Nordic torment: Edward Munch

The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) had a traumatic childhood.  His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five years old; his older sister died of that disease when he was fourteen; his younger sister spent most of her life in insane asylums.  He had a mental breakdown in 1908 and spent six months in a psychiatric clinic.  He wrote that “disease, insanity and death were the black angels that hovered over my cradle, and have followed me throughout my life.”  The dominant theme of his art is loss.  He saw the skull beneath the skin, and his paintings compress the essence of life into birth, sex, angst, sickness and death.  But his bitter memories inspired him, and he noted that for him painting was a confession and exorcism: “When I paint illness and misfortune it is a healthy release.”

Munch’s four-year liaison with Tulla Larsen was predictably devastating.  She pursued him for blood money when he rejected her, and in the course of a violent quarrel that led to their separation she shot at him and damaged his left hand.  Like Kafka, he felt that sex was the punishment for happiness, and portrayed women as fascinating, conquering, venomous and murderous.  The guilt-ridden post-coital scene in Ashes was inspired by Edgar Degas’ brooding, enigmatic Interior: The Rape (1869).  In both paintings the bare-shouldered woman is dressed in a white shift, and in both the lovers have had sex but are now physically and psychologically separated by the bright space between them.  Both antagonists share a terrible kind of intimacy.  Both pictures portray disconcerting emotions, an anguished atmosphere and the damaging emotional effects of sexual passion.  But Munch reverses the meaning of Degas’ work, and makes the powerful woman dominate and emasculate the man.  He turns away from her, bends over, holds his head in his hand and becomes her victim.

Interior, also known as The Rape (1868–1869) by Edgar Degas

The latest book on Munch to appear is the catalogue of an exhibition in the Paris Musée d’Orsay that ended a year ago: Edvard Munch; A Poem of Life, Love and Death (ed. Claire Bernardi, Thames & Hudson, 256 pp, $40/£30). It has seven essays on Munch’s social and intellectual background and five brief but more useful descriptions of the paintings.  The catalogue also includes 14 pointlessly blank pages. Though more interesting than some of the printed ones, they could have been used to make illuminating comparisons with Degas, Max Beckmann or Vincent Van Gogh.

Munch’s provocative pictures, a rebellion against conventional academic art, advocated the expression of inner feelings and subjective truth.  They were deliberately scandalous and condemned as outrageous and disgraceful.  This merely amused the artist, and in 1892 an exhibition in Berlin made him famous in Germany.  In a weird practice, he “punished” some of his imperfect pictures by exposing them to the wind and the rain, rather than to the critics, and attacked his own wounded pictures with a stick.

The works shown in the Paris exhibition can be roughly divided into portraits and portrayals of disease, women, sex, crowds and landscapes.  Munch’s famous lithograph of his Swedish playwright-friend August Strindberg portrays him with a tsunami of high swirling hair framing a lofty forehead, intense deep-set eyes, upturned mustache, full lips, thick neck and chaste white collar.  Strindberg perceptively described Munch as “the esoteric painter of love, of jealousy, of death and of sadness”.

In Self-Portrait with Cigarette (1896) his handsome pale face, lit from below, challenges the viewer with an enigmatic expression.  Like an apparition, he looms spookily out of a violet mist, which merges with the curling smoke of his cigarette, held in nervous widespread fingers.  Unlike Max Beckmann, who portrayed himself as erect and forceful, Munch reveals his vulnerability.  The forceful sharp lines in Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1926) convey his chilling cynicism and ironic detachment, exude status and self-confidence, project ferocious energy and psychic power.

Max Beckmann ‘Self-Portrait in Tuxedo’

Munch called Friedrich Nietzsche, who died insane of syphilis, “the man to whom I owe a greater debt of gratitude than to any other human being.”  Nietzsche believed that art should depict the agony and suffering of human existence, and declared: “To live is to suffer”; “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker and emptier”; “All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks.”  In Munch’s portrait of the philosopher, Nietzsche stands on a precipice beneath an egg-yoke yellow and red-streaked sky.  He’s draped in a heavy dark overcoat and clasps his hands at his waist.  He has blond hair swept back from his high forehead, furrowed eyebrows, strong nose and thick portcullis moustache, which extends to his chin and seems to prevent the ingestion of food.  Like his prophet Zarathustra, he gazes prophetically into the vertiginous mountains, which he hopes to climb intellectually from peak to peak.

The seven figures in Death in the Sickroom assume postures of grief, with bent heads and clasped hands, on the slanting floorboards.  The white-bearded father and pale mother stand near the sickbed; a hooded, seated old woman seems ready for the grave.  Medicine bottles appear on the nightstand, and the moribunda is hidden beneath the drooping duvet.  One catalogue author writes that the painting “reasserts the lasting nature of his mourning for his sister Sophie, who had been carried off by illness 16 years before.  The composition uses a theatrical format in a clearly defined cubic space.  The chorus of adult siblings, Edvard, Laura and Inger, appear downstage, as the terrible scene from the past plays out in the background.  The painter’s silhouette connects these two spaces, while on the lower [i.e., upper] left a young man walks away from the unbearable scene.  This is the other Edvard, the 14-year-old boy through whose pain-filled eyes the adult still sees the event.”

Death in the Sickroom, 1895 by Edvard Munch

Munch transforms traditional images of infancy and youth into horror and revulsion.  In the ghastly Inheritance the baby, a pathetic homunculus, is ravaged by red syphilitic chancres that burst through his skin like bullet holes.  With outsized head and spread spindly limbs, he lies like a pietà on the lap of his red-faced weeping mother.  Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus also portray the effects of syphilis.

Inheritance, 1897–1899, by Edvard Munch

In Puberty, with early menstrual blood staining the sheets, an adolescent girl, lonely, naked, vulnerable and frightened, sits on the edge of her bed.  She’s thin, round-faced and wide-eyed, with bony hands and knees pressed tightly together modestly covering her genitals and exposing her budding breasts.  The enormous brown shadow of her hair looms behind the child, touches her body and threatens to overwhelm her.

Puberty (1894-95) by Edvard Munch

Madonna, whose original defiant title was Woman Making Love, is a striking contrast to Puberty, showing an orgasmic woman worthy of religious adoration. Though facing the viewer, she also seems to be lying down—with one arm behind her neck, the other behind her waist—in a gesture of surrender.  She has an ironic red halo, tilted-back head, closed eyes, full breasts and sensually distended belly.  Her long dark tresses, instead of ensnaring the man as in Munch’s other pictures, flow around her alluring body and express her ecstasy.

Madonna, (1892 – 1895) by Edvard Munch

Munch described the origin of his most famous painting, The Scream: “I was walking along the road with two friends—the sun was setting—The sky suddenly turned blood-red—I felt a wave of sadness—I stopped, leaned against the fence tired to death—gazed out over the flaming clouds like blood and swords—the blue-black fjord and city—My friends walked on—I stood there quaking with angst—and I felt a vast, endless scream through nature.”  The howling creature stands on a bridge beneath the red-streaked sky and vertiginous swirl of water in the fjord.  Behind him two tall vague figures intensify his loneliness by walking away from him.  He has a fetal, skull-like face, and covers his ears to shut out the horrors of modern life: the cries of violated nature and screams of the insane. Robert Frost expressed this emotion in “Acquainted with the Night”:

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street.

The same sky and sea reappear to oppress the hollow-eyed subjects in the more expansive Angst.  Munch now portrays nine people from rear to front in increasingly large rows of three.  The wretched triad in the foreground includes a hollow-eyed, green-skinned, gaunt man with a derby hat, triangular face and sharp goatee.  A tall cadaverous man next to him wears a shiny top hat that projects into the sea.  The third participant in this ménage of misery, a wide-eyed, round-faced woman with parted hair and an incongruous pink hat, clasps her hands in a gesture of desperate prayer.

Angst (1894) by Edvard Munch

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to describe the isolation and despair of modern man in an urban crowd, which merely intensifies his loneliness. In Evening on Karl Johan, a street named for a Norwegian king, the men have tall hats and dark coats, the women wear severe dresses and wide straw hats with black bands.  The sky is cloudy blue, the street lamps and houses behind the pedestrians are lit up, all the faces look like ghostly apparitions. The numberless surging crowd of the urban bourgeoisie, which includes a child or dwarf, promenades joylessly on the twilit street of the capitol and seems propelled from behind into danger.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, William Blake expressed this feeling in “Mad Song”:

Like a fiend in a cloud

With howling woe,

After night I do crowd

And with night will go.

A century later in The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot also captured the atmosphere of the morbid city:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London  Bridge, so many.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street.

Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) inspired Munch’s work (1924) with the same title.  In Van Gogh’s pulsating and apocalyptic picture, the oppressive sky has twelve swirling comets with burning yellow cores, which seem about to crash like destructive meteors and threaten to obliterate the tranquil village.  Munch’s version, with its dark landscape and distant village, soft and undulating coast, floating skyscape and twinkling stars, is gentler and less menacing.  The lights are alluring in the village, which seems protected by the pink canopy of clouds.

Van Gogh – Starry Night (1889)

Munch’s deeply personal and original style, forceful brushwork and rough application of paint, emotionally charged pictures and tragic intensity, helped establish the idea of the artist as social outsider. Munch also gave visual expression to the Nietzschean belief that mental illness sparked creative genius.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published five books on art: Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real. 

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