This, seriously, is the Ibsen Memorial in Bergen.
He’d have made a terrific monster in Hammer horror films, don’t you think? Just imagine … The Curse of Ibsen, Ibsen Has Risen From the Grave, Ibsen Must be Destroyed …
The Hammer studios missed a few tricks there, if you ask me.
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Posted by kaggsysbookishramblings on March 30, 2016 at 3:52 pm
I wouldn’t want to be remembered like that….. :s
Posted by Fred on March 30, 2016 at 4:01 pm
Son of Ibsen
Ibsen meets the Werewolf
Ibsen vs. The Justice League
Posted by Scott GF Bailey on March 31, 2016 at 12:00 am
But the thing is, it looks just like him.
Posted by argumentativeoldgit on March 31, 2016 at 4:02 am
He did have rather strange facial topiary, it has to be said…
Posted by Fred on March 31, 2016 at 1:14 am
I wonder what the public reaction was. Was he still alive when it was unveiled? I hope not.
Posted by argumentativeoldgit on March 31, 2016 at 4:03 am
I think he’d rather have liked it, actually! 🙂
Posted by Fred on March 31, 2016 at 2:27 pm
Well, from pictures of him that I have seen, those whiskers are close to what he really had and if one sees those as glasses rather than as his eyes, well . . .
So, you may very well be right.
Posted by alan on April 1, 2016 at 7:10 pm
I think it was you who claimed that Ibsen kept a portrait of Strindberg above his desk because he liked the mad staring eyes.
Wikipedia claims that Strindberg outlived Ibsen – are you sure he didn’t arrange it ?
Posted by argumentativeoldgit on April 8, 2016 at 2:10 pm
Yes, Ibsen bought Munch’s portrait of Strindberg and hung it up in his study, claiming that he particularly liked Strindberg’s “mad, staring eyes”.
Strindberg was of a younger generation. In “The Father”, the main characters says sarcastically at one point that he would have liked to have heard Captain Alving’s side of the story.
While I love Ibsen, as you know, i have never quite managed to come to grips with Strindberg: he is possibly just a bit too mad for me! I’ll keep trying though…
Posted by beobachter on April 11, 2016 at 5:35 am
I agree that it actually captures the salient qualities of the photographs and a certain reading of the presence in his work quite well. And the “glasses,” if that they be, keep the image from being confused with some soviet-era abstraction of Karl Marx, like the disembodied head-on-a-block in Chemnitz.
Posted by argumentativeoldgit on April 11, 2016 at 8:42 am
And to be honest, there is something genuinely frightening and unsettling about Ibsen’s later plays. Rosmersholm is one I find particularly disturbing.