"My
art is self-confession. Through it, I seek to clarify my relationship to the
world. This could be called egotism. However, I have always thought and felt
that my art might be able to help others to clarify their own search for truth.”
(Edvard
Munch, quoted by Sue Prideaux in 'Edvard
Munch: Behind The Scream', New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2005, P.VIII.)
I had heard about the Edvard Munch print exhibition in the
National Gallery weeks beforehand on the internet. I was very excited to see a
small fraction of Munch's amazing oeuvre since he had been a perennial hero of
mine since at least the age of sixteen. Over the years, I had read many books
on him, read his diaries, read reviews of his exhibitions, watched many
documentaries on him and seen a handful of his oil paintings and drawings in
various exhibitions. I had always found his work very moving and strangely
haunting. I identified with him; I admired his courage, honesty, persistence
and individualism. Yet because I had
never been to Oslo where the vast majority of his work was held, my opinions on
Munch remained unfocused and provisional. Moreover, like Francis Bacon, I found
Munch's style so personal to him, that I knew it was foolish to try to copy him
directly. However, when I painted my series
of screaming women in September 1990 and my screaming self-portraits in January
1991, I was of course aware of
Munch's famous Scream though I myself
was thinking more of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s ‘Character Heads’, Gerstl's laugh and Schiele's grimace.
In the last five years under the directorship of Raymond Keaveney,
The National Gallery of Ireland had
punched well above its weight, putting on one fascinating exhibition after
another. This Munch show was just another fine example of what an intelligent
and ambitious curator with limited funds could do. In the Anglo-American world,
Munch had only lately been appreciated as much as he deserved, since his
emotionally charged and extrovert art sat uncomfortably with an aesthetic
rooted in French painting.
From September, Munch became an obsession with me as he often had
in winters past. Carol got me five large books on him from the NCAD library to
add to the three of my own I had in the house as well as a number of others in
which he was included. When not painting my own paintings, I was reading about
Munch, looking at reproductions of his paintings and prints and thinking about
the lessons of his life and art. At a time when I was still in mourning and
battling my own demons, his story and example gave me consolation.
I told Carol I had to go alone to the print exhibition, in panic
and grief, in order to get the full effects of Munch's brand of angst ridden
Expressionism. "Without the entanglements of a woman!" she laughed
acceptingly. However, for weeks I put off my trip into town, on the busy DART
and into the increasingly crowded National Gallery of Ireland. Even though the
show opened on 19th September, it was only on the 3rd November that
I managed to summon up the courage to go into town alone, like a God forsaken
pilgrim to see the relics of a tortured Saint.
In the gallery shop, I went a bit crazy. I bought the catalogue to
the show, a white t-shirt with the print version of The Scream and a stuffed-toy of The
Scream called The Screaming Scream,
which when you squeezed its belly it let out a cyborg wail. I thought it was a
bit tacky, but secretly loved it. I bought it for Carol who adored all things
kitsch and art related. She thought it was hilarious. Carol said, "Well
you know an art work is finished when they make a stuffed toy of it!" I
was not so sure, to me the image still had power. Carol said it looked like an
alien. Our dog Lucy had never shown any real interest in art. Her main loves in
life were; food, walks, cuddles and teddy bears. So when she saw 'The Screaming Scream' she went into a
trance wanting to chew it! While in the gallery shop, I also bought a new
Taschen book on Lucian Freud, which had a very good text on him plus large
reproductions of his technically amazing paintings.
While in the Munch exhibition, I found myself more interested than
usual in the responses of those at the exhibition. The work was having a
visceral impact on me and I wondered how it was affecting those around me. I
saw some square-jawed men walk briskly past The
Scream, clearly not impressed or interested. I heard others talk about
printing techniques. I saw people engrossed by the works - peering into them
deeply and in silence. I saw people almost unable to look and cracking jokes.
Women seemed far more engaged with the work than men who approached his work
with bluster, bravado and ego.
As the guards changed over, I heard one say to the other with mock
seriousness, "Very intriguing exhibition.” "Yes indeed.” The other
retorted shoeing him out. "Very intriguing!" The first guard insisted
as the door closed behind him. Then much to my annoyance a group of twenty
something students and a teacher or guide came in. The guide was giving a
pedestrian lecture and I enjoyed hearing her struggle to explain Munch's
depressing works, complicated love life and politically incorrect attitude to
women - to a group of mostly young middle-class women. But after a few minutes
I found her pedantic voice, evasions and qualifications grate on my nerves and
I quickly moved to the opposite end of the exhibition. Where, I could still her
lecture, and the chatter and laughter of her students, and many other visitors
to the exhibition. It was louder than a Pearce Street train station!
I love to immerse myself in another person's vision - to be exalted,
thrilled and given joy. However, Munch brought me to the brink of madness and I
felt sucked into a world of shame, jealousy, loneliness, death and pain. I do
not think I have been as traumatized and emotionally disturbed by any other
exhibition. Which is saying a lot! The only thing I could compare it to was
visiting a friend in a mental hospital and being approached by the inmates
desperate for companionship. Yes, I was in a bad place in my life but that was
only part of the reason. Nor was it really to do with the content of Munch's
art, which paled in comparison to what one found in contemporary art, media or
the news. It was the way Munch, dramatized the stories he was telling through
Expressionist grammar, so that one went beyond shock, beyond fear - into tragic
pathos. Yet the journey that I took that day and over the following months
studying his life and art I found therapeutic. These were more than mere prints
- they were emotional alchemy. Most print makers have nothing to say. What they
do say is all about techniques. Munch was a genius and he had a lot to say. At
home reading the very good text, I was surprised to see how mild the prints
felt in reproduction compared with the shock of them in reality, which only
made me feel more regret that I had not visited Oslo to see his best paintings.
Since Dürer in the 1500s and Rembrandt in the 1600s great artists
had turned to print as a means to popularize their art. In the hands of such
masters, print became more than mere mechanical reproduction - it became the
reproduction of the soul. It sounds like a contradiction in terms.
Nevertheless, if you have seen Dürer's Adam
and Eve or Rembrandt's The Three
Crosses, you will know that I am right. The communicative power of the
print was based on the stupendous skill and risk-taking in the original wood
block or copper plate - as unrepeatable as an oil painting - except it was made
to be reproduced.
Although artists like Rembrandt and Goya had made massive
reputations for themselves as print makers, print by the middle of the
nineteenth century had gone into a fallow period. Most prints were of an
illustrational quality made by inferior printmakers. Yet by the 1880s, print
had become of renewed interest to artists who had discovered the beauty and
startling modernity of Japanese wood-block prints. Artists like
Toulouse-Lautrec had used new print mediums like lithography to produce
startlingly modern designs, which bridged the gap between high art and popular
culture.
Munch's reasons for turning to print were manifold. He hoped of
course that it would be a profitable medium at a time when he sold few oil
paintings. However, for the first seven years, the cost of printers and
assistants left him with little profit from his prints. Nevertheless, he was
getting his work more widely known and appreciated through this affordable
artwork for budding collectors.
Although not conventionally trained, Munch became a master print
maker - always experimenting and developing its form. He was a master print
maker because he was also a master draughtsman. What was evident to me about
these prints was just how much heart and soul Munch had put into them. His
enjoyment of learning new techniques and developing new ones himself - was
clear in these inventive and varied graphic works. Munch often retouched by
hand his old prints with gouache, watercolour or crayon - turning mechanical
images back into handmade testaments. He would carry small copper plates in his
sketchbook and draw directly on them in cafes. This spontaneous approach
increased their immediacy.
The 41 prints in the exhibition covered a range of techniques
including drypoint, etching, lithography, woodcut and a number of mixed media
techniques. None of Munch's prints were conventional but while his technique in
some could have made a printmaker laugh with derision others would have made
them weep with envy. Together they showed that Munch knew how to adjust his
talents to his message, like an orator who knows when to reason and when to
emote. Using the conventional skills and standards of beauty in his more
affectionate works and abandoning them in favour of the ugly and unruly when he
needed to express painful unhappiness. That he could do both was proof of his
genius.
Even in works in which great technical skill was not required -
the work that went into them came not from the labour of the hand but from the
labour of a mind in which; civilization and nature, man and woman, good and
evil, and the sacred and profane battled it out night and day. From this mental
and emotional turmoil and ferment - Munch dispelled the meaning of these
conflicts to him onto paper. He thus sought to redeem his life of suffering
through art and thereby help others involved in similar struggles of existence.
The exhibition started with a series of portraits of writers,
intellectuals and friends of Munch. Portraits of lunatics - staring out at me
with mad looks in their eyes. These early portraits of artistic and literary
friends were very painterly in their broad sweeps of lithographic crayon.
Strindberg was gravely offended by Munch's print of him, in which Munch had
misspelled the dramatists name and added a boarder that included a female nude,
which seemed to indicate that women were the centre of his mind. Of course they
were, but no one likes the truth. Munch corrected the spelling and removed the
frame in later prints.
The masterpiece for me in this first room was Munch's Self-Portrait lithograph from 1895, in
which his ghostly white head emerged from a velvety black ground making it look
like a severed head levitating in the darkness. On closer inspection, it
suggested a memorial tablet with his name inscribed at the top and a jokey nod
to death at the bottom in the form of a skeletal hand and arm. It was a
wonderfully artful image full of skill and dark humour showing Munch had a
sense of humour.
Looking at Munch's woodcut The
Kiss IV from 1908, I was infuriated to see the explanatory text on the wall
say: “... it was described
('unhelpfully') by the misogynist Strindberg as “... the fusion of two human
beings one of which in the form of a crap, seems to be about to swallow the
larger.” Personally, I found this Feminist framing of Strindberg
unnecessary and distorting. Firstly, Strindberg was many things other than a
misogynist. Secondly, he was a close friend of Munch at the time and thus his
views had documentary importance to anyone trying to unravel Munch's art.
Finally, Munch himself saw women at the time in terms of suffocation, blood
sucking and consumption. Funnily enough, the aside ('unhelpfully') was not
mentioned in the catalogue where other than that the wall text had been taken
wholesale.
Jealousy I, was another psychosis-inducing
image. The eyes of Przybyszewski burnt into my mind as his lover Dagny Juel
embraced another man (maybe Munch) with his consent and Munch imagined the
scene and committed to art. Munch was recording the fatal flaw in free-love -
man's intense possessiveness and fear of cuckold.
Madonna was another powerful print
based on an original oil painting. It was inspired by Dagny Juel, but yet
again, Munch had converted the soap-opera of his life into a universal
statement. Seen from a pervert's point of view, it depicted a woman in the act
of love, a fact reinforced by his later addition of a boarder with sperm, and
the hunched figure of a foetus in the lower left hand corner. It was an image
in which Munch celebrated the beauty of Woman,
turned her fertility into a glory yet at the same time suggested her triumph
over man. It was images like this, which got Munch into trouble with religious
and conservative critics at the time and recently with Feminist critics.
In other lithographs like Vampire
II, 1895, Munch made his fears even more explicit when he depicted a pair
of lovers in which, a bowed man was devoured by a vampiric woman with flame-red
hair that entwined itself all over his head. Yet despite its grim subject,
Munch's treatment was quite elegant and surprisingly sensitive, his sweeping,
touching lines almost caressing the paper.
Munch was very attractive; his friends called him "the most handsome man in Norway.” His
diaries confirm that he had many lovers, yet he would never describe the
intimate details of their relationships, passing over them... His relationships
followed a pattern of intense infatuation followed by Munch fleeing commitment.
In his paintings women were either; Madonna's or whores, frail innocents or femme-fatales. Munch's vision of women
was not unique. The 1880s saw a new breed of independent women who took the
anonymity of city life as liberation from the prying eyes and vilification of
village life. Women entered academies (all be it in segregated girls schools),
began to work, rode bicycles, smoked cigarettes, dressed increasingly
provocatively, became readymade art on the promenades, openly pursued men and
women and began to fight for the right to vote. They also aroused fears of a
crisis in masculinity itself. Many
men found these newly liberated women threatening and artists being sensitive
souls telegraphed the unease.
A generation of writers and painters like Gustav Moreau, Degas,
Felicien Rops and Huysmans took woman down from the pedestal that centuries of
art had raised her upon and exposed her as Huysman's put it in an essay on Rops
as a, "venereal beast, the mercenary
from the Shadow, the abject slave of the Devil.” Between 1878-1902,
countless Salon and Symbolist painters like Felicien Rops, Fernand Khnopff,
Alfred Kubin, Franz von Stuck and Gustav Klimt and illustrators like Aubrey
Beardsley depicted aggressive, assertive and free-willed women as; Ishtar,
Sphinx, Lilith, Judith and Salome. These threatening, accusatory, salacious and
misogynistic depictions were tinged with repression, masochistic fear and even
delight. The fact that these were exceptional cases (and often purely mythical)
compared to the everyday cruelty of men, did not seem to trouble their
irrational minds. Behind all of this stood the spectre of syphilis, which was
taking the sanity, and lives of many in Europe at the time. Working class or
liberated women were seen as carriers of death. Women who for centuries had
been portrayed as the embodiment of beauty, grace and compassion where now
depicted as the personification of evil and cruelty. All in all their vision of
women was like nothing seen since the Gothic period. In Symbolism and later the
Expressionism that was born from it, the extrovert sadism of Romanticism became
introverted sado-masochism and Munch exemplified this tendency.
"But how can one
explain the widespread misogyny in late nineteenth-century western culture and
the all pervasive cult of the femme fatale - the evil and fascinating woman -
that can be seen not only in the art and literature of the time but in the
vampire-like allures of fashionable portraiture. Is this a case of mass, male
hysteria provoked by the very modest gains that women made in the late
nineteenth century? In Britain, the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 and
subsequent acts of 1882 and 1883 gave women some control over their own
property. In several European countries women gained limited access to higher
education and professions, throughout the Western world, while benefitting from
the inventions of the sewing machine and the typewriter that offered
alternatives to marriage and prostitution. In some countries they even began to
discuss the possibility of giving women the right to vote. However such
harmless progress would hardly seem to warrant such extreme reactions.” (Patrick
Bade, 'Felicien Rops', New York: Parkstone Press, 2003, P.50-53.) My explanation is simple,
the reason was the fear of a loss of power and control and a rewriting of the
rules of the game as it had been played out for centuries. If women were free
then the number of opponents these men faced on their crusade for personal
power, had not only been doubled, but the game had been changed from simplistic
checkers to eternally complex chess.
So Munch's vision of women was extreme but also representative of
his time. His work exaggerated the differences between men and women and made
every aspect of their relationships problematic. His female nudes spoke more
about his own personality that the women he took as his models. Munch
constantly portrayed himself as vulnerable and weak - a victim of destructive
women.
Personally, I did not care if men like Munch were misogynists. I
found the argument limiting and simplistic - a mere form of demonization.
Munch's art was a form of therapy, in which the viewer shared a dialogue with
Munch as he revealed his darkest fears. Therapy demands honesty on the part of
the patient, but it also requires compassion and understanding on the part of
the listener. "It would be perfectly
correct to say that Munch, in his paintings and his graphic work, but most of
all in his drawings, shows signs of misogyny. However, in many cases he is
dealing with specific experiences: his sphinxes and harpies, his Salome's and his
female birds of prey all show the characteristics of particular women. They
represent his own personal traumas, when he had experienced 'the love that
moves mountains'. It may be that he was telling the truth when he said 'I have
never loved', but his extreme sensitivity to the human condition renders him
capable of 'explaining' it to us. No misogynist could ever have portrayed the
apotheosis of a woman at the peak of sexual ecstasy with so much insight, or
given the scene such an aura of sanctity by the inclusion of a halo.” (Ragna
Stang, Edvard Munch: The man and the artist, London: Gordon Fraser, 1979, P.109.)
I noted with curious wonder how Munch in prints like 'Angst', drew the figures in the
foreground in a naturalistic way, but those in the background in an
increasingly, masklike, caricatured, childlike and ultimately abstract way.
However, this effectively conveyed the schism between individuals and the way
distance made everyone into a mere idea of a person. Again, Munch used unconventional
approaches to drawing to achieve emotional dissonance. Looking at 'Angst' the lyrics of The Doors came to mind: "People are strange when you're a
stranger/Faces look ugly when you're alone/ Women seem wicked when you're
unwanted..."
Feelings are like vapour - but Munch used his art to contain them
all - even the shameful and awkward ones. Many of the prints were vortex works
in which the directional lines surged in and out, side to side and up and down
- creating a feeling of vertigo, drunkenness or hysteria. This was most acute
with the stark The Scream print, with
its stunning black and white Expressionist design, which if anything was more brutalist
in its message than the colourful painting from which it was derived. I found
the contrast between the naturalist details of railings, people and boats in
the harbour only served to make the distortions of the man and the tempest of
nature around him even more unnerving. I stared hypnotized in front of it for
five minutes when I started to faint with a feeling of vertigo.
Munch was only twenty-nine when he painted the first version of The Scream. Far from being a spontaneous
work, Munch had in fact worked towards it for over a year and originally the
painting had been titled Despair. It
was probably a man stripped of everything after a bitter love affair and pushed
over the edge. At least that was how it was conceived as part of The Frieze of Life. However, the image
had taken on a life of its own and become a universal image so that this
compulsive icon of angst had been also been compared to a woman, a mummy, a
foetus and ectoplasm.
There were at least six versions of The Scream, including two pastels which served as preliminary
studies, three paintings including an oil, tempera and pastel which was the
most famous one, and oil on canvas which was thought to be a copy as well as
the black and white lithograph which I was getting to see.
Munch described his inspiration for this icon of angst: "I went along the road with two friends
- The sun set. Suddenly the sky became blood - and I felt the breath of
sadness. I stopped - leaned against the fence - dead tired. Clouds over the
fjord dripping reeking blood. My friends went on but I just stood trembling
with an open wound in my breast. I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass
through nature.” On the most famous version of the scream, in the seething
sky, the words were written "could
only have been painted by a madman", in handwriting similar to Munch's
but it may also have been made by a disgruntled art lover.
Historical research had discovered the exact place of The Scream, it was a path outside the
city of Christiania between an abattoir and the asylum in which Munch's sister
Laura had been committed. The Scream
had become the archetypal image of Munch's oeuvre because its expression of
dread was the culmination of the mounting anxiety and angst that The Frieze of Life - the story of a love
affair – had built up. As one of the first masterpieces of Expressionism, it exemplified
the exorcism of internal mental pain - outwards in art.
According to some, another possible source of inspiration was an
Inca mummy, excavated in Peru and which had been a sensation amongst artists
when shown at The Parisian Great
Exhibition of 1889, when Munch was also in the city. The wretched looking,
shrunken and bound up man, his skull still agape in agony certainly looked
similar to the pose of the scream, but we cannot know for certain if Munch even
knew this artefact of horror.
Munch's friend the poet Przybyszewski commented: "There is something dreadful and macrocosmic
in that picture.” Strindberg's interpretation of the Scream was suitably
apocalyptic as, "A scream of fear
just as nature, turning red wrath, prepares to speak before the storm and
thunder, to the bewildered little creatures who, without resembling them in the
least, imagine themselves to be gods.” (Strindberg, quoted by Sue Prideaux,
'Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream',
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.251.)
In the catalogue to the show they mentioned: "Arne Eggum states that The Scream was made in response to
Schopenhauer, whose Philosophy of Art stated that 'the limit of the power of
expression of a work of art was its inability to reproduce a scream, "das
Geschrei", precisely the title which Munch was to give to the
motif.'" Yet Munch did not know
this till after he had painted The Scream.
A backhanded compliment to the ionic power and priceless quality
of The Scream, was the fact that
twice different versions of it had been stolen. The first on 12 February, 1994,
the same day as the start of the winter Olympics, when one version was stolen
from the Norwegian National Gallery, the second version being stolen in August
2004 at the Munch Museum. Both were subsequently recovered. This brittle,
hopeless testament of unspeakable anguish still managed to burn in the
collective unconscious despite a blizzard of parodies in popular culture
including cartoons, t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets, car adverts and toys. They
mocked it because its plea for help - like most pleas for help - could never be
answered. Hence the scream. Hence the mocking. Only psychiatrists, priests and
poets knew how to respond to this kind of Existential pain.
Examples of the extreme simplification of Munch's art to visual
fundamental's were woodcuts like Two
Women on the Shore, 1898 and Two
Human Beings, The Lonely Ones, 1899. In Two
Women on the Shore Munch reduced the picture of an old woman in black and
young woman in white by the seashore to seven uneasy colours. The moon and its
reflection on the sea he simplified into an 'i' shape. I found it a beguiling,
enigmatic and eccentric form of visual short hand. A visual form of pathetic fallacy - in which Munch made
nature an active actor in his psychodrama not just a backdrop. In Two Human Beings, The Lonely Ones, the
'i' of moonlight divided the picture and its central characters a woman and man
in half. They were with their backs to us staring out to the horizon. The woman
stared directly out transfixed, the man was a bit further back - maybe looking
at her looking at the moon - but there was a distance between them that could
not be bridged. In this print, the primaries red, yellow, blue were combined
with black to create a radical abstraction. It was works like this that were to
have a huge influence on Expressionist prints in the 1910s made by Nolde and
Kirchner.
The Violin Concert from 1903 on the other
hand was a technically beautiful print, full of pathos as Eva listened to Bella
Edwards on the piano and waited with the violin held vertically in her hand
like a soundless idol, her mind lost in the music and preparing to play her
part in the duet.
Of the later prints, I found the woodcut and lithograph The Girls on the Bridge from 1918,
searing in its intense, heartbreaking depiction of three young women waiting
for their lovers to return from dangerous seas. Month's after the exhibition I
still had visions of its white lightening-like lines and simple blocks of
existence.
Edvard Munch was introverted, depressive, fearful of people,
terrified of women, a hypochondriac, an alcoholic in his youth and had more
than a handful of extreme emotional episodes in his life. But in the spectrum
of madness he never went right over the edge. His art saved him from that.
Munch was not fully recognized in Norway, until he was fifty and
already famous on the Continent. It took him the best part of twenty years to
achieve financial security and critical acceptance. He travelled throughout
Europe for decades promoting his art, making contacts and securing exhibitions.
Even in his hardest years, he was a relentless self-promoter and sophisticated
student of art who shaped his vision by assimilating the ideas, techniques and
styles of old and contemporary masters. He also managed to turn all his
personal weaknesses into strengths in his art.
Along with Goya, van Gogh, Gauguin and Ensor he was one of the
father's of Expressionism. It was his scandalous exhibitions in Germany, which
made his name and was to influence a younger generation of German and Austrian
painters like Kirchner, Nolde, Gerstl and Kokoschka. Even at the turn of the
millennium his influence could be found in the confessional and
auto-biographical works of Tracey Emin and in the evocative and mysterious
paintings of Peter Doig.
Munch proved himself a master both technically and creatively in
oils, watercolour, drawing and printmaking. His creativity was relentless,
obsessive and emotionally taboo breaking. More than any other artist in Modern
art, Munch made private, shameful experiences of alienation, panic, jealousy,
lust and fear of death central to his art. His best paintings were like suicide
notes in paint, except he never tried to kill himself, because his art always
brought him back from the edge.
He never married and he had no children, so apart from some dramatic
love affairs, his life was dedicated to art. He was more than an artist he was
a visionary. Death haunted him his whole, long life. He was a hypochondriac and
was terrified of his own demise while astutely avoiding the burials of those
around him. Like his friend Strindberg, he was attacked as a misogynist, but
kept company with some of the most free-living, headstrong and vivacious women
of his day. In fact, his 'hatred' of women was nothing more than the
broken-hearted anger of a man who loved them too much and could not deal with
his inner weakness.
Edvard Munch was born on 12th December 1863, near
Loten, in the county of Hedmark, Norway. He was the second child in a family of
five children born to Laura Cathrine and Christian Munch a doctor in the army
medical corps and later a physician. His father's family included a
distinguished painter, bishop, poet and historian of Norway. Christian Munch
was a reserved man, known for acts of charity, who loved to read and had a
strong Christian faith. Laura Cathrine's family were farmers and fishermen and
her father was a merchant who was said to be as strong as beer.
In 1864, the Munch family moved to Kristiania (the name of Oslo
before 1925), where Christian Munch worked as a physician to the poor who he
would often treat free of charge, which meant his own family lived poorly. In
1868, Munch's frail mother Laura died of tuberculosis with Edvard and his older
sister Johanna Sophie by her bedside. Christian Munch became withdrawn, ill
tempered and insanely pious after his wife's death - warning his children of
eternal damnation. Later Munch recalled; "Disease,
insanity and death were the angles which attended my cradle, and since then
have followed me throughout my life. I learned early about the misery and
dangers of life, and about the after-life, about the eternal punishment which
awaited the children of sin in Hell... When anxiety did not posses him, he
would joke and play with us like a child... When he punished us... he could be
almost insane in his violence... In my childhood I always felt that I was
treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in
Hell hanging over my head.” Perhaps he also harboured an idealized image of
his dead mother no other woman could ever live up to. His aunt Karen Bjolstad
assumed the upkeep of the household and family, bringing some small joy to
their lives and educating the children. She discovered Edvard had a gift for
art and encouraged him. She was an amateur landscape painter who with her sales
bought them both art materials. Where it not for his aunt and his siblings -
Munch may have ended up a far more broken child.
In 1875, Munch left Cathedral
School due to rheumatism, fevers and sleepless nights so he began
homeschooling. He also began visiting the Kristiania
Art Association and its exhibitions. In 1875, Kristiania had a population
of just 77,000 and its artistic community was small with few of them making a
living through art. Ambitious artists knew they had to travel to the Continent
and Paris in particular in order to train, study the old masters and learn
about the latest avant-garde movements. However, such travel was expensive and
Munch came from a relatively poor family so he knew from the start that he
would have to make sales and contacts. Munch sold works from the start of his
career, and as early as 1881 his work sold at auction, but such sales were
unpredictable. In 1877, Munch's older sister Sophie who had become a mother-figure
to him, and with whom he was very close, died of tuberculosis aged fourteen.
Yet again, he had lost a woman dear to him. Later his younger sister Laura was
diagnosed with melancholia, and faded into her own world. Munch himself was a
melancholy boy and would later battle with mental illness and alcoholism. As a
young man, he was cautious and shy, and reacted badly to criticism. However,
Munch was kind to his young brothers and sisters and would tell them stories
and amuse them with his drawings.
Prompted by his father, from 1879-81, he trained as an engineer at
the Royal Technical College, however
ill health meant that he attended little. His father had been against Munch
becoming a painter, partly because so few artists could make a living and
partly because he viewed them as immoral. However, on the advice of a local
artist he finally agreed. Once Munch's father was so infuriated by his son's
painting of a female nude that he destroyed it. Later, when he came to visit an
exhibition in which Munch showed the heartbreaking nude Puberty, Edvard covered the canvas with a cloth in order to spare
his father's feelings. "The
petit-bourgeois prudery of the time can be most strikingly conveyed by
examples. At the opening of the Christiania Museum of Sculpture in 1883, a
professor of the history of art was obliged in the course of a public address
to swear, with his hand on the bible, that the art of the nude was pure and
beautiful and that no one need feel shame at contemplating and admiring it.” (J.P.
Hodin, 'Edvard Munch', London: Thames
and Hudson, 1972, P.35.)
So despite his father's reservations, in November 1880, Munch
began studying in the Royal School of
Design. That year, he also painted his first self-portrait, the first of
over 70 oil paintings, 20 graphic works and 200 watercolours, drawings and
sketches of himself, which he would paint between 1880 and 1943. Sometimes they
were painted yearly, others monthly and even daily. He turned his own personal
feelings of alienation into a more general expression of the alienation of the
individual in society. His early paintings of himself, revealed a silent but
strong willed young man - unwilling to wear his heart on his sleeve. In later
years he would go to the other extreme and like Gauguin and Ensor, Munch
depicted himself as Christ on the Cross - reviled and misunderstood. He also
depicted himself murdered by a woman in The
Death of Marat, a patient under the scalpel or given electric shocks, a
big-breasted woman, a gambler at a roulette-wheel and a lonely drunk in a bar. In his last as an old man, he recorded the solitude of his life as
a painter before death.
In 1882, he fell under the influence of a new group of talented
Norwegian realist painters including Christian Krohg, Fritz Thalow and Eric
Werenskiold and rented space in the Pultosten building with them. Christian
Krohg was a skilful realist painter (albeit one who used photography to aid his
hyper-real paintings) who liked to tackle the great social problems of his day.
He had made a name for himself already with paintings like Sick Girl, 1880-81, which had caused a scandal when exhibited. Four
years later Krohg would cause a further scandal with his novel Albertine the story of a poor girl who
became a prostitute, a book which was confiscated by the police. Krohg took
Munch under his wing and corrected and supervised his early work. However,
Munch's involvement with Krohg, put him in a prematurely controversial light.
In 1883, Munch attended Frits Thaulow's Impressionist Open-Air Academy in Modum
and showed his first painting at the Autumn
Exhibition in Kristiania. His talent was evident in his early student work,
which was stylistically indebted to Norwegian Naturalism and Realism which
itself was influenced by older trends in Paris. By the age of twenty-one Munch
had already developed a skilful and mature style.
In 1884, he began associating with Kristiania's bohemian community
- who were in open rebellion against their Lutheran upbringings. Hans Jaeger
was the head of a small group of radicals in Kristiania and the author of the
salacious and anarchistic Kristiania's
Bohemia. For which he received a prison sentence for blasphemy. He also
wrote the pornographic passages in Krohg's novel Albertine because Krohg was unable to write them himself. One of
Jaeger's commandments, which Munch was to follow emphatically in both word and
paint, was 'Thou shalt write thy life'.
This was infinitely more productive than Jaeger's last commandment 'Thou shalt take thy life'. Munch was not
to follow it but a couple in the group did. They were anti-bourgeois, atheists,
readers of Karl Marx and attracted to the nihilistic anarchism of Prince Peter
Alexeivich Kropotkin.
They were representative off a broader cultural movement in the
Nordic countries which would seek to challenge the injustice and hypocrisy of
society: "At the end of the 19th
century, the economic development of the Scandinavian countries provoked the
expansion of a poor proletariat and the appearance of a new middle-class,
which, raised to the level of nobility, vigorously defended its positions. The
literature and the art which this middle class liked made a bitterly ironic
contrast to the brutal reality; it was a romantic sugary art, giving a false
image of life against which writers like Strindberg, Ibsen and Brandes strongly
reacted... Their compatriots' early lack of understanding left a bitterness
they could never shake off. They called themselves atheistic and amoral, but in
fact they were mystics and moralists. They defended the poor and the
misunderstood, and shouldered the sorrows of the world, but in exalting the individual
they paradoxically cut themselves off from the masses for whom they believed
they were working, moving gradually towards the cult of the solitary genius.” (Michel
Ragon, Heron History of Art, London: Heron Books, 1968, P.20.)
Like most in Europe at the time, they were fanatical readers of
the transcendent philosophy of Nietzsche and the philosophy of dread of Soren
Kierkegaard. Most of their lives ended in some kind of tragedy including
alcoholism, poverty, murder and suicide. They advocated free love and fought
for women's rights. The women were from good homes, confident, eccentric and
rebelling themselves against the constraints of bourgeois life. It was in this
group that Munch became addicted to alcohol and increasingly dependent upon it
when painting, which he began to do by candle light in his cold studio after a
night of socializing and drinking. "Within
the group, he was known and feared for his capacity for silence, reserve and
formal good manners that remained in place however drunk, and made him seem
like a spy, an interloper from the bourgeois world they were undermining. 'He
would seem remote and detached and then, at a given moment he would cut in on
the conversation, putting the whole discussion into perspective with his
ironic, often self-mocking comments and his concise use of paradox'. Such an
approach has never been the road to popularity and he made his share of enemies
within the group.” (Sue Prideaux, 'Edvard
Munch: Behind The Scream', New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2005, P.72.)
Munch won the Schaffer
Bequest Fund in 1884, but was too ill to travel to Paris that year. In May
1885, he travelled to Paris via Antwerp where he showed in the Norwegian
section of the World's Fair. He
stayed in Paris three weeks, studying at the Louvre and visiting contemporary
exhibitions but on this first trip it was mostly the Old Masters in the Louvre
like Goya, Rembrandt and Velázquez that impressed him.
Back in Norway, he met
Millie Thaulow the wife of a captain in the medical corps. Millie was tall and
slim, with a fine boned face, thin lips and dark blonde hair - though Munch
often painted her with flame red hair. She flirted with him and filled him with
fear and terror. However, her seduction worked and he eventually lost his
virginity to her. He became intensely jealous, felt shame and guilt about their
relationship and was annoyed by her interference with his painting time. In his
painting Evening on Karl Johan, 1892-4,
he depicted himself alone walking in the opposite direction of a frightening
and ghoulish looking crowd - hoping to bump into Millie. The relationship ended
badly and Munch felt bitter when another man replaced him. Yet, she would
inspire his later work, becoming a 'vampire-woman'
in many of his paintings. She would feature in later paintings as a siren in 'The Voice' and the longing girl in the
red dress dancing with the awkward Munch in The
Dance of Life.
Meanwhile he began work on
his first masterpiece The Sick Child
inspired by the death of his sister Sophie. While painting, Munch was so
overcome with feelings of grief that he was in tears as he painted. In a moment
of inspiration, his threw turpentine on the wet canvas and watched as his tears
- were echoed by the crying painting. The agitated wraith like lines and
dripping paint also echoed Munch's interest in Spiritualist photography in
which certain tricks and distortions of photography were used to suggest the
spirit world. The Sick Child was
Munch's first real masterpiece, decades ahead of its time in its painterly
fracture. In 1886, he exhibited paintings in the Autumn Exhibition, including The
Sick Child, which caused a storm of controversy. It did not help that he
attended with Jaeger who was out of prison on bail. Judged by the conservative
standards of the day, its lack of naturalism, its lack of detail, its frenetic
brushwork and dripped paint was an insult to art. He was attacked as a
charlatan and lunatic. Today however we can appreciate what Munch was trying to
do. He was animating the deeply personal memory of the loss of his beloved
sister by breaking out of the straightjacket of academic measure and restraint.
In 1889, he staged his
first solo exhibition in Kristiania and charged an entrance fee to recoup the
costs. He received a state scholarship and travelled again to Paris in October,
where he studied at the atelier of Leon Bonnat, and learnt the skills of
life-drawing and tonal painting. In addition, he met the circle of avant-garde
painters around Theo van Gogh. On this trip Munch spent more time absorbing
contemporary art including the work of Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Felix Valloton,
Odilon Redon, Rodin, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir and
Japanese prints which were all the rage. Munch began to adopt an open ‘unfinished’
look to his paintings influenced by the Impressionist sketch and in particular
by Toulouse-Lautrec who had made the ‘unfinished’ bravura oil painting central
to his work. Yet Munch's experiments with Impressionism were unconvincing and
marked by a strange, empty, hyperactive activity. It neither suited neither his
character nor ideas, and his work for a while descended into mere stylistic
exercises.
In November, he returned to
Norway following the death of his father, but returned to Paris in December.
Despite his father's tyrannical treatment of him as a child and deploring of
Munch's later scandalous career as a painter, his death left Munch traumatized.
In 1890, he wrote the "St. Cloud
Manifesto" which was based on a series of "visions" he had
had. "There should be no more pictures of interiors, of people reading
and women knitting. There would be pictures of real people who breathed,
suffered, felt, loved.” (Edvard Munch, quoted by Sue Prideaux in 'Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream', New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.120.) Munch's art began to
take the form of a proto-therapeutic art.
He won a second state
scholarship and returned to France staying this time in Le Havre due to ill
health. In 1891, he won a third state scholarship in Norway and again returned
to Paris via Copenhagen. He travelled also to Nice in the south of France in
December. In 1891, he had the idea for his Frieze
of Life, but it was not for a few more years that he would begin work on
it. In his Frieze of Life, he sought
to tell the story of a love affair from its tentative beginnings to its bitter
end - mostly staged along a coast line. The 'bad taste' of Munch's mature art -
came from his instance on painting the shameful aspects of human life on the
scale of History paintings.
In 1892, after his second
solo exhibition in Kristiania, he was invited to exhibit in Berlin. His show in
the Verein Berliner Kunstler (Society of Artists in Berlin) in
November was closed after a week - following a debate and vote by members of
the Artists' Association who were incensed by his work. His art was derided as
the crude daubs of a sick mind - a sinful and demonic art that could also
produce a moral and mental decline in those exposed to it. However, younger
members of the Verein Berliner Kunstler
were angry with how Munch had been treated as a guest and broke away to form
the Berlin Seszession. Even the older
painter Max Liebermann the Manet of Germany and President of the Seszession was to come to his defence.
The scandal was the making of Munch in Germany. He doggedly staged his own
version of the show over the course of the year in Dusseldorf, Cologne, again
in Berlin, Breslau, Dresden and Munich. Indeed, between 1892 and 1909, Munch
exhibited one hundred and six times throughout Europe and even twice in the
United States. In Berlin alone, he showed his work sixteen times.
He spent 1893 based in
Berlin, where he might have seen work by Gauguin and van Gogh at the Free Exhibition. In Berlin, he frequented the bohemian Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (Black
Piglet Café) where he became friends with the dramatist, occultist and amateur
painter August Strindberg, the poet Stanislaw Przbyszewski and Dagny Juel the
muse that would feature as the ultimate Femme
Fatale in many of Munch’s masterpieces including Madonna and Jealousy. She
was the twenty-five year old daughter of a physician and niece to the Norwegian
prime minster. She was not conventionally beautiful, but she was enigmatic and
decadent. Four men including Munch and many of the women were infatuated with
Dagny. She accepted and rejected their advances, played them off each other and
inspired their art. She ended up marrying Przbyszewski though their marriage
was an open one; she bore him two children and lived in poverty with him. She
remained friends with Munch until her untimely end. She was shot in the head by
a deranged admirer - who then shot himself.
Although after Strindberg's
descent into madness, Munch was to disavow his friend. It is clear that for a
few years in Berlin they shared an intense intellectual relationship, which
shaped both their arts forever. August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a playwright,
poet, novelist and amateur photographer, painter and student of the occult. He
wrote over 70 plays in his tormented life, many centring on the battle of the
sexes. Like Munch, Strindberg had lost his mother early in childhood, and he
was a deeply insecure, misanthropic man who also hated women. He had three
stormy marriages and a history of fallings out with his friends. At various
times in his life he was to suffer from mental illness and had a number of
severe psychotic and paranoid episodes. In dramas like Miss Julie, Strindberg created compelling characters that did not
act rationally, were victims of their own subjective torments and acted with
wilful cruelty. His friendship with Munch inspired Strindberg to pursue
painting in a hope of making a living. Self-taught, Strindberg's intensely pastose seascapes - painted from memory
- were compelling proto-Expressionist canvases. Later he claimed to have
extracted gold from earth he had dug up in cemeteries, and in 1897, he was
elected a Fellow of the Alchemists Association of France. It was all
mumbo-jumbo but quite a craze at the time.
The group of decadent, satanic and rebellious artists that hung
out at the Black Piglet Café was to
shape the course of Munch's art dramatically: "During the winter of 1888-9 Strindberg had corresponded with
Nietzsche, who sent him copies of Zur Genealogie der Moral and Gotzendammerung.
Strindberg's admiration for Nietzsche was shared by other modernist writers in
Berlin who rated psychology and personal intuition higher than aesthetics or
morality. Their curiosity about unconscious layers of perception and the
illusion that individuals were an arena for conflicting powers brought some of
the writers and artists perilously close to losing their sense of reason and of
the value of life. Brooding mainly on feelings of pain, loss and injustice,
they used their private experience to create a polemic art. During the 1890s
Strindberg, Munch and Przbyszewski expressed notions of the dramatic struggle
between good and evil, darkness and light which recall the ancient Manichaean
heresy. Despite their religious upbringing, their vanity and fondness for
intellectual athletics made them callus, which led Przybyszewski to declare:
'For that which is normal is stupidity, and "degeneration" is
genius.'" (Carla Lathe, 'Munch and Modernism in Berlin 1892-1903', 'The
Frieze of Life', Ed. Mara-Helen Wood, The National Gallery, London, 1992,
P.45.)
In 1894, Munch produced his first intaglio prints, and in 1895,
Julius Meier-Graefe published a portfolio of eight of Munch's intaglio prints
however it was not a commercial success. Also in 1894, his friend Stanislaw
Przbyszewski wrote the first monograph on Munch.
A large exhibition of Munch's paintings in Kristinaia, led to
public rows about Munch's sanity. At the debate at the Student Union, Munch hid
behind a curtain and listened as Johan Scharffenberg a medical student declared
his art was insane and it was because he came from an insane family. Even his
friends who defended him seemed to take it for granted that Munch was insane.
Munch was less offended by the boorish attacks on his talents as a painter than
by the questions about his sanity, particularly because it brought his family
such shame. Since then the debates about Munch's madness have continued. His
friend and historian J.P. Hodin, seemed to regard Munch as insane in some
respects and certainly during a couple of famous episodes, but he also thought his madness had
given Munch his genius: "There is
always the question as to whether genius can be seen as an illness as Balzac
expressed it: 'Who will win, the illness over the man or the man over the
illness?' or whether it should more adequately be conceived as a heightening of
the faculties of perception, mental combination or intuition and an immense
urge for and ability to work. As to illness - and Munch himself, as we already
know was often assailed by it from his earliest childhood - let us remember
what Nietzsche said: 'There is no profound wisdom without experience of
sickness, and all higher healthiness must be achieved through its means.' A
similar idea was expressed by Diderot, who said: 'I suppose that reserved and
melancholy men have had some temporary dislocation of their personal mechanism
to thank for that extraordinary and indeed divine acuteness of perception which
was to be noticed in them on occasion, and which brought them sometimes to
madness and sometimes to higher reaches of thought'. Bergson, Freud and Proust
all ascribe a similar constructive role to illness.” (J.P. Hodin, 'Edvard Munch', London: Thames and
Hudson, 1972, P.94.)
However, more recent writer's on Munch, have tried to play down or
at least contextualize Munch's illness, and the way he used it to his own
advantage: "The artist learned that
by positioning himself as a radical outsider, and by capitalizing on the
popular press's portrayal of him as a tortured, mentally ill Impressionist, he
could attract substantial and sensational attention. Writing again to his aunt
about the furor in Berlin, he claimed to have made a tactical error by not
showing his "scandal pictures" at a gallery immediately upon the
closure of the initial exhibition, lamenting, "I could have earned several
thousand kroners... He was well aware of the bad press and, in some ways,
appreciated its immediate effect: the entrance fees that kept him financially
afloat.” (Jay A. Clarke, Becoming Edvard Munch, Influence, Anxiety, and Myth, The Art Institute of Chicago, New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, P.78.)
That year Munch's brother Andreas died. The following year Munch
exhibited at the Salon des Independants.
He also produced decorations for Ibsen's Peer
Gynt and illustrations for Baudelaire's Flowers
of Evil and created his first lithographs and woodcuts. In 1897, he
exhibited again at the Salon des
Independants and bought his first house in Asgardstrand.
Between 1898-1901, Munch lived in a state of great spiritual
agitation, overwork and alcoholism compounded by dramatic love affairs. In
1898, he met Tulla Larsen the daughter of a wealthy wine merchant and they
begin a tumultuous relationship. Tulla Larsen was twenty-nine with an hourglass
figure and known for her extravagant hats.
He travelled extensively throughout Europe pursued by Larsen who
had become fixated on him. Despite his fear of being ensnared by Larsen, he
freely took money from her and then felt guilty for his weakness.
His landscapes of the 1890s were startlingly modern in their
almost total abstraction of nature to undulating forms and pulsing passages of
loosely applied paint applied with very thin watercolour like layers - that
dribbled and dripped in parts.
In 1899, he illustrated a special issue of the journal Quickborn containing a text by
Strindberg. He travelled to Florence via Berlin, Paris and Nice and spent May
in Rome. In the autumn of 1899, he entered the sanatorium at Kornhaug, in the
Gudbrandsdalen. In 1900, he travelled back to Berlin, then to Paris, Dresden, Italy
and Switzerland. Tulla became increasingly like a stalker.
In 1902, he spent the winter and spring in Berlin where he showed
the complete Frieze of Life at the
Berlin Secession expanding the exhibition with prints. He described the cycle
of paintings as such: "I have worked
on this frieze for nearly thirty years. The first picture, The Kiss, dates from
1888-9. The Yellow Boat, The Street, Man and Woman and Anxiety were painted
between 1890 and 1891, and have already been exhibited in Berlin. The following
year I added new works to the series: Vampire, The Scream and Madonna. They
were first exhibited separately in a private gallery, then in 1902, at the
"Berlin Sezession", presented as a single series round the main
vestibule as an example of the psychology of modern life. Certain art critics
have tried to prove that the spirit of this frieze was influenced by German
ideas and my friendship with Strindberg. I am certain that future criticism
will refute this assertion. The work was conceived as a series to show a
panorama of life.”
He was introduced to the physician Max Linde, who wrote a book on
his art and commissioned him to produce the print portfolio From Max Linde's House. He also began
taking amateur photographs of his own - which he would use as aids to inspire
is art. He spent 1903 paralytic with drink and got into a series of drunken fistfights.
Meanwhile Tulla had rented a house near his and one night, Munch
was told Tulla had tried to kill herself, and was dying. Since Tulla later
destroyed all her diaries and letters about Munch, we only have Munch's account
of what happened. He went to her house where in her bedroom he found her laid
out like a corpse with candles and flowers around her. Suddenly she jumped up
laughing. There was a gun, one of them grabbed it. A shot rang out. Munch's
middle finger on his left hand was bleeding. Munch claimed he had shot himself
in the hand (he was right-handed.) His hand was x-rayed and we can see in it
the bullet lodged in the middle finger of his left hand.
The relationship was over. Munch the most handsome man in Norway,
now found his beautiful hand deformed. He could not look at it. He wore gloves
obsessively and never showed his left hand in photographs or paintings until at
the very end he bore it bravely as he held a crayon. He said, "There is
nothing more naked or disgusting than the fingers. I cannot bear people who are
always playing with their hands.” (Munch, quoted by Michel Ragon, Heron
History of Art, London: Heron Books, 1968, P.23.) In his house after his death,
forty pairs of gloves where discovered.
The Hamburg collector and lawyer Gustav Schiefler started work on
a catalogue of all Munch's prints. In 1903, returned to Berlin and then Paris
where he became a member of the Societe
des Artistes Independants. He also met the stunningly beautiful English
violinist Eva Mudocci who became a close friend and muse. Eva was already
involved with another woman and so their relationship was happily platonic.
Meanwhile he painted portraits of Max Linde and his four sons. These bravura
portraits revealed Munch as a master of child portraiture neither sentimental
nor superficial. In 1904, he signed exclusive contracts with the Hamburg dealer
Commeter for the sale of his paintings and with the publisher Bruno Cassier for
the German sales of his graphic works.
In November 1905, he took the cure at the spas in the Thuringen
area of Germany - trying to overcome his anxiety and alcoholism. Yet he was
fearful that if he were completely cured, his art would be crippled.
In 1906, he worked on designs for the theatre impresario Max
Reinhardt's production of Ibsen's Ghosts.
In 1908, his long-time supporter Jens Thiis who had become director of Norway's
National Gallery purchased Munch's work for the museum.
It was only at the age of forty that Munch achieved financial
security. He was now able to support his family, even though he hated to be in
their company. With the deaths of van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, Munch
had become a legendary figure and ultimately he would become a millionaire.
Munch called his paintings his "children" and hated selling them.
This was one reason why he chose to make prints of them. When he sold a
painting, which he prized, he felt compelled to make a copy for himself.
In the autumn of 1908, he admitted himself to Dr. Daniel
Jacobson's clinic, where he remained for eight months. In Norway, he received
the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint
Olva. Munch's breakdown only served to increase his mythic status and the
market for his work, which led to the success of his prints, based on the tale
of Alpha and Omega and he still managed to organize exhibitions in Denmark,
Germany, Norway and Sweden while in the clinic. Munch had been in a state for
years leading up to his stay in the clinic, however he had feared that without
drink and his anxiety he would lose his creative fire. "I must retain my physical weaknesses; they are an integral part
of me. I don't want to get rid of illness, however unsympathetically I may
depict it in my art... My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness.
Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded
in reflections over being different to others. My sufferings are part of my
self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction
would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.” (Munch, quoted by
Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind The
Scream, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.251.) Life in
the clinic was relaxed, the food was good, the nurses pretty and flirtatious
and the main remedy Munch received were baths with mild electrical currents
nothing like those given in electro-convulsive therapy today. Other baths were
made with concoctions of carbolic acid or mineral or herbal ingredients. They
were no real cure but can't have done him any harm either. During his
convalescence in Jacobson's clinic Munch made visits to the zoo where he made a
number of wonderful animal studies full of character and bravura summation.
Munch became a teetotaler (apart from a few slips), ended his
bohemian life and retreated to the country. Munch had made the choice of sanity
over martyrdom, however his work after 1908 lost the obsessional quality that
had given it so much power. The negative pessimism, and obsession with love and
death that had helped create his early Expressionist canvases was replaced by
pleasure found in the simple things of life and a growing expressive naturalism.
His pallet lightened and his colours became more beautiful and complementary.
In 1909, he began work on
decorations for the University of
Kristiania Festival Hall known as the Aula.
Due to discussions and conflicts, the decorations were not accepted until 1914,
and completed in 1916. The masterpiece
of these frescos was 'The Sun' a
massive cosmic evocation of the earth's light.
In 1914, he journeyed to
Paris and Berlin. In 1916, he bought a small estate at Ekely where he spent
most of his time until his death in 1944. Although he lived as a virtual
recluse, he had many models come to pose for him, which lead to a late series
of female nudes in various mediums, which revealed a new tenderness and
acceptance of women. In particular, his housekeeper Karen Borgen and later her sixteen-year-old
daughter Ingeborg Kaurin were to feature in his late nudes. In the 1910s he painted
a series of deceptively simple watercolour nudes. Rapidly painted with only a
few strokes of the brush - the watercolour worked wet in wet these late works
had an intimacy and loveliness absent in his earlier femme fatels. "The
stream of live-in models was to produce a hidden portfolio of erotic art,
parallel to his more public work. At the same time that he was producing it he
was writing privately about the beauty of chastity. Maybe he did manage to keep
the sex in his head. Maybe that is why the sexual tension in the pictures is so
powerful. A characteristic of the erotic art is that it does not show open
pudenda or the erect penis, an intensifying restraint that remains true to his
earlier artistic goal to make pictures in which 'their soul, their inner world,
is the only reality, a cosmos'... The second unusual episode in the line of
erotica occurs in 1918, when he executed a lesbian series. It is puzzling.
Lesbian erotica was very common in Germany at the time, but that was hardly
relevant to Munch. In terms of his overwhelming concern with subjective states
of mind, they can be considered a failure; they achieve the naturalist's
'veracity of the document' without engaging in any spiritual reportage.” (Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2005, P.297.) In 1918, he revisited his 'Frieze of Life' and published a pamphlet
defending his work and castigating Norwegian critics for their early neglect of
his work.
In 1922, he painted murals
for the workers dining room at the Freia
Chocolate Factory in Kristiania. He also travelled briefly to Germany and
Switzerland. In 1926, his beloved sister Laura who he had painted many times
died, he could not attend the funeral, but hid behind a tree near the
graveyard. He kept the temperature in his house a constant 70 degree
Fahrenheit. If anyone told him he was looking unwell, he would take to his bed.
In 1927, he travelled to
Germany, Italy and France and held large retrospectives at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the National Gallery Olso. In 1930, Munch
was struck partial blind by an eye complaint. Yet determined to record what he
saw, he painted a series of quick watercolours of his obscured vision, in which
he went further towards abstraction than ever before. Like many of his late
watercolors' they had a touching, personal and off hand quality that made them
read like the private entries of a diary.
His eye complaint reoccurred in 1938 when he nearly lost his sight
completely and even in 1940, he still found it difficult to work because of his
illness. In 1931, his aunt Karen who had become a mother figure to him and had
encouraged his art as a child died. Although he had a housekeeper and was
occasionally visited by friends, much of the time he was totally alone,
connected to the world only through long conversations on the telephone or with
taxi drivers - who drove him around. He would go into Oslo and buy a pile of
foreign newspapers and reminisce about his young life abroad. He was plagued by
insomnia the only cure for which he found was to board a train to Stockholm on
which he could fall asleep. He had no need for conventional creature comforts.
Apart for one room where he eat and slept, all of the other rooms in his house
were used as studios and storerooms for his art.
By now, Munch had become
hugely popular in Norway and was showered with honours and awards. In 1933, on
his 60th birthday he was celebrated, but he cantankerously told
journalist to go away when they tried to interview him. In addition, Pola
Gauguin (son of Paul Gauguin) and Jens Thiis published the first biographies on
Munch in Norway. Then in 1937, eighty-two works by Munch in German museums
considered "degenerate art"
were confiscated and sold by the Nazis.
In 1940, Norway and Denmark
were occupied by German troops. In the neighbouring farm, there were Panzers
and there was an anti-aircraft battery set up nearby. The Germans' were
threatening to requisition his home that was crammed with his art works, though
surprisingly he remained calm. Munch refused any contact with the Nazi's unlike
his friend the novelist Kunt Hamsun the author of the novel ‘Hunger’, whose son approached Munch to
join the ‘Honorary Board of Norwegian
Artists' and thus endorse the Quisling regime - however he briskly
declined. The board never materialized because the Nazi's thought it would have
no credibility without Munch's participation. On his eightieth birthday
greetings flooded in. A week later Ekely was shaken by the explosion of a
munitions dump nearby and all the windows in his home were blown in. He was
uninjured, but he contracted a severe bout of bronchitis. On 23ed January 1944,
after a life of tribulations and triumphs, Munch died peacefully at the age of
eighty-one in his home at Ekely.
Munch had never allowed anyone up to the second floor of house in
Ekely - up there was found thousands of paintings and drawings as well as
prints and journals. Wanting his Frieze
of Life kept together, he bequeathed his remaining works to the city of
Oslo including; 1,008 paintings, 15,391 prints, 4,443 drawings, 378
lithographs, 188 etchings, 148 woodcuts, 143 lithographic stones, 155 copper
plates, 133 woodcut blocks, 6 sculptures, 92 sketchbooks and thousands of
photographs, letters, and secret manuscripts. Paradoxically it was the worst
thing he could have done for his future reputation. Up until the 1940s he had
been one of the most famous artists in Europe but his reputation declined after
his death since art lovers had to make a pilgrimage to Norway to see most of
his best works.
He was a paradoxical artist, famous for his misery - yet it never
prevented him from making art or promoting himself ruthlessly. He was an
exemplary Expressionist artist, which in its crudest terms claimed to be a
spontaneous and unreflective style. Yet his work had come out of the spirit of
Decadence and Symbolism and borrowed many of the themes and subjects of
Northern Realism and Naturalism like deathbed scenes and mood paintings of
interiors and landscapes.
The paradoxes of Munch's oeuvre reflected the paradox of
Expressionism. For while at its most basic it aimed at a purely subjective,
autonomous expression of individual sensation and feeling - it could only do so
within the pre-existing framework of contemporary art and culture. "Anxieties of influence, as Harold
Bloom argued in his foundational text of 1973, are multifaceted: they can be
considered homages or crutches, Oedipal dilemmas that can be either overcome or
invisibly internalized. For Bloom, the term itself is a metaphor that suggests
how individual artists misread and creatively reinterpret the work of their
predecessors. The essence of any avant-garde movement is to exist on the
cutting edge, which explains Munch's keen desire to be viewed as innovative and
independent at every turn. However, as Bloom argued with regard to poetry, each
of Munch's images "implicates a matrix of relationships".” (Jay
A. Clarke, Becoming Edvard Munch, 'Influence,
Anxiety, and Myth', The Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2009, P.12.)
Munch borrowed from Monet many of his early themes of people by
lakes and the sea. From Arnold Blocklin he learned how to make an imaginary landscape
heave with heavy symbolic mystery. From Vuillard and Bonnard he learned how to
animate and vibrate an interior with feeling and life. Gauguin taught him how
to construct a painting in large blocks of intense and symbolic colour. From van
Gogh he learned how to create dynamic expressive forms using directional
brushstrokes. From the erotic print maker Rops he took the pose for his
painting Puberty, and from Redon he
learned the grammar of intense visionary image making.
Munch's art was a symptom of his age, but the greatness of his
talent raised his personal tragedy and that of his times to an epic level of
universal tragedy. "In many of the
notes he wrote during his long life Munch stressed the importance of the
artist's role as mediator and redeemer. He believed that the spirit of the
artist lived on through his work, and that even after his death the artist
could help others gain greater insight into their own lives and problems -
provided he was able to express in his pictures his own sufferings, ideas and
feelings in a way that enabled other people to understand and relive them.” (Gerd
Woll, 'The Frieze of Life Graphic Works',
'The Frieze of Life', Ed. Mara-Helen Wood, The National Gallery, London,
1992, P.45.)
So Munch saw his art as therapeutic but was the cure more
dangerous than the illness? Had he settled down and become an engineer like his
father had wanted, would he have been happier? Maybe, but the world would have
been deprived of one of its most compelling artists. Besides, life is too short
to deny your talents.
Flicking through Munch and
Photography, by Arne Eggum, from 1989, I was stunned and shocked to come
upon photographs of Munch naked. What immediately struck me was the diminutive
size of Munch's flaccid penis. It was tiny! I told Carol this and she came to
his defence. "Well maybe it was cold.” She sympathetically suggested.
"Well it does get cold in Norway! But no this was in summer.” I laughed.
"Well you know what they say it's not the size of the train it's the size
of the engine.” She retorted. "Yes but surely it had some effect on him?
Maybe that's why he feared women. Maybe he feared he could never satisfy them?
I retorted. "Well he didn't seem to have any problem getting them! And
they became obsessed with him!" Carol pointed out. "Yes I suppose
your right.” I replied, still not so sure. Later I realized that in those
paintings that he had painted himself naked he had recorded his penis with even
less attention, hardly conveying it with anything more than a smear of paint or
even just bare canvas.
Munch had famously declared, "The
camera cannot compete with brush and palette - as long as it cannot be used in
Heaven or Hell.” His paintings were archetypal Expressionist works in which
he intensified colour and drawing to express his inner demons - yet many of his
early paintings were based on postcards and later works aided by photographs
that he had taken of his models. In his earliest works, Munch was thought to
have experimented with the camera obscura
and the camera lucida, in this he was
like many Naturalist and Realist painters of the day, and like them, he never
revealed his use of this secret aid. From
1902, Munch made his own amateur experiments with photography and was
particularly active as a photographer between 1902-1910 and 1926-32. In many of
his portraits, he was to use photographs as aids and produced a sizeable number
of photographic self-portraits. However, Munch would alter the placement of
hands, or spacing in the composition and crop or extended the figure according
to his taste, making his interpretations as notable for their differences from the
photos used. Some of the works based on photos suffered from a lack of intimacy
and tended towards illustration, those that worked best were when his colour
and paintwork achieved an autonomous intensity of their own moment. He was also
indebted to the look of staged 'Spiritualist'
photography, and experimented with photographic tricks like double-exposure -
to suggest ghostly presences. In his paintings, the wraith like application of
paint was an echo of the distortions, overexposures and imperfections of
amateur photography.
Munch's technique as an oil painter left a lot to be desired. He
was a fitful, impetuous and instinctive painter who frequently left his
paintings in an unfinished state. Yet it was the sketchy, immediate approach
that he adopted which made works like The
Scream work so visceral. He frequently painted out of doors and exposed
'finished' canvases to the elements. He believe that the damp from rain and
snow, the scuff marks from casual treatment and even the bird dropping that
splattered his canvases added to their psychic intensity. "Good pictures never disappear. A brilliant thought never dies...
One line in charcoal on a wall can be a greater work of art than a painting
carried out in the most accomplished technique. Many painters work so hard
towards posterity that the poor overworked canvas loses the fire of the
original thought. The picture so carefully constructed then remains alive
forever - and dead.” (Munch, quoted by Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2005, P.273.) Over the years, he would return to old canvases
and paint corrections to them - frequently creating even more pictorial
disjunction. The dating too of his canvases was a nightmare, since Munch
sometimes back-dated works he had worked on for years. Or dated old paintings
more recently because he had made a few additions. Of the 1,008 canvases found
in his various studios after his death, not one had been varnished. After his death, those in charge of his
estate had his canvases cleaned and varnished his paintings, altering their
texture and sheen completely. Despite the conventional soundness of their
approach to restoration, in Munch's case, this was a betrayal of his painterly
ethics.