THE LIVES OF
IBSEN and MUNCH
THE LIVES OF
IBSEN and MUNCH TORSTEIN VELSAND
Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons
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CONTENTS 7 Preface | Torstein Velsand 19 The Life of Henrik Ibsen 131 The Life of Edvard Munch 243 Appendix
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Have you ever considered, for example, that the lines in a play ought to be given different colours, depending on whether they are said in the morning or the evening?� Henrik Ibsen
Preface by Torstein Velsand Ibsen painted, Munch wrote. Or was it vice-versa? Yes, quite right – it was both. Edvard Munch, the creator of pictures who devoted his life and strength to giving profoundly personal mental impressions and experiences a form that made them universal, also left behind large quantities of writing: diaries, letters, philosophical memoranda, attempts at writing fiction, autobiographical sketches and even plays. He could perhaps have become a major writer, he once confided to a colleague, and many of the motifs we are familiar with from Munch’s pictures he originally made the subject of a literary treatment. Henrik Ibsen, for his part, is said to have had such powerful dreams about becoming a painter that his wife Susannah had a hard job keeping him away from the easel. As a boy, he was already noted for his telling caricatures. Later on, he attended drawing classes for a while, gradually advancing to oil paintings and watercolours. As a pharmacist’s apprentice in Grimstad, he decorated the rooms of his employer with his own paintings, efforts that gained the admiration and recognition of the local
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population. It is reasonable to argue that he reached the level of capable amateur. At a professional level, however, Ibsen and Munch both stuck to their respective fields – fortunately, one should probably add. After a few half-hearted attempts to become something conventional in life, they followed their calling and gave themselves up to art, completely and uncompromisingly. Munch had his debut as an artist at the age of nineteen. Ibsen was three years older when his first play was published. An engineer and a pharmacist were lost to the nation. On the other hand, Norway gained a place on the artistic world map. Ibsen went first; after all, he had a 35 years’ advantage. When Munch came into the world in 1863, the severely tested dramatist had finally got his travel grant and was about to embark on a long-lasting exile, and while the delicate budding artist was still in his childhood, Henrik Ibsen had long since become an established and fêted playwright, with a name and reputation that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Scandinavia. But even though the two in a sense belonged to separate generations, their paths crossed in life as they did in art. For both Munch and Ibsen, it was a question of creating an art of seeing: ‘I look inwards; it is there I have my battlefield, where I sometimes am victorious, sometimes suffer defeat,’ Ibsen wrote in a letter to his
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sister Hedwig. ‘Painting is the brain’s perceptions filtered through the eye,’ Munch supplemented in a memorandum, expanding elsewhere: ‘By painting the colours and lines and forms I had seen when in affected mood – I wanted, like a gramophone, to get that affected mood to quiver aloud once more.’ But seeing is not enough in itself, Ibsen points out – the material has to be lived through by the artist: ‘If the work is to succeed, it is a question of seeing and getting others to see, not so much of what has been experienced as what has been lived.’ And if what has been experienced is to be lived, a certain distance is necessary, he emphasises, for ‘man, mentally speaking, is a long-sighted creature; we see most clearly at a great distance – details distract.’ Nor was Munch a great one for details – he did not paint every leaf and twig, nail and wart he saw, and felt that his pictures ought to be seen at a certain distance so that the onlooker did not miss out on the whole. When they both went abroad and stayed there for a long time, however, it was not just to get achieve distance but also to escape from the small-minded, oppressive nature of things in Norway. ‘Here at home I am constricted and feel the cold breath of envy and malice,’ Munch notes. In his native country he found ‘no atmosphere around me that can carry me forwards and stimulate me to work’. On the other hand, there
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was plenty of what he perceived as interruptions and irritations – he simply had to flit around it in order to be at peace with himself. For his part, Ibsen claimed that he had no talent for being a national citizen. He chose exile as a lifestyle and, until he returned permanently in 1891, only visited his native land sporadically in order to charge his batteries and his bile. In Norway, people were not generally interested in freedom, ‘but only in liberties, a few more or a few less, according to one’s political standpoint’. To Ibsen freedom was ‘the highest and primary condition of life’. So be it that freedom came at a price. Art had to be given pride of place. ‘Friends are an expensive luxury, Ibsen writes to Georg Brandes, ‘and when one invests one’s capital in a calling and a mission here in life, one cannot afford to keep friends.’ The cost was too high, not because of what one had to do for friends, but ‘what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing’. Munch felt the same way: He once allowed himself to be tempted to partake of some hot chocolate and pastries in the bosom of his family – and regretted it bitterly afterwards. He had wasted several hours on small talk and cosy socialising; hours he could have spent working. Despite the fact that he was strongly attached to those nearest him, he was dependent on
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maintaining a physical distance and, like Ibsen, led an increasingly isolated life as he grew older. No personal relations ever came about between the painter and the writer. The first meeting between them – if it can be called a meeting – was also anything but cordial. In 1891, Ibsen, after many years in exile, moved back to Kristiania, where, being the celebrity he was, he quickly became part of the streetscape. Almost daily he would, to quote Munch, come slowly sailing down Karl Johans gate like a ‘trim little craft’ around two o’clock, on a steady course towards his regular table at Grand Café. One day, when Munch was sitting in the room with his friend Jappe Nilssen and ‘a lovely young lady from Kristiania’, they decided to invite the maestro over to their table, but Ibsen brusquely declined their invitation. ‘I am not used to being disturbed by strangers in cafés,’ he briefly replied, then concentrated once more on his small glass of spirits. The next meeting, in autumn 1892, was friendlier. Munch had recently arrived home in Oslo after his major ‘scandal’ exhibition in Berlin, one that was marketed as ‘Ibsenesque word pictures’. Again, the painter was sitting in the company of good friends at the Grand, where, to his astonishment, Ibsen approached and said, ‘Good day, aren’t you Mr Munch?’ and sat down at the table. ‘He said something – polite phrases – and
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Henrik Ibsen at The Grand Café, 1902
left,’ Munch recalls. After that, they would exchange words when the occasion presented itself. Ibsen only actively sought to meet Munch when the latter opened his new exhibition in Kristiania in October 1895. The battle raged about the pictures, which, according to the reviewer in Aftenposten, could be divided into two groups: the incomprehensible and the repulsive. While the public called for a boycott and police intervention, the writer suddenly made his entrance in the exhibition hall. He was extremely interested in what he saw, and Munch willingly accepted the role of guide. They moved together from picture to picture, and one in particular caught Ibsen’s attention: ‘Sphinx’, also known as ‘Woman in three stages’. According to Munch, the play Ibsen published several years later, in 1899, When We Dead Awaken, was directly inspired by this picture of the three women: the dreaming, the zesty and the mournful. But even if Ibsen in this instance may have permitted himself to be partly influenced by Munch, the influence the other way was greater and more easily demonstrable. Munch’s interest in Ibsen’s works went right back to his early youth, and it never let him go. Usually, he remarked to one of his biographers, he skimmed through texts superficially, almost diagonally, just enough to gain an impression. Ibsen, on the other hand, he read
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from cover to cover. He was probably first introduced to the writer in his childhood home, where evening entertainment often consisted in readings. Often sagas and Norwegian history were on the menu, and when 14-year-old Edvard made his first preserved illustration for an Ibsen play, he chose the medieval drama The Pretenders. Later in life, he did a great many drawings and woodcuts with motifs from this work, possibly for an intended but never realised book publication. His public debut as an Ibsen illustrator, however, took place in Paris in autumn 1896, when the theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poë was to stage Peer Gynt. Lugné-Poë, who had previously staged several of Ibsen’s plays at his Théâtre de L’Œuvre, employed Munch to create the
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programme poster, and Munch delivered a lithography of Solvejg and mother Aase against a background of valleys and snow-clad mountains. It was the first of a series of Peer Gynt motifs from Munch’s hand. They are mainly hasty sketches, but nonetheless he must have identified with the main character – Munch’s Peer Gynt was often given the painter’s own features. When Lugné-Poë in 1897 followed up his Peer Gynt production with Ibsen’s latest play, John Gabriel Borkman, Munch was again commissioned to do the poster. This one he simply adorned with his first Ibsen portrait, probably done from memory or a photograph, for Ibsen never sat as model for him. Behind the maestro’s severe countenance he placed a symbolic, lit lighthouse – here was the man who cast light into the dark corners of the human mind – the great seer. And Lugné-Poë must have been satisfied. He had never been able to forget Ibsen’s eyes, he once stated, and only Edvard Munch had managed to capture them in a drawing. The portrait shows many similarities with the picture Munch painted of Ibsen in 1898. Here Ibsen is depicted in the reading room of the Grand Hotel, with his back to the window and the street outside, almost hovering in a borderland between the inner and the outer world. This room, incidentally, was also to be the backdrop of the last meeting between the two of them. It took place
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when Munch on a winter’s day just before the turn of the century suddenly felt ill – scholars disagree as to whether this was due to bronchitis or his increasing problem with alcohol. Whatever the reason, he sought refuge in the Grand, registered as a guest and sat down in the reading room, where he did his best to overcome his indisposition with some acquaintances. When they were about to leave in the evening, Munch asked the waiter to charge the drinks to his room. However, the waiter refused, insisting on cash. Ibsen was sitting by himself at a corner table, and the penniless painter turned to him in search of support and financial assistance. He was given a helping hand, but the money was accompanied by a condescending remark: ‘You ought to do like me,’ Ibsen said. ‘I always pay.’ ‘Very well, Ibsen,’ Munch answered – he could sometimes be quite touchy. ‘We shall not meet again.’ The words proved prophetic. The two never met again, something Munch was the first to regret. Perhaps he had offended Ibsen by his behaviour, he later speculated, perhaps Ibsen felt just as shy and lonely as he did, perhaps he just wanted to avoid talking to an intoxicated man? It was not until after Ibsen’s death in 1906 that Munch seriously began to work as an Ibsen interpreter. When the German-Austrian stage director Max Reinhardt was
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to stage Ghosts that same year at Deutsches Theater in Berlin, he asked Munch to do a draft design of the decor. Here the artist was, thematically speaking, on home ground, being personally familiar with the misfortunes of inheritance, and not least because production’s success owed much to the scenography. Unfortunately, Munch was to experience one of his worst crises at that time. He ‘finally grew utterly wretched in Berlin’, and when Reinhardt commissioned him to also design the decor for the theatre’s following Ibsen performance, Hedda Gabler. It was a heavy, demanding work burden, one that Munch, somewhat resignedly, described as ‘much toil with no corresponding financial gain’. Nevertheless, Ibsen’s literary hammer blows continued to resound undiminished in Munch’s mind when, after a few chaotic years, he did as Peer Gynt and returned home to Norway. He wrote to Max Reinhardt about the possibility of renewed cooperation about Rosmersholm and other Ibsen plays, but primarily he initiated work on what he himself described as the mightiest snow-clad landscape in all Nordic art: John Gabriel Borkman. He devoted page after page to the tragic bank manager, to his lonely, ruminative, indoor roaming and his ice-cold death beneath the stars. Later in life, he once again erased the distinction between his own and Ibsen’s world by portraying himself as
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Borkman’s restless figure and turning the surroundings of the death scene into his own garden. Like John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken – the last Ibsen play Munch dealt with artistically – belongs to Ibsen’s late works. Both are often read as the ageing writer’s revealing self-confrontation, dealing with the problem of pursuing his own aims at the expense of fellow humans, love and warmth. Munch had, as mentioned, his own reasons for being interested in this play, but perhaps he wrestled with the same problems himself, with the cleft between life as an artist and life as a human being. ‘It is humanity – life that one must bring out,’ he writes about the deeper meaning of art. But Munch himself, if we are to believe his biographer Rolf Stenersen, ‘fled from life and humanity by shutting himself in with his work, his art’. And Ibsen? If one chooses to interpret his last plays autobiographically, it is hard not to conclude that he followed his calling, but sacrificed happiness. He could justifiably make the words spoken by Professor Rubek in When We Dead Awaken his own: ‘I have come to realise that I am not at all adapted for seeking happiness in indolent enjoyment. Life does not shape itself that way for me and the likes of me. I must go on working – producing one work after another – right up to my dying day.’
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THE LIFE OF
HENRIK 足IBSEN
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The puppeteer in his den When Henrik Ibsen left his native town of Skien one winter’s day in 1843, there was little to suggest that world fame lay in store for the fifteen-year-old – quite the contrary. At that time, Skien had about two to three thousand inhabitants and was a lively commercial town strongly influenced by bourgeois culture and families steeped in tradition. It was here that Knud Ibsen, Henrik’s father, started his career as a clerk before establishing his own business in the retail trade. Here too he rose in the world, gaining further prosperity by his marriage to his stepfather’s niece, Marichen Altenburg, who was artistically inclined and greatly interested in the theatre. And here also their son, Henrik Johan Ibsen, was born in the building known as ‘Stockmannsgården’ on 20 March 1828. The Ibsens’ first child, Johan, who was a year and a half at the time, died only two weeks later, but Henrik was to have a number of siblings: Johan Andreas (1830), Hedvig Katrine (1831), Nicolai Alexander (1834) and Ole Paus (1835). Henrik Ibsen’s earliest memories were of Stockmanns
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gården. Right in front of it lay the church, he writes in an autobiographical sketch. To the right of the church stood the town pillory, a post with a chain and neckring of iron – “two small brown arms that with the greatest pleasure were ready to clamp round my neck”. To the left lay the town hall with the gaol, where pale faces could be made out through the barred windows facing the square, as well as the “loony bin” – all that was on offer to those with mental illnesses. On the fourth side of the square lay the grammar school. Such was Ibsen’s first view of the world. His first childhood years were happy and untroubled. His parents were wealthy, frequenting the town’s finest circles and leading an extremely active social life. In 1833, the family moved to Marichen’s stately childhood home, the Altenburggården, which Knud Ibsen had bought from his mother-in-law. There were nearly always guests at the house, with plenty of life and activity in the grand rooms from morning to evening. But the good times were soon to come to an end. When the youngest son, Ole Paus, came into the world, Knud Ibsen’s days as a man about town and property owner were already over. Financial difficulties began in 1834, when he fell into arrears with his taxes and had his large, lucrative spirits still sealed by the authorities. Things then went downhill fast. He had to discontinue payments, and his properties, livestock and chattels disappeared at public auctions. The unfortunate
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Ibsen’s smile. Charcoal d rawing by Erik Werenskiold, 1895
merchant managed to avoid the greatest shame of all – going bankrupt – but there was precious little left. Some time before, Knud Ibsen purchased a small place in the country outside Skien, the farm of Venstøp. He moved there with his family in the summer of 1835, after having lost Altenburggården. He was, however,
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Stockmannsgården in Skien
even obliged to mortgage Venstøp, so now he lived on his own farm at the mercy of others. Henrik Ibsen spent the final years of his childhood at Venstøp. In a way, it was not a bad place to grow up. The main building had much to offer that could feed the imagination of the future dramatist, and at the entrance to the kitchen there was a small porch where Henrik tucked himself away as often as possible, for he was not particularly sociable by nature. Henrik was a serious child. Early on, he became a dreamer, a loner who preferred to sit alone in his closet reading, painting or busying himself with a puppet thea tre he had made for himself. In vain did he defend his den against intruders – the more he insisted on being alone, the more eager the other youngsters became to entice him out. They threw stones and snowballs
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at the walls, his sister Hedvig has related, and when the small hermit’s patience was finally exhausted, he would rush out and chase those who were disturbing his peace. He was, however, uninterested in physical exercise of any sort, so as a rule he gave up the chase and padded back home once his tormentors had been chased a certain distance away. Even so – as a budding man of the theatre, Henrik needed an audience. So he occasionally came out of his inner exile and rigged up his puppet theatre outdoors in a stall. There, neighbours and other interested people could watch his performances if they paid half a farthing in admission. He learnt early on that the path of art is a thorny one: Once, when everything was ready for a real gala performance, some of the neighbouring lads cut the puppets’ strings, everything got mixed up and Henrik Ibsen’s first fiasco was a fact. Naturally, this enraged him, but his fists were all he had to express his anger with. Knud Ibsen’s fall also limited the prospects for his son’s education. When he was five, Henrik was enrolled at the municipal primary school in Skien, which he attended until 1835, when his father stopped paying tuition money for him. After that, he presumably attended Fossum Ironworks’ school, which had been established for the children of the workers there, and in 1841 he started at a newly established private school in Skien, where he showed particular interest in religion. In addition, he learnt oil-painting from
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the landscape painter Mikkel Mandt, showing quite some promise. But there could be no question of an expensive art education. Those who knew Henrik during this period give somewhat differing accounts of his personality and nature. One of his teachers, W.F. Stockfleth, remembered him as a quiet boy with an exceptional pair of eyes and an unusual talent for drawing, while his classmate Boye Ording recalled his quick, volatile temper and fiery temperament, his sharp tongue and natural capacity for satire. Many allegedly found him stuck-up and arrogant. In 1843, the Ibsen family moved back to Skien, to a building that one of Knud Ibsen’s half-brothers had recently bought. Shortly afterwards, on 1 October, Henrik was confirmed at Gjerpen church. Now he was considered an adult and had to find a way of making a living. He is said to have dreamt of studying medicine, but such an education was also beyond his father’s means. Knud Ibsen did, however, make use of a former acquaintance to get a position for his son as an assistant at Jens Arup Reimann’s pharmacy in Grimstad. And so it was that Henrik Ibsen boarded a coastal vessel and left his native town – for good, as it t ranspired.
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Sorrows and pleasures in Grimstad Grimstad resembled Skien in many ways, though it was smaller and conditions were poorer. There was no street lighting, so its inhabitants had to navigate with care in the narrow streets, where there were open gutters. Shipping, however, was prospering, and anyone who had any money to spare – from the vicar to the kitchen maid – invested it in shipping shares. The male inhabitants often went to sea at an early age and were only home during the winter months. Grimstad remained Henrik Ibsen’s home for several years, and his stay there was to leave its mark on him. His everyday life as a pharmacist’s assistant was no bed of roses, but in the earliest preserved piece of writing by Ibsen – a letter to his childhood friend Poul Lieungh – he seems for the time being to be content with life: “Reimann is very good to me, and does everything he can to encourage my enthusiasm for the pharmacy, as this was not all that great to start with.” He does not get on well with Reimann’s wife, however – she is impossible to please. But he likes the town and its surroundings, and the local ladies are not to be sneezed
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Henrik Ibsen’s first play, Catiline, was written in this house in Grimstad
at either, although they are less stylish than those of Skien: “Rest assured that I do everything to gain their favour, which it is relatively easy to obtain.” Reimann had his pharmacy in a small, two-storey house in an unglamorous part of the town. On the upper floor, Reimann slept with his wife and the youngest children in the innermost room. Customers could ring the bell at any time, and to get to the pharmacy at night, the pharmacist would have to go through both the side-room, which Henrik shared with the three eldest sons, and the adjoining room, where the maids slept. So much for privacy. Apart from the pharmacy itself, the first floor contained a single living room. In the tiny kitchen, Henrik and the maid, Marie, trod on each other’s toes round the fireplace in a forced working partnership that was not always friction-free. The pharmacist himself was not all that enterprising, so Henrik had to take responsibility for much of the daily running and management of the place. He was only free on Sundays. Then he would often row out to Maløya, or roam the local countryside with his painting gear. He was still introspective and shy, and as if to further protect himself against the world, he grew a magnificent full beard. He did not abandon his dream of studying, but such plans meant that he had to give up some of his sleep. “He wrote and read almost all night,” if we are to believe Marie, the maid. But it was not only a syllabus that stole his nocturnal hours – he also began to dabble in
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Ibsen’s friend, co-lodger and literary saviour Ole C. Schulerud. When the publishers of Christiania had refused Ibsen’s debut Catiline, Schulerud personally financed the publication. Painting by Christian Olsen, c. 1857
poetry. And between spells of writing he also found time to become a father at the age of eighteen. Hans Jacob Hendrichssen was hardly a welcome offspring when Reimann’s maid, Else Sophie Birkedalen, brought him into the world in the autumn of 1846. As Henrik Ibsen describes his son’s coming into being in a letter to the authorities, represented by the town bailiff, Preus, the ten-year older Else Sophie’s favours had been almost exceptionally easy to obtain. To the registrar’s question as to whether he acknowledges paternity, he remarks that he dare not deny it – “despite the maid’s relationship with other male persons at the time in question” as he “had unfortunately engaged in corporeal intercourse, motivated both by her alluring behaviour and our shared employment at pharmacist Reimann’s”. Ibsen was obliged to make such a humiliating statement because Else Sophie had written to the county prefect, suing Ibsen for child support. And being a father was expensive. Ibsen was ordered to pay alimony until
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the child reached the age of fifteen. It was to no avail that he claimed to be living in abject poverty, without any other wages than board and lodging. Apart from that, the incident passed off in relative obscurity, as Else Sophie went home to her parents when the birth became imminent. The seduced pharmacist’s assistant kept as low a profile as possible in the matter, and father and son were to meet for the first and last time shortly before Ibsen died. His life also changed in other ways. Reimann had had to dispose of the pharmacy that summer, but as early as spring 1847 the new owner resold it to Reimann’s former apprentice Lars Nielsen. He moved the practice to a better, more centrally located building, taking along Ibsen, who by that time had passed his pharmaceutical assistant’s examination. Like Reimann, Nielsen left much of the running of the pharmacy to his assistant, who had his hands full – although he was also given a raise. Ibsen was only three years younger than his new boss. They never became close acquaintances, but they treated each other with respect, although Ibsen called Nielsen “the beast” behind his back. People in general had started to notice his sharp tongue. One day, rumours of the strange pharmacist’s assistant reached the ears of another young man in the town. His name was Christopher Due, and he soon found a reason to visit the pharmacy and see for himself. Out of the back room, he later wrote, came “a rather small
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young man with an agreeable, lively face”, characterised by an impatient expression that betrayed the fact that the customer was not particularly welcome. Despite this, the two of them soon got on well with each other. Due admired Ibsen’s intelligence and humour and became a frequent guest in the pharmacy. Everything between heaven and earth was discussed – also issues to do with cohabitation. Ibsen envisaged his future marriage as one of politeness, living on separate floors and only meeting at mealtimes. Generally speaking, he expressed himself with a breadth and boldness that commanded attention. Soon the pharmacy’s emergency room became a meeting place for a fairly large circle, with Ibsen as its natural centre. Among those who found their way there was a young student by the name of Ole Carelius Schulerud, and in him and Due Ibsen found his first literary midwives. The trio were as poor as church mice, Due relates, but their solidarity was all the greater. While wealthier comrades, whom Ibsen summarily dismissed as “empty brains with full purses”, busied themselves with their shipping shares and living in a whirl of pleasures, these three could scarcely allow themselves a cigar when they met. This feeling of being outside the higher reaches of society hardly lessened the trio’s burning interest in the rebellious state of affairs out in Europe. In 1848, the February revolution broke out in France, with Parisians storming the streets and overthrowing the king, Louis
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Philippe. There was also civil unrest in Italy, in Hungary the Magyars revolted, and the German-speaking population of Schleswig-Holstein sought to liberate itself from Denmark. This aroused the agitator in Ibsen, and he held impassioned speeches among his friends, rejecting all monarchs and emperors in favour of the only possible form of government – a republic. In addition, he wrote a fervent call-to-arms poem in support of Europe’s fighting peoples, becoming a kind of rebellious figure in the petit bourgeois town of Grimstad. And in the textbooks he was studying for his final exams he came across a figure that caught his interest: the Roman Catiline. This meeting hardly helped Ibsen to sleep at nights, for, inspired by this material, he set about making his debut as a dramatist. Previously, he had had to steal time to study. From these stolen hours he now stole time to write, and his play Catiline was written, so Ibsen tells us, entirely during night-time hours, something he himself felt could be a possible subconscious reason why the whole play takes place at night. After three months of work, in February 1849, he let his hero plunge his knife into Aurelia and then have himself stabbed by Furia. The intrigue had been completed. Now it was a question of finding the play a buyer.
© Font Forlag 2016 Graphic design and cover: Torill Stranger Photo editors: Torstein Velsand and Knut Ola Ulvestad Paper: Munken Pure (100 grams) Printing and binding: Livonia Print The Lives of Ibsen and Munch was first published as two separate volumes in the series ‘Norway’s National Heritage’, in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The author of both, Torstein Velsand, has written a new preface to this edition. The author and the publishers would like to express their gratitude to Director Erik Henning Edvardsen at the Ibsen Museum and to Karen Lerheim and Sidsel de Jong at the Munch Museum’s library for their valuable contribution. FONT CXLII First edition ISBN 978-82-8169-381-4 First printing The contents of this book must not be copied in defiance of the Intellectual Property Rights Act or agreements concerning copying entered into with KOPINOR, the organization which protects the rights of owners of intellectual property. Copying in defiance of the Act or agreements may result in a claim for compensation and confiscation, and may be punishable by a fine or imprisonment. www.fontforlag.com
THE WORD ‘font’ comes from the Latin fons, which means source or fountain. Today the word is mostly used to designate a typeface, the typographical appearance of a set of letters or symbols. As early as in ancient Egypt there existed two typefaces (hieratic and demotic). These were hieroglyphs that were either carved into stone or written on papyrus. When Johann Gutenberg invented the art of book printing in the 1430s, it was necessary to standardize the written characters. The writing style of the time, Gothic, was extremely complex and ornate, and in due course simplified versions evolved. Around 1890, the Gothic style of writing disappeared from daily use, and Antiqua became the dominant group of typefaces. Antiqua is based on the Roman monumental writing style; each letter consists of a basic line, a hairline and small enhancements called serifs. The other main group of typefaces today is called Grotesque. This was first used in 1916 by the English printer William Caslon III, and is characterized by the letters having equally thick lines and lacking serifs. Most typefaces in general use belong to either the Antiqua or to the Grotesque group. These two groups can be further divided into subgroups according to how much space each letter takes up regardless of appearance (for example an M and an I), or to whether the space needed by the individual letter is related to its appearance. The latter style, called proportional fonts, was developed by the American newspaper industry to save printer’s ink and paper, which explains the name of one of the most used typefaces in this category, Times. Today proportional fonts dominate production of newspapers, magazines and books. FONT FORLAG uses the Trajan Antiqua typeface in its logo. This was developed by the American Carol Twombly in 1989, and was stylistically inspired by the 40-meter high Trajan Column, which was erected in Rome between 106 and 113 AD to commemorate Emperor Trajan’s military conquests. Ascending this column, which has a diameter of almost four meters, runs a 200-meter long spiral band of magnificent reliefs. The base of the column is decorated with the finest examples of Roman script and sculpture. These inscriptions are generally regarded as the most important inspiration source for the various Antiqua scripts. THE LIVES OF IBSEN AND MUNCH has been set in the Expo Serif type, which was introduced in 2008 by the American designer Mark Jamra. With its combination of applicability, durability and classical elegance, this font is known as an graceful ‘workhorse’.