice has received news of a sudden windfall from money for a sold painting, she "began to carry the groceries to the kitchen table, and while walking there with both hands full, a great and flaming thought suddenly came to [literally: struck down into] her — the dress!" (123). She recalls a dress she had admired but thought impossible ever to purchase, given their financial straits. Inspiration/revelation comes from above, a concept given form in red flames.

Bjørneboe may also have had Resurrection (ca. 1512-16), a 16th-century painting by the German painter Matthias Grünewald, in mind when he decided to make Sem's hair red. Bjørneboe mentions Grünewald's powerful depiction of the resurrection scene, painted for the altar at Isenheim in Alsace, in an important moment in Moment of Freedom (179, E172). With its red-orange halo surrounding Christ's head, a halo then encircled by a complementary blue-green one, the painting captures a number of contrasts, especially spiritual/worldly (i.e., immaterial/material) [9]. Commenting on the painting in Farven og lyset: Studier i Goethes Farvelære [Color and light: studies in Goethe's color theory], Lone Schmidt observes that "In minutely executed details (the painter) reveals feelings from deep doubt to heavenly bliss and conjures them up intensely with the aid of pure, saturated colors, arranged in stark contrasts" (29). The use of red and light to emphasize the divine nature of Sem's talent also reinforces the Romantic notion of children being closer to the spriritual, especially in their early years (cf. Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"), a notion also held by Steiner. Kristiansen notes that "The childhood memory can therefore be interpreted as an experience of divine, spiritual light" (122).

Bjørneboe reinforces the paternal background of Sem's artistry in the initial description of his mother as "pale and colorless" (10). [10] When his father poisons himself, Sem's mother moves in with the boy's spinster aunts, two hypochondriacal women who exchange pills and thermometers as Christmas presents and who thrive on control, especially of Sem's widowed mother. [11] Their attempts to dictate the path of the red-haired boy's life are ultimately doomed; he appears always "absent, almost as in dreams" (12). Still, they are a curb on his individual development; their own artistic sense (or lack thereof) is best illustrated by the suffocating environment of embroidered pillows, knick-knacks, and potted plants they create once they take over their dead brother's house. They are aesthetically challenged, and the boy's own artistic sense develops along opposite lines, like the contrast between the detested cozy portraits of people knitting that Munch in his "St. Cloud Notes" vowed to replace with vibrant colors that would "live."

Bjørneboe believes that images take precedence over words, especially in childhood. [12] Not only is Sem reticent, but his artistic interest can also be traced to his private moments with his most prized possession, Europe's Museums, a collection of illustrated books that, in an ironic move, were saved from destruction by the two manipulative aunts. The reproductions of paintings become both sanctuary and inspiration for Sem. Perusing the pictures alone in his loft, removed from his mother and aunts, he finds "the truth . . . his real life took place here. Eveything else was merely a shadow-existence, a land of the dead, distant and unreal" (18). Like Alice through the looking glass, Sem enters the pictures when he opens the books: ". . . here Sem had his real hide-out and home . . .Here he had arrived" (19). The sanctuary effect of Sem's pictures reflects his early desire to escape an unhappy environment, a frequent catalyst to artistic development.

Despite the red glory of the boy's artistic nature, Sem's personal side remains alienated and sad, reinforced in the source of the novel's chromatic title. The antagonistic other boys at school eventually paint Sem's penis blue, a fact which is discovered by his colorless aunts and mother when they bathe the boy that night (scrubbing the colored member only makes it "somewhat lighter" (17)). Sem's blue tissemann indicates the sorrow that follows his personal life, a sorrow eventually illustrated, à la Karen Blixen, in a blue scene of longing. During a particularly depressed period in his early teenage years, Sem suffers from recurring nightmares (through their histrionics his resentful aunts have performed emotional interruptus on the boy's first romantic relationship, thus throwing him into his initial bout with despair). Eventually he realizes that

Behind this lay something else, the real reason for everything. It was a totally foreign and unknown longing after something he knew nothing about. Just a longing. . . . It happened that the longing took form inside him, in a picture that rose within him, an inner picture full of sweetness and beauty. It drifted like a breeze, like a breath of air through him; it was a picture of a blue sea, a strong, dark-blue sea — and in that sea lay an island with white buildings on it. The colors were like a balm on his eyes, though the picture only revealed itself for a second before it was once again gone.

He realized that this was not a picture of longing itself, but only one of the last veils in front of the incomprehensible that he longed for. Like fragrance and sensation it had something to do with the pictures in the books from his childhood, a pale inner similarity with them — even though the nature was completely different, just as different as the colors. For these pictures of the sea and the island were white and blue, whereas the pictures of the old cities were reddish brown and dark. (68-69)

Sem's own blue nature, his longing, becomes, like the blue portrait, an expression of sadness covering a deeper problem. Still, in a reflection of Bjørneboe's thoughts in his essay "Litteratur og virkelighet," Sem must first experience an objective (and in this instance colored) image before he can even sense the message behind the picture. Bjørneboe echoes Kandinsky's assertions in Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911; Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1914) of the melancholic nature of dark blue, its organ-like musical tones captured in the sea's "dark-blue" color; Kandinsky notes that when blue "sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human" (38). Steiner had also recognized this quality in blue: In a 1914 lecture on "The Creative World of Color," he observed that blue "has something in it which goes away from us, which leaves us looking after it with a certain sadness, perhaps even with a kind of longing" (139).

The buildings' bright white color seems a fairy-tale invention, an unattainable kingdom of purity and innocence. [13] More importantly it is the colors which serve as a "balsam" on Sem's vision; blue's restful, absorbing nature seems in full effect here, though fleeting. The ensuing revelation that the colors recall some unclear aspect of childhood associated with the mysterious red-brown images [14] of Sem's picture books emphasizes the "incomprehensible" nature of what lies behind the pale likeness. The "ufattelige" that Sem longs for is similar to the King's melancholic longing of an adolescent in Blixen's tale "Fra det gamle Danmark" (1942; The Fish); it is both emotional and sexual in nature, again reinforced by the use of the color blue. [15] The murky colors of Sem's picture books indicate a darker side to his emotional state, and Bjørneboe follows this description with the birth of "two rows of pictures" within Sem's mind: "the brown ones and the white ones," the dark and the light, reflecting the boy's already split nature.

Sem's apparent salvation arrives when he first shows his drawings (many are copies of the pictures in Europe's Museums) to his insouciant friend Severin, who then leads the red- haired boy to Laurin, an art instructor in the city. Laurin is impressed with Sem's drawings and talent. Agreeing to train the boy he tells him: "In any case, there is one thing I can help you with; I can teach you the tricks of colors" (39). What ensues is a basic lesson in color concepts that leaves Sem feeling as if he has discovered the Holy Grail. He becomes "dizzy and happy" when he first handles a palette and brushes. Kandinsky's theosophical musings on the musicality of color again come into play as Laurin, after giving him his first fine brush, explains to Sem: "Here you stand with your instrument! It is the same as a violin for a musician; it is a Stradivarius. . . The little palette you hold in your hand, that is a harp which you can play on!" (40). At this point Sem feels a shiver, tantamount to a religious paroxysm, run through his body.

From the tubes of paint he squeezes into a circle of color, Laurin traces the path through the spectrum from yellow through purple and back to yellow:

        Look here, the painter said, laying out a row of tubes beside each other: These are the colors of the spectrum. It is all the colors of the rainbow, all the bright colors — from yellow to violet. Have you seen the rainbow?
        Yes, Sem had.
        Good, we begin with yellow!
        Sem felt that Laurin was equally as taken with the moment. The painter began at the far left of the palette and squeezed out a little bit of twinkling, sharp yellow paint onto it.
        Lemon yellow, he said. And then he took the next color.
        Cadmium yellow, he said. Next comes orange! Then comes vermillion, and then cadmium red.
        A series of glittering, joyous dabs of color lay across the palette, and Laurin turned the opposite way for the next group:
        This is purple-red, and then comes lake. After lake comes ultramarine, and then cobalt blue. He looked at Sem and then pointed between the last red and the first blue:
        This is where you find the violet colors. You'll have to mix these until you get the color right.
        He took a new tube:
        This is Prussian blue. It's terribly strong and must only be used in small doses! Next comes a cool green, a green with some blue in it. This is emerald green, or vert emerauld, as it is called in the trade. After that comes cadmium- green, and so we have gone full circle. Through the entire rainbow. All the yellow-green nuances lie between cadmium green and lemon yellow. (41-42)

Laurin's circle of paints bears a striking resemblance to Johannes Itten's own twelve-color circle (note that twelve colors are named by Bjørneboe in the citation above), from which can be formed harmonic triads (e.g., yellow — blue — red) and tetrads (e.g., yellow — red- orange — violet — blue-green) of color. [16] Like the anthroposophists, Itten was also a devotee of Goethe's Farbenlehre, and he cited Delacroix as an influence on his emphasis on the placement of complementaries. An eccentric character who shaved his head to look like a monk and was a radical vegetarian, Itten taught at the Bauhaus (1919-23, until he was ousted for being divisive) and gave frequent lectures on color. His twelve-color circle (sometimes depicted as a star) was first made public in the periodical Utopia in 1921.

Most noticeable is Laurin's advice about the violet colors; violet is comprised of red and blue, the two colors that have come to define Sem at this point in his life (red hair/blue penis). Laurin's advice about having to mix the colors by trial and error to get the right combination reflects the difficulty Sem will experience juggling his art (red) and his personal life (blue). The comment also reflects the struggle of both Steiner and Goethe to find the balance between the spiritual and the physical.

The mentor/apprentice aspect of the moment is unmistakable (Kristiansen pursues many of these more archetypal lines in Bjørneboe's work). A parallel scene occurs in Moment of Freedom when the Servant of Justice, in a page torn from Bjørneboe's own life, recalls an encounter with his mentor Isaac Grünewald in Stockholm. [17] The spiritual aura of what is happening in this scene in Blåmann also reflects one of Itten's contentions in The Art of Color concerning the comprehension of chromatic power: "Only those deeply responsive can experience the tonal values of single or simultaneous colors without reference to objects" (84). Sem innately possesses an appreciation of and attraction to color's power, sans objects. In this sense the dance between the material and the immaterial that Bjørneboe seems never to have abandoned, and that so often accompanies color theory after Goethe, becomes evident. Itten, citing Goethe's notions of color's sensual/aesthetic effects, claims that the "optical, electromagnetic and chemical" aspects of color reflect a similar "process" in a person's spiritual side (Kandinsky refers to this quality as the "sympathy of the soul"). The sense that nature is ordered which surfaces from this chromatic view has long spoken to those who would find evidence of the immaterial in the material. [18]

This complementary nature of existence, captured so vividly in Matthias Grünewald's two-color halo, also surfaces in the last two colors Laurin squirts onto Sem's palette:

        And here comes one of the most delightful colors to be found! It is green earth. It can only be compared to one other — and that's this one here: English red!
        Both of the last two colors were especially pleasing for Sem's eyes to look at, and together with ivory-black and zinc-white, they gave him great joy. (42)

Sem's material/immaterial sides respond strongly to the complementary effects of the earthly green and divine red. Laurin's last words are that the first thing Sem will have to paint is the color wheel! The complimentary colors! Laurin has imparted to the boy a Goethean sense of both the power of complements and the ordered nature of color. Over the next few nights, Sem's sleep is filled with dreams; with an awakened chromatic sense, his imagination is ready for new heights. Some of Steiner's teachings seem to be at play here also; in the anthroposophist's view, children learn best during the second seven years of life when the imagination and fantasy are at their strongest.

By the time he begins painting, Sem has developed an Expressionist's sensibility: "For Sem, beauty was expression, it was a spiritual quality" (83). Despite his naturalistic leanings, he has also learned that only a few brush strokes on a page and "it began to vibrate" (70); this quality leads to Sem's love of drawing "croquis," quick sketches of models who shift position after a few moments. [19] Observing a model Sem feels "the music in her." More importantly, by the age of seventeen, Sem's approach to color echoes some of Matisse's basic premises about aiming for harmony when setting one color next to another: "He never looked at a naked woman's body without comparing it to the color in the background" (83). As Matisse observes in "Notes of a Painter" (1908), with the addition of each new color on a canvas, "a new combination of colors will succeed the first and render the totality of my representation" (40).

Even Sem's initial response when meeting his eventual wife is tempered by his chromatic eye: after she has modeled for him, Elice shows him some of her drawings (which he responds to in characteristically misogynist fashion by calling them a "typical girl's drawing"). Turning toward her to see if the young woman has understood his criticisms, he is struck by her eyes:

There was something strange about them; they had no common color but were a mix of brown, black, green and yellow. . . . First, they turned brown, and then almost black, while he sat and stared at them. It interested him purely for coloristic reasons. Actually, they were quite lovely, and they turned darker and darker. (84) [20]

The predominance of earth tones in Elice's eyes may well allude to her appeal to his physical nature; Sem also notices that her skin has a greenish tone, almost olive (a complement to his red hair?). When the two return to Elice's small loft apartment so she can change, she tells him to look away while she undresses. Sem does not answer her, Bjørneboe explains, because he has found a book about Matisse and is leafing through it. Sem's dark-blue nature takes over early in his relationship with Elice, especially when he runs from the romance just as it is deepening. When he changes his mind and tries to win her back, she resists, forcing him to value their relationship when she eventually acquiesces.

Despite the novel's lopsided sense that men are artists and women either supportive (Elice) or hindering (Sem's aunts and mother), Ottil Tharaldsen's view of Åsta Evjeland (see footnote above) is limiting and dismissive. At one point Tharaldsen refers to Åsta as "an exception" to the book's general rule that women artists cannot measure up against their male counterparts and then accuses Bjørneboe of reducing her function to that of a "fortune-teller." Two problems arise from Tharaldsen's contention: It is Åsta, possessed of a heightened chromatic sense, who assesses and judges Sem's paintings worthy of exhibition (while he is off on an irresponsible binge). Also, her working out of Sem's astrological chart cannot be viewed as a solely "female" activity; Bjørneboe remained enamored of astrology throughout his adult life and admitted to making his own astrological charts. In the scene in which she advises Elice about Sem's charts (and those of their child), Åsta represents the voice of the author (particularly in her discussion of the relationship between destiny and choice) not as the voice of a "woman."

Tharaldsen is on safer ground on the romantic front, discussing Åsta's idealized worship of her dissolute dead lover Vågum. As her former teacher, though, Vågum has served no purpose different from Laurin with Sem: both mentors have imparted advanced colorific senses to their students. In this aspect, Åsta functions as a parallel to Sem, with the advantage of age, experience, and wisdom on her side. In fact, one of the weaknesses of the book (which received mixed reviews from critics) is this narrative break in which Åsta becomes a central figure and Sem seems to slip into the background.

Bjørneboe introduces Åsta as a knowledgeable painter in the chapter "And the husband went out to get milk..."; she is a major character for the next few chapters, and our first introduction to her involves color. As she stares at the rainswept sky, we are informed immediately that she sees differently from the average person: "For other people the sky was gray, in some places much lighter, in others almost black" (96). Åsta is bothered by a yellow tone appearing in the gray clouds, a light ochre that lacks "greenish tones in this meeting between yellow and black" (96). Baffled by this incongruity, she stops into a store to buy some liquor and talks to Enok Syvertsen (Sem's other childhood friend). Staring at Syvertsen, she thinks: "The boy had become so very red in the face. . . . The first blue tones will soon follow" (97). Even faces are met with her advanced chromatic sense.

Later in the novel, when Elice visits Åsta's loft apartment, she notices the older woman's paintings: ". . . all of them, streets and houses, in strong colors, gray and blue, with one or another little intense-yellow or green speck of color on a door or a windowsill, assuredly and purposefully painted" (143). No sense of weakness in her ability emerges from these portraits. Though she admits that Vågum was a great "colorist" (144), she also recognizes that he was an irresponsible drunk who wasted his own talent ("if he had stayed sober"). Seeing Sem's "naturalistic" paintings (which he has refused so far to exhibit), Åsta recognizes them as "the work of a great painter's youth" (104).

The reader is left uncertain about Sem's future by the end of the novel. After his friend Severin, the would-be sculptor suffering from tuberculosis, dies from their days-long binge, Sem experiences a number of delusions, including the dead Severin's tear-stained visage. When Sem finally awakens, he sees Elice bent over Olemann's crib and is struck artistically by the curve of her body. He quickly grabs a sketchbook and draws her, a possible indication that he can return to his artistry without the romantic notions of tortured solipsism. Elice's remark that he is the only Tangstad to have had a red-haired son also points to a continuation of his artistry, not to defeat. Reviewing the novel in Aftenposten (8 December 1959), Egil Rasmussen observes that in this final scene "the reader discerns that Sem finally opens up, that the artist and the person have come in contact with each other." After a lifetime of alienation, Sem's red and blue sides appear to be uniting.

Though the novel reflects Bjørneboe's commitment to Goethe's Romantic color theorizing (and Steiner's interpretation of the same), a dissatisfying quality pervades Blåmann's ending. One senses an almost formulaic Jungian turn in Sem's survival of the haze of his drunken binge and his sudden emergence as a "new" person. In his final reverie before he regains full consciousness, Sem sees himself as a child with "a paintbox standing beside him and a big, soft paintbrush in his hand " (182). In front of his child-self lies his "old picture-book" Europe's Museums; its red cities — the initial inspiration for his artistic life — are his last image before he awakens from his stupor.

Although Bjørneboe would have us believe that the chromatic tools imparted to Sem as a child have provided more than an artistic advantage, the reader sees no real evidence of the artist's personal advancement. The tensions of material/immateriality — of physical/spiritual — that haunted Bjørneboe throughout his career (and that informed so much of his work) remain unresolved in Blåmann — just as they would remain unresolved in the life of its author.

Top    |    Home   |   Site Map

This page added July 2001