Edvard Munch’s Love and Angst at the British Museum
“One shall no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They will be people who are alive, who breathe and feel, suffer and love.” With this declaration in 1889 Edvard Munch performed a radical about-turn, swapping the naturalistic and impressionistic renderings he produced while finding his feet in the first decade of his career for work that became wholly inspired by and infused with personal longing, anguish and anxiety. He remained true to his word: from this point on his people were indeed alive. However, not of all of them seemed happy to be so. Many of his subjects are haunted and hounded, brittle or broken. He opened their minds, laid bare their souls and invited the beholder to feel their pain, gauge their torment and make sense of their dislocation.
We do just that at the British Museum’s magnificent exhibition devoted to the experimental prints Munch made during the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century while resident in Oslo (then Kristiania), Paris and Berlin. “Edvard Munch: Love and Angst” contains more of the latter than the former but it is by no means all doom and gloom. The largest show of his prints in the UK for almost fifty years, the exhibition demonstrates through its many riches how this founding father of Expressionism managed to channel his emotions and sublimate his experiences to create striking, rule-breaking art which has the power to both entrance and disorientate.
The best example is of course Munch’s masterpiece and one of the most iconic images of modern art. The version on display of The Scream is a rare 1895 lithograph. Some sceptics will feel compelled to write this off in advance as an inferior monochrome imposter when compared with the more famous and more colourful paint-and-pastel real deals. But it pays to reserve that pre-judgment because this is no pale imitation. For all its familiarity, despite its recognisability, it assails us afresh. Stare at the wavy lines too long and they become nauseating. Stare at the face too long (taking in the eyes – one pupil looking straight ahead, the other glancing off to the side) and the perceived trauma acquires a heightened intensity. It was this print which was disseminated widely during Munch’s lifetime and which established his reputation. It comes with a German inscription – missing in the colour versions – which reinforces the idea that the person in the image is not screaming but rather reacting to a scream. The translation reads: “I felt a great scream pass through nature.”
The Scream may be the crowd-pleasing highlight here, but isolate it from its hype and we find many other pieces which are if not its equal artistically then at least imbued with a similar dark magic which keep us transfixed. Were it not for its tell-tale title, Vampire II could be an innocuous print of a woman caressing, or perhaps comforting, her lover. But that title prompts us to dramatically alter those first impressions and re-visualise it as a savage act: she bearing down on the nape of his neck, the thick strands of her blazing red hair enveloping his head. Munch reprises this motif of hair as a tool of female entrapment in his 1896 woodcut Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair – only here his pair have been reduced to a pair of disembodied heads. There is another couple in Consolation from 1894, this time with naked bodies. On this occasion it is he who has his arms around her – unequivocally comforting, not caressing. What snags our attention and sows unease is not her mental state but her physical condition. In contrast to him and his pallid body, her skin is a shocking, unnatural pink. He is blank, featureless, unscathed; she looks like she has been immersed in boiling water or rubbed raw.
Munch often relied upon symbolic representations of women. For him, women were mysteries. He lost the two most important female figures in his life when he was young: his mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did his sister, aged fifteen, nine years later. His first serious relationship was an affair with a married woman, Milly Thaulow, who later broke his heart and turned him into a chronic commitment-phobe. A more troubled relationship with Tulla Larsen culminated with a fiery argument and a shooting incident which left Munch with a damaged hand. After breaking up, Munch split Self-portrait with Tulla in two. One of the few paintings on show, it projects a nightmarish vision. In the foreground are positioned the unhappy couple: she with colourful hair, a sickly pallor, and the most miserable countenance; he in ruder health but vouchsafing her a disapproving glare. In the background, a demonic figure simultaneously emerges from and blends into the absinthe-green backwash and views the pair through sightless eyes.
Two other self-portraits present Munch in singular ways. Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (1895) is a faithful homage to Albrecht Dürer and a disturbing image of an artist who is not all there – his head appears to float free and a limb is stripped of all flesh. Less figurative and more affecting is the 1930 lithograph Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine. Munch, a scratchy composite of dark shadows and grey worry lines, sits under a cloud in a near-empty restaurant, his sole company the bottle before him. His spiralling alcoholism would tip him over the edge and precipitate a mental collapse.
Elsewhere we see, and marvel at, Munch’s stage set designs for Strindberg and Ibsen, along with the painted themes and distilled emotions that make up his celebrated Frieze of Life cycle. Again and again we find ourselves turned into voyeurs, intruding upon intimate scenes and witnessing full displays of pure, unadulterated feeling. Inheritance (1916) depicts a harrowing legacy: a syphilis-ravaged baby – part-Gollum, part-Roswell alien – lies awkwardly in its devastated mother’s arms; The Kiss (1895) portrays unfettered desire: two naked lovers are locked in a passionate embrace by a window, oblivious or indifferent to outside observers.
In his recent book on Munch’s life and art, So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard describes his compatriot as “a painter of the inner life, of dream, death.” This exhibition bears this out. Munch plumbs the depths to showcase his subjects’ thoughts and feelings – their love, their angst and their suffering. In doing so, he provides valuable glimpses of his own bruised heart and beleaguered state of mind.
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst is exhibited at the British Museum, London, until July 21. For more information click here.
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst by Giulia Bartrum (ed.), published by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with the British Museum, is out now.
