Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1855–1886), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still unsurpassed. The odd thing is that the painting seemingly came out of nothing: Munch was twenty-one years old when he painted it, he had hardly any education, hardly any experience as a painter, and he painted it on the very outskirts of provincial Europe, in a Kristiania where, only a few decades before, cows could be seen ambling through the streets. Equally odd is the fact that this painting, which marks the beginning of Munch’s artistic career, his first masterpiece, is also an end point: he never again made anything that came close to it. The Sick Child is an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist. He worked on it for a year, adding layer upon layer, then, scraping the paint off, added new layers, scraped them off, as if he were burrowing into something, or toward something. When he exhibited it at the Annual Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania in 1886 he still considered it unfinished, and titled it Study. At the exhibition the painting was ridiculed, people laughed and pointed at it, the newspapers slammed it. Nowadays this is difficult to understand. How could anyone ridicule something so palpably heartfelt and vulnerable, and so existentially threatening, for isn’t it the very image of deep emotion and existential threat? 

The Sick Child depicts a pale, gaunt, sickly girl propped up against a pillow in bed, her gaze directed at a woman sitting next to her and holding her hand. The woman’s head is bowed, we can’t see her face, only the girl’s. It is full of concern for the woman, who will have to go on with her life.  

The room is rendered almost without depth, our gaze has no way to travel into it, the surface stops it at every point. The bed, with its greenish covering, looks almost vertical. The walls, also greenish, in places dissolve into vertical, clearly painted stripes. There is a bottle of medicine on a chest of drawers in front of the bed to one side, to the other there is a small table with a half-filled glass. Both objects seem mere suggestions, painted just clearly enough that we can recognize them, but no more. The same applies to the girl’s and the woman’s hands, especially the girl’s one hand lying on the bedcover, it is unfinished, merely suggested, a “hand” rather than a hand. 

More than a hundred years after Modernism there is of course nothing shocking or provocative about this, nor anything incomprehensible; we have no difficulty reading and understanding the painting’s codes, nor in relating to what they signify. But back then, in 1886, the public saw only flaws and shortcomings, a lack of competence, sloppiness, the work of an amateur. Why? Because the motif, the sick or dying child, the sickroom, belonged to a genre—in other words, there were certain expectations for what it should look like, and certain ways of achieving this. And here, I think, is where it starts to get interesting, that an agreement existed between reality and its depiction, and that this was a given, so not subject to negotiation. Munch the twenty-one-year-old likely did not approach his painting with a theory about reality and our image of it, he probably didn’t confront his motif with notions about the arbitrariness of the rules of art, still less the arbitrariness of our image of reality. He wanted, quite simply, to paint something he had seen. And what he had seen, which he wanted to paint, was his sister Sophie’s sickbed, watched over by his aunt Karen. Sophie, with whom he had been very close, had died of a lung hemorrhage eight years earlier, in 1877. He had everything at his disposal—the form, the motif, the method, the talent. He got hold of a model to represent his sister, while Karen posed as herself, and he began to paint. But what should have been a simple matter, over and done with in a few weeks, evidently became more and more difficult the longer he painted. The problem was as simple as it was insurmountable: he couldn’t find a valid way to transfer what was in front of him, the room, the bed, the girl and the woman, to the canvas. It should have been simple, but it was impossible. Why? It wasn’t that he didn’t know how—only three years later he painted a sickroom according to all the rules of art, with spatial depth, well-modeled bodies, sunlight entering through a curtain that billows in the draft, and fully rendered details; a perfectly verisimilar room in the realist tradition. The only thing standing in his way must have been his experience of the room, in other words, an inner dimension. That is what he wanted to capture, that is what he was groping for, which nothing of what he had learned could help him find. He added layer upon layer of paint, scraped it off, added another. He was seeking something authentic, something true, and the paradox is that he found it at the point where the painting visibly became a painting, where the illusion of reality began to break down; that is, in art at its most artful—where “as if” no longer reigns. Borrowing a phrase from the language of film and theater, we might say that he broke the fourth wall.  

***

Once in a while, though not often, a book, a film, or a work of art grabs hold of me in ways that elude thought, that feel urgent, producing a kind of inner voraciousness, something constantly smoldering which occasionally flares up, and which while they last feel more important than anything else. The sensation is not unlike the feeling that sometimes arises when I write, those moments when the world and the self, time and place, simply cease to exist, and where what matters is not words but something else, something other, vague and indefinable, but powerful, agitated, harrowing, pleasurable, bordering on the manic—and again, voracious. The Brothers Karamazov was one such book for me, and The Idiots by Lars von Trier was such a film. But it can also occur with theoretical works. Ten years ago I curated an exhibition of Munch’s pictures in Oslo. During my research I happened upon a book in the bookstore at the old Munch Museum, it was by Stian Grøgaard and was entitled Edvard Munch: An Exposed Life. Grøgaard was a painter himself, but also a philosopher and a professor at the Art Academy in Oslo. I read his book in one feverish stretch on the plane home, and continued reading on the train from the airport. What the book does is to reset Munch by examining what was available to him at that time, in the 1880s in Kristiania, and how he related to it in his paintings, practically brushstroke by brushstroke. Grøgaard’s key concept is unlearning—when what you know and have mastered is no longer of any use, and to the contrary, it is a hindrance. For Munch himself it was presumably an unconscious process at first, governed by inner necessity, not necessarily understood—The Sick Child—while later it became the opposite, conscious and calculated, as we know it from his perhaps wildest painting, The Scream. One thing that both of these paintings did, albeit in very different ways, was to deny room to space. Space is continuity, continuity is time, time is a course of events, a course of events is storytelling, and storytelling is reconciliation. Not only is space a place other than our own, it is also a guarantee that whatever is happening will end, to be followed by something else. What is compelling about both The Sick Child and The Scream is their utter refusal to be reconciled. By denying room to space, they become a part of our space, acutely present, and the emotions they embody or awaken are impossible to deflect. What is interesting, of course, is that the means Munch used to get near to his subject were perceived by his contemporaries as the opposite: they were met with laughter, not sincere emotion. Whereas for us now, as I write this, in April 2026, the problem has perhaps become the opposite, since everything now is up close, everything feels urgent—I need only to reach for my phone and open a random news site to see a tragedy unfolding in real time. Images, which in Munch’s time were relatively exclusive objects, including photographs, have become the very things through which we see and experience the world. What we live in now is the moment. A concept such as the authentic has lost all meaning, not just because it is a cliché—for isn’t everything staged, including the authentic? Only an idiot asks such a question, for in a form like this, a piece of expository writing originally meant for a catalogue for an art exhibition, it is impossible to get beneath concepts, at least for me, and while concepts—for instance, “authentic,” “staged”—do have content, they are static and indeed formless, and form is decisive; only form can embody or realize the content of concepts, by bringing them into play. We see what we know, and what we know is confirmed by what we see. This is the closed circle we live within, and that is why, at least I think that is why, art exists. It seeks that which we don’t know. This is why the concept of unlearning is as relevant now as it was for Munch. And it is difficult to view the phenomenon of Dogme 95 in light of anything other than unlearning. As a means to come into contact with something the form would otherwise conceal. Not direct access to reality, of course, but a different kind of access.  

 ***

But before I go there, to The Idiots and its jumble of stagings that gravitate around the absolutely authentic, I would like to dwell for a moment on Munch, for during my work with the mentioned exhibition in 2017, not only did I read articles, monographs, and biographies about Munch, I also saw the 1974 film Edvard Munch, by the Brit Peter Watkins, a unique work of biographical cinematic art, almost shocking in its originality. It opens with Munch and a servant girl in a room, where after a few seconds Munch turns and looks straight into the camera. The illusion is broken before it has been properly established. The same holds for the ensuing scenes, which are performed as in a regular fiction film; we are there, watching Munch and his entourage live their lives, before the action is interrupted by interviews with the performers. They are still characters in Kristiania in the 1880s, but now evidently also participants in a kind of documentary—we seem to be behind the camera, and this transforms the remaining scenes into fiction, yet without for all that leaving fiction behind, since it is now second-order fiction. The actors are for the most part amateurs, many of them cast for their physical likeness to the characters they are playing—the lead actor in particular, Geir Westby, who is uncannily similar to the young Munch, but also Kåre Stormark, who plays Munch’s mentor, the anarchist and rabble-rouser Hans Jæger. The physical likeness creates a strange nearness to Munch’s time, whereas the acting, stiff and awkward, creates distance. There is also a voiceover, which, in documentary style, gives an account of contemporary events in the world. In this way, with all its breaches of illusion and efforts to make the medium, i.e., the form, visible, the film succeeds almost miraculously in delineating the conditions of Munch’s life, both political and personal, in a way that feels entirely true and strangely authentic. Seen from a distance, this is not wholly unlike the way in which the authentic shines through in The Sick Child, with its breaches of illusion and how it makes form visible. For the fact is that the time that produced The Sick Child is irrecoverably lost, and any approach which fails to take that into account is a lie, but that doesn’t mean it is inaccessible. In Grøgaard’s attempt to trace Munch’s physical process of painting and place it in a contemporaneous, painterly-technical context (what could and couldn’t be done in the 1880s), and in Watkins’ film, which gives an intense portrayal of the social environment Munch’s pictures sprang from, time isn’t captured, but rather brought into play in our own time. And it might be (though not necessarily!) interesting to see whether some of these elements reverberate in Lars von Trier’s films. After all, this exhibition curated by him includes pictures by Munch, and Watkins’s film is also on view here. On the other hand, that would be like entering his films through a side entrance and prowling around in them with eyes glued to the ground, hunting for details while ignoring the greater reality around one, which is what really matters. 

For I remember well the effect Trier’s films had when they came out, on myself and on the milieu I was part of—they were important, they were controversial, they were discussed, they left a mark. In my life as a writer, Trier is the only contemporary filmmaker who has had this kind of influence, and whose work it has been impossible not to engage with. The way in which the question of goodness, of the good, is challenged in the most grotesque fashion in Breaking the Waves, and how norms and morality come into view as if someone had lit a candle in the dark room they ordinarily dwell in. Emily Watson staring straight into the camera. Not so as to say, “This is a film,” but rather, “It’s just the two of us, see what’s happening to me.” The church bells in the sky toward the end. I can still clearly recall the dazed state I was in after seeing it for the first time, that Karamazov fire, the inner voraciousness. So too with the final scenes of Dancer in the Dark: the sound was cut and the only thing audible in the cinema were sniffles and sobs, there can’t have been a single person in there who wasn’t crying. That is Lars von Trier: his films are wildly manipulative, and the manipulation is obvious and yet impossible to guard oneself against—at least for me. Feelings trump intellect. And isn’t that what happens at every level in his films, actually? And which makes them so provocative for many viewers? Not only are you given an exposition of a moral philosophical question about the nature of the good in Breaking the Waves, you are forced to experience it, and the conflict which the good stirs up everywhere it appears is suddenly brought near to you, to your own emotions, your own morality.  

This is especially the case with The Idiots, to my mind Trier’s masterpiece, a film that does something that no contemporary novel I can think of comes even close to doing. Like many of Trier’s films, it starts with a basic premise and just puts it out there, into the world, then follows to see what plays out within and around it. Which is also Dostoyevsky’s method: What happens if Jesus comes to Saint Petersburg? What happens if a young man puts his abstract philosophical ideas into practice and kills a person? That Dostoyevsky’s novels are still so intensely vivid must at least partly be because the author himself doesn’t know what the consequences will be. His novels are explorations of ideas. These ideas are, as it were, rubbed down into the baseness of life, where they all but lose their identity as ideas, overwhelmed by all the flesh and blood down there. Stylistically the novels are interesting as well, with their persistently slapdash and unfinished air; scenes are often scantily sketched out, sentences frequently appear to have been simply flung down, with no touching-up, no polishing, no beauty of language. The interesting thing is that this doesn’t matter to the quality of the novels. Nor do the flawed plots, the improbable sequences of events seem to matter; strangely, they don’t detract from the novels’ credibility. Many artists have been influenced by this, of course, and Edvard Munch is one of them—on the morning of the day he died, January 23, 1944, he was reading Demons. If nothing else, recklessness is something he had in common with Dostoyevsky, that he painted fast, that he didn’t bother to fill in the details, that beauty was never his concern. As for what kind of relationship Lars von Trier has to Dostoyevsky, I have no idea, nor do I know what thoughts underlie his films—all I have to go by are the films themselves and a few incidental circumstances, such as that the script for The Idiots was written in four days. That is a truly frenzied pace, and must, or so I believe, have to do with being a writer who wants to get away from himself, wants to lose control over the writing, to break free from what he already knows and has mastered, which is by now familiar and therefore controlled, and into something else, which will be new even to him. But I am speculating. What is not speculation is Dogme 95, the manifesto that sought to eradicate cinematic conventions, conventions so freighted with habit that they are no longer able to carry anything other than themselves, by means of a few simple rules, which all have to do with the suspension of distance between the film and the world, in other words, with getting closer. Shooting must be done on location: presence. Music can only come from the place where the scene is being shot: presence. The camera must be hand-held: presence. The lighting must be from where the scene is being shot: presence. The action must take place in the present: presence. No effects are permissible, either technical or in terms of the action: presence. The result on Trier’s part, The Idiots, which came out in 1998, was (and here I must once again draw on my own experience) a film almost brutally close to reality. Which is odd, because what the Dogme restrictions do is to get rid of the “as if” of traditional cinematic language, which conceals precisely the fact that what we are watching is a film, not reality. In The Idiots the illusion is broken, the cinematic is not concealed, on the contrary, it emerges clearly: it is filmed with a handheld digital camera, which the viewer is constantly aware of, due to the jerky camera movements and the abrupt cuts. So that what we see is a group of actors in different environments, and that certainty never leaves us. Sometimes the microphone appears in the upper edge of the frame, and at regular intervals the action is interrupted by interviews with the participants, in documentary style. The reason this works so insanely well is of course that the film is also about staging. The actors play people who are playing mentally retarded, and their relations with their surroundings are constantly at breaking point, for the reactions of people around them are conflicted, since they too are playacting in the encounter, thus pulling the rug out from under any notion of the authentic, the true, the real.  

And yet that isn’t how the viewer sees the film. The rigging around the authentic is precisely that, mere rigging, a thing to analyze, but adding nothing to the emotion, which for me at least overshadowed all thought. The Idiots is about transgression. I know people who laughed until they cried while they watched it, and others who hate it and consider it infantile, its provocations hollow. As for me, I laughed initially, until the laughter stuck in my throat and my discomfort grew greater and greater. The bourgeois boundaries which the characters transgress against by playing idiots are my own boundaries. I want people to behave decently, to stick to their place, to live and die in the North. It was almost unbearable to watch them making fun of people. And at the same time I felt, and have always felt, a powerful urge to regress, to let go of everything and just fall. Just cry and cry, shout and scream, punch and kick, vanish into a total refusal to face the consequences. Or into utter passivity. For me, The Idiots was an exploration of that too, not just of hypocrisy, sectarianism, morality, and boundaries, which become visible only when they are transgressed, and real when they are felt. And if the film pulls the rug out from under the notion of the authentic, the true, the real, it is only to turn it around when the end arrives, the moment which the entire film may have been created to make space for, where all acting stops, where no illusions exist, and we see what Munch saw: a dead child. 

Translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey.

From an essay in Descendant: Lars von Trier and Nordic Art, edited by Anne Gregersen and Pernille Gøtze Johansson, which will be published by Strandberg Publishing in connection with an exhibition curated by von Trier at Willumsen’s Museum in Frederikssund, Denmark, opening June 6, 2026.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s most recent novel is The School of Night.

Ingvild Burkey is a poet and translator.