by Peter Schjeldahl
When he was seven years old, in 1870 or 1871, Edvard Munch used a lump of coal to draw a sprawling procession of blind men across the floor of his home in Kristiania—as Swedish-ruled Oslo was then named—one in a series of squalid flats taken by a family prone to poverty, disease, mental disorder, and death. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was five; his fiercely beloved older sister Sophie would do the same when he was thirteen. Another sister would be lost to psychosis. Munch himself was sickly from birth; he said later that he grew up feeling “like a boat built of hopeless material, of old rotten wood.” His father was a military doctor, at a time when doctors were ill-paid and little respected, and a guilt-ravaged religious zealot whose idea of parental duty was to instill the terrors of Hell in his children. The boy’s drawing expressed an alarmed fascination with anonymous crowds on city streets—the same theme appeared in major paintings that he made some twenty years later. According to Sue Prideaux’s assured and vivid recent biography, “Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream” (Yale), Munch’s Aunt Karen, the family’s mainstay, marvelled at “the trembling uncertainty” that the apparent prodigy had caught in the sightless figures. (As Munch matured, his talent was regularly noted—even as his art was loathed and his character deplored—in Norway.) In later years, Munch recalled “deriving such pleasure from the monumental format of my work, real satisfaction at the sensation of my hand so much more actively involved than when I drew on the back of father’s prescriptions.”
Two things impress me about this story. First, I believe it, despite its redolence of the sort of family lore that mythifies everybody’s childhood and abounds in the hagiographies of genius. No other great artist—and only a rare writer, short of Proust—has made so absolute a principle of truthful memory. (A perceptive German critic, in 1902, characterized Munch as “a Romantic who cannot lie.”) Second, I’m struck by the note of discovered joy in artmaking, never mind the direness of the subject, that may be typical of budding artists but would serve this one to an extreme degree, as an emotional tightrope over the abysses of a life that was otherwise pretty thoroughly awful.
“Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is the second comprehensive Munch retrospective in the United States in the past fifty years. The first, at the National Gallery, in 1978, came as a revelation to observers who had not previously visited Norway, where all but a few of Munch’s paintings reside. (The Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ “Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice),” from 1893, is the only American-owned painting from his magnum opus, the series of pictures on themes of love, anxiety, and death which is commonly termed the “Frieze of Life.”) He was known here as a great printmaker—the most original of the Symbolist era—and, vaguely, as the father of German Expressionism. But reproductions of his work, including the already famous “Scream,” prepared no one for the originals’ astringent textures, dense space, tensile drawing, and eloquent color.
That show revolutionized my sense of modern-art history, particularly of its canonical elevation of the quartet of Post-Impressionism: Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. Munch, though younger than those masters, and hitting his stride a bit later, suddenly seemed to me their peer in giving form to the seismic forces of European modernity. He still does, both despite and because of a radically impure style that, at its best, varies from picture to picture. His strongest works, dating from about 1890 to the early years of the last century, exalted pictorial functions—narrative and illustration—that were being combed out of modern painting as specialties more proper to literature and the popular arts. Thereafter, until his death, in 1944, Munch, with less to say of life, painted mainly just to paint, with so-so results, except for the occasional, jolting self-portrait. As a happy compensation for being so long marginalized, and at a time of resurgent interest in storytelling among young artists, Munch today appears fresh and challenging in ways that his more honored peers may not.
French painting (Gauguin and van Gogh), Scandinavian theatre (Ibsen and Strindberg), and German philosophy (Nietzsche) shaped Munch’s emerging sensibility as he moved through the bohemian scene in Kristiania, with some agonizing experiments in free love, and on to art school in Paris, under the academic realist Léon Bonnat, and to scandal in Berlin, where, in 1892, his first major exhibition was denounced by Kaiser Wilhelm II and promptly shut down. Munch’s first successful works were interiors and portraits that strained against the genteel conventions of naturalism. The MOMA show includes a regrettably later version, from 1896, of “The Sick Child” (1886), a torturous reminiscence of Sophie on her deathbed, in which Munch struggled toward a new pictorial language. In the ravishing “Summer Night / Inger on the Beach” (1889) seaside rocks seem to pulse with incipient life. After experimenting with semi-Pointillist Impressionism in Paris, he painted, upon learning of his father’s death, “Night in St. Cloud” (1890), which shows a top-hatted man in silhouette, sitting at a window and smoking, in variously inky and luminous blues. It is a ticking bomb of suppressed feeling.
Munch became Munch with his allegories of love. “The Voice,” presenting a seductive woman in white in the seaside woods, backlit by a low summer-night sun, memorializes the onset of his first love. “Ashes” (1894) is about the affair’s end. Postcoital, the same woman, in perhaps the same woods, dispassionately tidies her hair, as a male figure huddles dejectedly. “Madonna” displays a woman during intercourse as seen by her lover, for whom plainly she cares nothing. Not all of Munch’s many relationships with women ended badly, by the way; some were casual. But any real attachment foretold disaster—in the worst case, a tussle over a gun that went off, shattering the middle finger of Munch’s left hand.
“The Scream” (1893) is keenly missed. Its absence from the show, except as an image in prints, produces the effect of an opera minus its soprano. I mean the original “Scream,” a delicate and raw marvel in oil, pastel, and casein on cardboard, which hangs in Norway’s National Gallery, not the inferior remake (one of three, none of them quite right) that was stolen from the Munch Museum. Standing in for it at MOMA is “Despair” (1892), his first representation—with a faceless and inert foreground figure under a seething blood-red sky—of a ghastly epiphany (“I felt a scream penetrating nature”) that he had had years earlier on a road outside Kristiania. The flayed and writhing homunculus of “The Scream” came to him from nowhere, unprecedented in any art and without an equivalent in his own, apart from the merged faces of the lovers in his paintings and prints called “The Kiss.” Munch avoided representing unreality. With no use for the supernatural, he was a stony skeptic in circles of spiritualist friends. The power of “The Scream,” I think, owes much to an intellectual resistance that it overcame in the artist. A similar resistance explains the popular tendency to treat that icon of unhappy modern consciousness as a joke in cartoons and inflatable toys. Laughter dies in the face of the supremely matter-of-fact original. It is the touchstone of Munch’s definitive quality in his great years: a self-abnegating submission to emotional truth. “If only one could be the body through which today’s thoughts and feelings flow,” he wrote in 1892. He became that body intermittently, at a cost of becoming almost nothing in his own person. Study his self-portraits. What is uncanny in them is narcissism turned inside out, giving itself away. ♦
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