Dual experience

This brace of exhibitions takes up the whole of Level 4 (aside from the coffee bar and souvenir shop) of Tate Modern; I say ‘take up’ rather than fill because the Strindberg is stretched so thin it almost achieves invisibility, while the Beuys needs a lot of room to ‘breathe’. In the case of the Strindberg display, I have rarely seen public gallery space so underused. I cannot begin to comprehend why this vast suite of rooms has been given over to an exhibition better suited to the foyer of the National Theatre (where, incidentally, a new version by Caryl Churchill of Strindberg’s A Dream Play is being staged). A visually oriented writer, as Strindberg undeniably was, is not necessarily an artist worthy of a Tate retrospective. As it turns out, his paintings simply do not deserve such an accolade.

August Strindberg (1849–1912) was a writer who tried many paths, working at the beginning of his career as an art critic with some feeling for Impressionism. There is the famous story of Gauguin later asking him to write a catalogue introduction for an exhibition, and Strindberg’s refusal being so eloquent (it’s certainly direct: ‘I cannot grasp your art and I cannot like it’) that Gauguin printed his letter instead. But it wasn’t to Impressionism or Post-Impressionism that Strindberg looked in his own work, but to Expressionism, and in some senses he even anticipated Surrealism — that predominantly literary phenomenon. For he turned to painting as a form of therapy when he was feeling particularly traumatised or was suffering from writer’s block. Most of his art dates from around 1872 or from 20 years later, his most prolific period. There was reason for him to describe his pictures as ‘an escape into nothingness’, for they evidently acted as a safety valve for an overtaxed system.