These two handsome, brilliant, wildly solitary, introverted Norwegians feel compelled to bare their souls publicly in their art while neurotically guarding their personal privacy. With Knausgaard’s book on Munch, we enter the realm of biography written by the doppelgänger. However, I have always thought and felt that my art might help others to clarify their own search for truth.’ Through it I seek to clarify my relationship with the world. Both men operate on the principle that scrupulous self-examination is the only way of arriving at some sort of universal truth. Munch wrote an almost Knausgaardian number of autobiographical pages in his private journals while recording the outer reality of his life in hundreds of self-portraits. Now he has given us a book on Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist best known for painting ‘The Scream’. Nietzsche observed that all philosophy is autobiography, and Knausgaard certainly qualifies, having written 4,000 pages of a multi-volume autobiography called My Struggle. Karl Ove Knausgaard declared at the end of his previous book that he is no longer a writer, and it looks as though he’s moving in to fill that space. Doesn’t have a world-class philosopher (Kierkegaard was Danish).
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