Chance Encounters, Edition 28
Edvard Munch: Beyond "The Scream"
In 1893, a 30-year-old artist created an image that has echoed through the decades since, becoming an iconic symbol of anxiety and alienation, and obscuring the rest of the artist’s career. In this edition of Chance Encounters, I’m going to explore Edvard Munch’s art, starting with The Scream, and then looking at Munch’s achievements beyond that memorable painting.
The painting reproduced above is one of 5 versions that Munch (Norwegian, 1863 – 1944) created between 1893 and 1902; it is the earliest painted version, in tempera and crayon on cardboard, and is today in the collection of the National Museum of Norway. The Scream has inspired so many imitations and derivations that most of us barely see the details of the work anymore. In spite of this familiarity, let’s look a little more closely, first at the figure. I don’t say him or her because the artist has simplified the figure so it exists beyond any kind of gender or personality. The body is a wavering column topped by a skull-like head with only rudimentary features. This simplification allows any viewer to identify with this distraught character. The face, framed by the hands raised to cover the ears, was likely influenced by Munch’s seeing one of the Peruvian Inca mummies displayed at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Inca mummies were bodies naturally preserved by the dry cold air in Andean caves. The process stretched the faces into the semblance of screaming which symbolized fear of death for many late 19th and early 20th century Europeans.
The landscape setting of The Scream has been identified as a view of a fjord from a road in Oslo. On several occasions, the artist recalled the circumstances that inspired this subject:
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
The whole landscape is made up of swirling, trembling lines and everything beyond the person and the landscape, such as boats on the fjord and two figures at the right edge, seems to be disappearing. Munch intensifies the disorienting effect by exaggerating the linear perspective of the bridge, so it appears that the figure is sliding toward us. Munch was well trained in perspective drawing, so we know this was a deliberate effect, one that modern horror filmmakers utilize as well. In spite of the basis of this painting in an episode from the artist’s life, it isn’t meant to be a record of the specific event but a symbolic rendering of the emotional reality.
The Scream was one of a series of works that Munch titled The Frieze of Life, intended to convey the spectrum of emotions and life experiences which the artist saw as universal: love, longing, anxiety, melancholy, despair, and grief. In 1902, at the Berlin Secession exhibition, Munch exhibited the whole series together. Several of the paintings are linked to The Scream by the sloping bridge and red sky. This context demonstrates what Munch perceived as his goal in art – the expression of humanity’s psychological reality.
Munch’s mother died of tuberculosis when the boy was just 5 and his older sister succumbed to the same disease when he was 14. These early experiences of illness and death influenced the artist’s personality and work. Throughout his life, Munch feared his own tendency to illness and the artist created works which explored sickness and death throughout his career, including Death in The Sickroom in 1863. Once again, although the painting is based on the artist’s experience with family deaths, the painting isn’t intended to document a specific sickroom or a particular death; it depicts the emotional truth of the subject. The dark figures are almost silhouettes against the dense green wall and orange floor. They are isolated from one another and absorbed in their individual responses to their grief. This sense of isolation, of separation from the world of ordinary life, is similar to what Munch depicted in The Scream, though nearly everything else about the subject, setting, and composition differs in the two paintings.
Though many of his works are dominated by dark events and feelings, Munch also found joy in nature. He spent many of his summers in Norwegian coastal towns, drawing from nature and developing a series of works depicting summer nights. Drawn to the tranquility of the water during the extended evenings of Norwegian summer, the artist also saw an underlying anxiety. Many in the series are pure landscapes but in Summer Night. The Voice, Munch introduces a mysterious female figure. The woman is in shadow while the bright blue water and the beach seen are seen through the trees reflecting the sun. Some writers have suggested that the woman is based on Munch’s married lover, but the motif of the woman among trees predates their relationship. Once again we need to remember the artist’s strongly symbolic tendency; the woman is a personification of “the voice” of the title, perhaps the voice of Nature or of the Sea.
Munch was never a member of a specific artistic movement. Entering the Royal School of Art and Design at age 18, the artist was first influenced by Impressionism, the French movement which stressed close observation of the interaction of light and color on the subject. Quite a few of Munch’s early works show the painterly, light-filled qualities of that style, but like many young artists of his generation, he found Impressionism too focused on surfaces and not sufficiently interested in the emotional meaning of his subjects. Post-Impressionist artists like Vincent van Gogh and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec were powerful inspirations for Munch, but he found Paul Gauguin’s style and approach to subject matter most similar to his own. Like these three independent masters, Munch was deeply influential for other artists. His ideas about depicting the full range of human emotions and his techniques of simplification combined with intense color were hugely important to the development of the Expressionism movement, first in Germany and then worldwide. Critics and historians have also tried to connect the artist to the Symbolism movement. His focus on the universality of the themes he depicts connects to that late 19th – early 20th century French literary, music, and artistic movement, but Munch never associated closely with members of this group. In the end, Munch’s style is his own unique blending of ideas swirling through European art at the turn of the 20th century.
Indeed, the turn of the 20th century was of monumental importance in Munch’s art and thinking. The last decades of the 19th century, sometimes referred to as the fin de siècle (literally, end of century), saw rapid social and cultural change and many viewed the onset of the 20th century as ominous. (Those who remember the Y2K scares will understand something of the atmosphere.) Associated with anxieties about the new century was a melancholy emotional state known as mal de siècle or “century sickness.” This depressive state was thought to be caused by the evils of modern civilization. Artists and writers of the time responded to this emotion in different ways. Paul Gauguin fled to Tahiti to escape “civilization” and Munch used his art to bring emotion into public view.
My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life—it is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity.
A key theme of fin de siècle art was the femme fatale, the dangerous or deadly woman who appears in Symbolist art and literature as well as other art of the period. In Munch’s art, women were often either threatened innocents or dangerous temptresses. This eerie print from 1902, The Sin, gets most of its impact from the absence of the black ink that is typical of prints. Printed instead in red, yellow, and green, the figure’s nudity, staring green eyes, and long hair ending in finger-like curls, combine with the colors and the title to suggest a typical femme fatale. At the same time, the facial expression suggests someone uncertain or vulnerable, almost as if one of Munch’s threatened innocents has been masquerading as a temptress, and now faces an unexpected and undesirable result.
Munch loved printmaking. The Munch Museum in Oslo, repository of Munch’s estate, owns approximately 18,000 prints. He used the lithograph or woodcut techniques to explore his themes and compositions, creating multiple versions as well as multiple impressions of each one. He experimented with color, as we see in The Sin, and with varied tonal effects in black and white. In addition, the ease of creating multiple copies of his images provided a steady income at times when his works were not selling and kept his ideas and images circulating and spreading his influence throughout his career.
In 1908, Munch suffered a mental breakdown after the end of a romantic relationship. He spent eight months at a clinic in Denmark receiving treatment for alcoholism and nervous breakdowns. At the end of his treatment, he was advised to give up the heavy drinking in which he had engaged since his bohemian student days in the 1880s; he did and resumed his artistic endeavors with great enthusiasm. In this period he returned to landscape subjects and scenes of people working and playing in nature, painting in a much brighter and lighter style. The Yellow Log, painted in 1912, uses a complementary color scheme, based on yellow and violet, colors which appear even brighter when seen in combination. The colors and mostly white background create a happier and more positive mood than Munch’s earlier works. The lack of black in the palette contributes to the mood and also looks back to the early influence of Impressionism on the artist because the Impressionists essentially banned black from their canvases beginning in the 1870s. Demonstrating Munch’s comfort with linear perspective, the yellow logs recede from the picture plane creating an illusion of great depth between the upright violet trees. The decorative patterning of the foreground trees enlivens the surface of the painting and their curvilinear forms contrast with the straight lines of the trees. The overall effect suggests the painting is meant as a celebration of Norway’s wealth of natural resources.
Around this same time, Munch was invited to submit a plan for the decoration of the new Aula (auditorium) of the University of Oslo. Constructed in a Neoclassical style, the new building was planned with spaces for large murals covering the walls. The University established a committee which solicited submissions from prominent artists, but the contemporary artists didn’t provide the kind of traditionalist, classical forms the committee had hoped for. Determined to try again, the University invited submissions from just two artists, Munch and Emanuel Vigeland (Norwegian, 1875 – 1948), an artist recently returned from studying fresco technique in Italy and Egypt, who would become known for his decoration of Christian churches. Vigeland’s plan incorporated the Classical elements and themes that the University had asked for but Munch’s plan was completely modernist in its form and ideas. The jury couldn’t decide between them once again and the building was dedicated with blank walls.
Munch however, was determined to gain this important commission, an opportunity to establish his importance among his own countrymen. He created sketches for his planned paintings and with the help of friends had them publicly displayed. Their efforts paid off; the public response was positive and Munch received the commission. In order to create the paintings, the artist constructed an outdoor studio where he could work on them. Each painting is almost 15 feet tall (4.6 m) with widths ranging from over 7 feet (2.3 m) to over 38 feet (11.6 m). The themes represented in the paintings emphasize the natural sciences and history, and the value of education. (For more on Munch’s works at the Aula, see this page on the University of Oslo website.)
The Sun is the center point of the suite of eleven paintings; symbolizing the enlightenment brought by education, the painting occupies the wall behind the stage at the front of the auditorium. Painted in Munch’s new black-free style of saturated colors, the sun rises above a group of islands brightening foreground grass and rocks. Rays of light reappear in the four panels flanking The Sun, reinforcing the theme of spreading enlightenment.
I wanted the decorations to form a complete and independent world of ideas, and I wanted their visual expression to be both distinctively Norwegian and universally human.
By the time that Munch was working on the University commission in the mid-1910s, he had achieved sufficient financial success to work when and as he wished. He created a large self-supporting estate where he lived with his large collection of his own paintings. The artist always found it difficult to part with his paintings, viewing them as a coherent single work of many parts. When he died, Munch bequeathed his estate to the city of Oslo, which created the Munch Museum to house the prints mentioned above as well as approximately 1100 paintings and 4500 drawings. Among that collection was a series of studies in drawing and painting, Model by the Wicker Chair, created between 1919 and 1921. Many of the characteristics of this example are seen in the preceding landscape paintings, here applied to an interior with a nude female figure. Munch created images of nudes throughout his career; figure drawing and painting was a basic skill taught in all art schools in the 19th century. This work lacks the stylization and emotional intensity of most of the artist’s earlier works, perhaps because he had not yet associated the scene with the spectrum of human emotion that was his overarching theme. The patchy, bright, and somewhat non-naturalistic use of purple and greens on the nude woman remind us that Munch’s earlier works were admired by and exhibited with the Fauve artists. (See Chance Encounters 22 The Fauves)
Edvard Munch had created drawn, painted, and printed self-portraits throughout his life. They were often intense explorations of his strong emotions and changing circumstances. Among the artist’s last works was this one, Self-portrait. Between the Clock and Bed, created between 1940 and 1943, and painted while Norway was suffering under occupation by Nazi Germany. Munch was one of the Modern artists declared “degenerate” by the Nazi regime; 82 of his paintings were confiscated from German museums and collections. Of those, 71 works were purchased by the artist’s friends and collectors. Only 11 disappeared completely. In this self-portrait, a frail-looking Munch stands next to a grandfather clock with a blank face, his dark figure silhouetted against a bright wall displaying his art. The bed draws the eye with its complex red and black patterned cover and because it shares no formal characteristic with the rest of the painting. The artist stands suspended in a timeless moment between his bright artistic past and a future neither he nor we can know.
This has been a brief (believe it or not) survey of Munch’s career beyond the iconic Scream. That important painting was created in the artist’s most productive period, the last decade of the 19th century, by an artist who had just discovered his artistic identity and goals. Munch has a reputation as a person mired in dark moods and mental distress, but as I have tried to show, he created works that express powerful positive sensations too.
This 2012 video from the Tate Modern introduces a few more of the artist’s works.
I hope you’ll be inspired by this week’s post to explore more of this important artist’s sixty year career. Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll be back next week with a new post.
My favorite is the Yellow Log, which he made to look like a VERY long log.
Wonderful post, full of interesting information. I remember how amazed I was on seeing The Sun when it came to New York. A gorgeous painting that I thought at the time quite out of character for what little I knew of Munch’s work. I didn’t know there was a whole suite of paintings, of which that was a part. How magnificent it would be to see them all!