Entry - 11.29.19

From my first exposure to his art, I’ve retained an undiminished interest in the paintings and prints of Edvard Munch.  After reading a lot about his life and looking at many reproductions of his work, I came to understand that Munch’s oeuvre could be classified as belonging to three major periods: a developmental stage during which he was influenced by Naturalism and Impressionism, an interval of mature fruition which lasted from about 1890 to 1910, and finally a long period of decline characterized by a diminution of ability.  I recall that during my years of undergraduate art studies one professor summed up the course of Munch’s production in a nutshell: he created amazing works which reflected his intensely volatile lifestyle and a perspective colored by mental illness; after he sought treatment and adopted a more moderate way of living, his art lost its edge and was no longer worthy of serious examination.  I am always wary of any easy summing up of an artist’s output, but I must admit that my own observations corresponded to a large degree with this evaluation.  The powerful works that really grabbed me and I returned to again and again all seemed to have been produced during that relatively short interval of mature fruition.  I refer to works like:

Edvard Munch - Summer Night-Inger on the Beach - 1896

Edvard Munch - The Sick Child - 1896

Edvard Munch - Puberty - 1894/95

Edvard Munch - Death in the Sickroom - c1895

Edvard Munch - Madonna - 1894

Edvard Munch - Jealousy - 1895

Edvard Munch - Melancholy - 1891

Edvard Munch - The Scream - 1893

Edvard Munch - The Brooch - 1903

Edvard Munch - The Voice - 1896

Edvard Munch - Ashes - 1895

Edvard Munch - The Storm - 1893

But I can’t help wondering, if these three periods hadn’t been defined for me so categorically, would I have been disposed to see his output, instead, as part of one continuum defined by regular peaks and valleys.  In 2017, just before I retired, The Met Breuer hosted an exhibition, Edvard Munch – Between the Clock and the Bed, which featured many of Munch’s late paintings, the majority of which I’d seen only in reproduction.  The show included works from throughout Munch’s career, and I must admit that, though I was curious to see the late work, I wasn’t expecting much.  I was surprised to find a good many of the late paintings in the show to be emotionally powerful and technically sound – in fact, I was impressed at how intuitive his painting continued to be in his later years, surfaces varying from thick impasto to thin washes to bare canvas, and I recognized that he successfully pulled off some fairly audacious exploits in these canvases, adopting practices that I would hesitate to attempt.  I was impressed.

Edvard Munch - The Night Wanderer - 1923/24

Edvard Munch - Starry Night - 1923

Edvard Munch - Self Portrait between the Clock and the Bed - 1940/43

Of course, my impression could have been a response to some very selective curating on the part of the show’s organizers.  Without a doubt, Munch’s vision did undergo a major adjustment in his later years.  I would say he went from seeking through generalization a universality of experience during his youth to striving to present a specificity of experience by documenting real observations in his later years.  In these later works, the “players” are real people, with real occupations and class affiliations; they wear clothing specific to their function and status.  Munch is no longer the dissipated, intellectual outsider exposing the internal workings of a troubled mind; he is a member of a community whose members struggle against natural and manmade forces to survive or even thrive in the first years of the twentieth century.  While earlier, Munch would use compositional devices to obscure the effect of perspective, he now stressed that effect, depicting lines of crops converging in the distance or emphasizing the difference in size between individuals and objects in the foreground and those further away.  Often the later pictures record specific locations revealed in the distinct light of a specific time of day.  Even in a work whose theme encourages a more universal interpretation like Adam and Eve of 1909, Munch chooses to rely on specifics; we witness a somewhat well-to-do schoolgirl encountering an awkward young worker in an orchard – she confidently and coquettishly grasps a branch and bites into an apple, while the dumfounded boy is passive, his hands planted firmly in his pockets.  This painting is not a depiction of an engagement between the archetypal “man” and “woman”; the actors are members of specific classes as defined within an identifiable epoch.

Edvard Munch - Adam and Eve - 1909

Edvard Munch - Life - 1910

Edvard Munch - Workmen in the Snow - 1912

Edvard Munch - Man in Cabbage Field - 1916

Edvard Munch - Horse Team - 1919

I must admit that the above works don’t engage my interest as powerfully as the earlier work.  Here Munch documents externals rather than piercing externals to reveal the hidden core of things.  Often these paintings have an almost “photographic” quality to them – as if Munch captured a snapshot of a moment in time and translated it into a lushly and energetically painted image.  Perhaps my response to these images may only be a matter of personal preference.  And while there are many obvious failures included within his late oeuvre, Munch’s mature production is also riddled with many awkward, inconsistent and mawkish works.  I think the modernist revolution demanded that artists make forays into uncharted territory both thematically and technically – most particularly during the opening years of the twentieth century; inevitably radical experimentation would often result in less than perfect outcomes.

To understand how Munch’s approach to painting evolved it would be a good idea to explore briefly his own history and the changes that were occurring within the art world during his developmental years.  Born in 1863, Munch saw his mother succumb to tuberculosis when he was five years old, to be followed by his favorite sister within the following decade.  Later on a brother who had survived to adulthood passed away shortly after marrying.  Munch himself was a sickly child, often restricted to bed where he developed an interest in drawing; he believed that he was being pursued by death, that an inescapable fate awaited him.  To compound his jaundiced perception of the human condition, Munch believed his family to be inflicted with mental illness. His father, who Munch described as “temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious”, was a poor provider, unable to furnish a reliable income for his family.  His younger sister was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age and was later committed to an asylum.  Munch had a number of unsuccessful relationships with women but, being naturally wary of family life and fearful of his own mental condition (exacerbated by alcoholism), was unable to make a commitment to any of them.  Considering his personal history, it seems inevitable that Munch would address weighty matters within his art.

During his early studies, Munch was exposed to Naturalism and Impressionism and initially experimented with these styles.  But he recognized fairly quickly that the direct replication of outward semblances would not satisfy him.  Fortunately, in the late nineteenth century, a movement was evolving amongst a loosely connected, geographically diverse group of writers, artists and musicians who sought to expose absolute truths and explore personal perspectives in their work, often employing mythological references or dream imagery.  Members of this movement sought to address large themes, to examine the private motivations and drives that fueled human behavior and to develop a new language to describe the indescribable.  This movement was dubbed Symbolism.

Ferdinand Hodler - The Night - 1889/90

Arnold Bocklin - Island of the Dead - 1880

Gustave Moreau - Jupiter and Semele - 1895

Gustav Klimt - Death and Life - 1915

In many ways, Munch was the consummate Symbolist.  Paintings like Melancholy, Puberty, The Sick Child, Madonna, Jealousy, Death in the Sickroom, The Dance of Life and The Scream absolutely address essential themes central to universal experience.  In these works, Munch finds the quintessential vocabulary that permits the viewer to readily empathize with the monumental themes which he explores.  Somehow he finds a way to unite the universal and the personal in a single image.

But Munch is at times also categorized as an Expressionist.  More so than any of his contemporaries, Munch pushed the limits of what was acceptable technically in his art.  He used paint intuitively, often employing thin washes to rapidly cover large sections of canvas, streams of running color comingling as gravity drew them downward.  At other times, he applied paint in thick blobs, without seeking to achieve fine nuance or effect a satisfactory transition between individual strokes of color.  He employs long, sinuous strokes of paint that snake across his canvases, whether depicting water or hair or sky or jetty, creating a dizzying, unsettling effect. Often, in his haste, he left the bare canvas exposed.  He paints rapidly, presenting only those basic elements essential to the recognition of form and eschewing detail and nuance.  Munch has developed a method of painting that is deeply personal: intuitive as opposed to deliberate, emotional rather than intellectual.  He apparently works very quickly and energetically, giving immediate vent to the emotions which spark his efforts.  Immediacy and authenticity are critical to his process.  This approach conforms with many of the basic tenets of Expressionism.

Earlier this year, I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s examination of Munch’s oeuvre, So Much Longing in So Little Space, in which the author not only provides a personal evaluation of Munch’s art but engages in discussions with a number of contemporary artists about Munch’s place in history and his influence on their own work.  I found the book to be enlightening and informative, often indulging in the author’s very subjective reactions to lesser known works of the artist.  A very astute observation of Knausgaard, one I had never made myself, was:

“One might say that Symbolism consists of solemn or grandiose motifs painted in a careful or pusillanimous way.  That is true of Gustave Moreau and Böcklin, for example.  And one could say that Expressionism is trivial motifs painted in a wild way.  What is striking about Munch, and what makes him special, is that he paints solemn motifs, like The Scream and Despair and Melancholy, in a wild way.  He stands midway between the two schools.”

He’s right about the motifs addressed by the Expressionists.  Often they were prosaic, but it was how they were addressed that made them significant.

Maurice de Vlaminck - Sailing Boats at Chatou - 1906

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Street, Dresden - 1908

Henri Matisse - Open Window, Collioure - 1905

Chaim Soutine - Pastry Cook of Cagnes - 1922

Erich Heckel - Path between Bushes - 1907

I might go further than Knausgaard and suggest that Munch’s exposure to the work of contemporary Expressionist artists may very likely have been responsible for his eventual shift from grand themes to more everyday ones.  Maybe seeing Expressionist work much more firmly grounded in aesthetics made Munch recognize what, I believe, most modern viewers now feel about Symbolist art – that, in addressing grand, dramatic and aberrant themes, it often descended into sentimentality and awkwardness.

Knausgaard also recognizes something that I’ve thought about for years - that an interesting parallel exists between Munch’s late work and that of fellow Norwegian Knut Hamsun.  While Munch began depicting ordinary townspeople, farmers and laborers in his art, at about the same time Hamsun in his later novels stopped presenting odd outsiders, mysterious strangers and struggling intellectuals and chose to address lowborn and unsophisticated people in his writings.  In works like The Growth of the Soil, The Women at the Pump and Wayfarers, Hamsun apparently pays homage to the unworldly folk who scratch together a living from soil and sea, tirelessly labor while battling the unforgiving elements and have no time, patience for or interest in intellectual pursuits.  Something was definitely happening in Northern Europe at that time which made people suspicious of sophistication and engendered in the individual a desire to return to his or her roots.  The Nazis recognized this development and embraced “the Volk” in their propaganda, relating the soul to the soil and celebrating the simple peasant worker.  Sophistication became synonymous with degeneracy, education with indolence.  There are probably a million reasons for the evolution of this perspective.  I believe that primarily this kind of thinking came about as people became aware of the drawbacks of industrialism and rampant capitalism.  Also the pointless slaughter and destruction of World War I must have made ordinary people question the judgment and motives of their elite, ruling classes and promoted an allegiance to local, grassroots initiatives.  Later on, the financial collapse that came with the Depression must have made people question their reliance on big business and financial institutions and encouraged them to look back wistfully to a golden age when their wellbeing would have been linked inextricably with their own personal industry.  I think both Munch and Hamsun couldn’t help but be influenced by the development of this outlook.

I believe this blog entry to be even more meandering and unorganized than usual, so a brief summation might prove helpful.  It is my contention that the commonly held belief that Munch’s artistic production can be placed in either of two specific categories (pre or post psychiatric treatment) is erroneous and misleading.  I also assert that the premise that his technical skills diminished after treatment is inaccurate; there are certainly plenty of late Munchs that show the same technical brilliance and inventiveness as his earlier work (particularly the self portraits).  Munch’s personal history made him a natural participant in the Symbolist movement, providing him the opportunity to address epic themes that related directly to his own life experiences.  His work did change over the years, but the change was more of a slow evolution than an abrupt cataclysm.  And that change was more thematic than stylistic, most likely resulting from exposure to Expressionist art and the influence of an early twentieth century Northern European Weltanshauung that idealized the simple existence of honest, unrefined laborers.

(By the way, Oslo’s Munchmuseet invited Knausgaard, also Norwegian, to curate an exhibition that was held at the museum in the summer of 2017.  The exhibition, Towards the Forest, featured many paintings, prints and sculptures culled from the museum’s own collection that had never been shown before.)

As always, I encourage readers to comment here.  If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.