MUNCH, Edvard

This painting draws on two earlier departures: the anxious humanity moving forward as if driven by ominous elemental forces, as first conceived in Evening on Karl Johan Street; and a certain view of Oslo Fjord, already seen in The Scream. Both were destined to recur with considerable fidelity in Anxiety and in other works of the same period.

In Anxiety, Munch repeats closely many elements of The Scream. The same jetty that accommodated a single alienated personage appears again, as do the lake in the distance, the two boats, the church, and other structures that line the shore just a little less dimly than before. They are all quoted from the earlier work, as are the gloomy hues and the intense swirls of concentrically enlarging lines that define and ultimately embrace land, sea, and sky.

If, however, The Scream deals with the horror experienced in total isolation by a single being, Anxiety plays upon collective despair. the sentiment of angst in this work is even more sustained, if less piercing, than in The Scream, since its desperation is here borne by a group rather than by an isolated individual.

Against a dark background of slender tree trunks, a woman in pale clothing stands facing us. Her wide eyes, loose hair and open bodice tell us of what has happened. With her hands high on her head, her posture is expressive of despair, but also of power and victory. In the lower-left quarter of the picture sits a man with his back turned to the woman. He is withdrawn and holds his hands dejectedly to his head. The only contact between the two after what has just happened in the sombre woods is through her long, red hair.

“I felt our love lying on the earth like a heap of ash,” Munch wrote on a lithographic version of the motif. This explains both the picture’s title and the stylised tree trunk in front of the man. Also in its use of colour and form, this picture is full of contrasts and tension: open and closed shapes, straight and curved lines, dark and light colours.

This painting is possibly one of Munch’s most pessimistic on the subject of male-female relationships. It depicts the man as weak and the loser, while the woman is strong and victorious. In this work Munch expresses both personal experience and typical aspects of the complex contemporary view of woman: “The woman who is at one and the same time a saint - a whore - and unhappily devoted.”

The picture shows what we can assume to be the artist’s family grouped around his sister Sophie, who died in 1877. She is sitting in a chair with her back to us. To the right stands an aunt, Karen Bjølstad, who moved in with the family to take care of the children and the household after the mother died of tuberculosis in 1868. In the background stands the father, the doctor Christian Munch, with his hands clasped as if in prayer. Near the centre of the picture is a male figure, probably Edvard, in quarter-face. Sister Laura is sitting in the foreground with her hands in her lap, while the third sister, Inger, stands staring straight at us. The male figure to the left is generally identified as Edvard’s younger brother Andreas. In Death in the Sickroom, there is no physical contact between the people, except for the hand that aunt Karen has laid on the back of the chair in which the invalid sits.

The subject of sickness was so widespread in the late 1800s that those years have been called the “pillow period” in Scandinavian painting. “Sickness, madness and death were the black angels who watched over my cradle,” Munch wrote.

“I paint not what I see, but what I saw,” Munch once said about his works. This is a situation recalled from several years earlier, to which he returned in the 1890s. The scene is strictly composed and excludes anything irrelevant to the theme. The dark clothes and the noxious green of the bedroom walls intensify the mood of discomfort.

Munch had learnt to make drypoints in 1894 for financial reasons (prints were easier to sell and cheaper than paintings while also having potentially a larger audience and clientele), and he printed his first colour lithographs and woodcuts in 1896. As an artist he had a rare ability to master various printmaking techniques at the same time.

Munch’s use of woodcut was innovative, in that he began to exploit the structure of the wood itself, thus emphasizing the inherent expressiveness of the material. His woodcuts had a marked influence on later artists, especially the German Expressionists, and they did much to foster a revival of the technique. From the time he made his first prints, the prints and the paintings largely fed off one another.

Munch often grouped his images into picture series. “The Green Room” (1907) is a cycle on love relationships consisting of seven paintings. The pictures engage the spectator, but the images do not create one story, but several stories. Manifesting a now characteristic multiplicity of stylistic approaches, Munch’s painting cycles continued to explore the motifs of The Frieze of Life, but with shifting emphases that began to accentuate group dynamics rather than individual relationships.

In his initial painting of a Kiss, Munch outlined a range of emotional subject-matter that he was to work on again and again and that here formed the foundation of a series of paintings he grouped together under the title Love.

Madonna is the usual title given to several versions of a composition showing a bare-breasted half-length female figure created between 1892 and 1895. Munch produced at least five versions of the composition using oil on canvas and print form. Although it is a highly unusual representation, the composition might be of the Virgin Mary. Whether it is specifically intended as a representation of Mary is disputed.

Munch’s Madonna, a femme fatale par excellence, visually hints at the imagery of victimization. The familiar gestures of surrender (the arm behind the head) and captivity (the arm behind the back, as if bound) are clearly if softly stated. These gestures have a long history in Western art. Munch used it in his Madonna to mitigate his assertion of female power; the gesture of defeat subtly checks the dark, overpowering force of Woman. Some critics suggested that Munch intended to represent the woman in the life-making act of intercourse, depicted as though recumbent beneath her lover. The sanctity and sensuality of the union are captured by Munch.

Madonna is the usual title given to several versions of a composition showing a bare-breasted half-length female figure created between 1892 and 1895 using oil on canvas. He also produced versions in print form.

The lithographic print of the composition is distinguished by a decorative border depicting wriggling sperm, with a fetus-like figure in its bottom left corner.

In the 1880s Edvard Munch often found human subjects among his close family and friends. One eloquent portrait is that of the writer, anarchist and social critic Hans Jæger (1854-1910). The subject sits leaning back in a sofa, weighing us up through his spectacles with a direct gaze. His hat and tight-fitting overcoat emphasise his aloof and impassive aspect. The cool light streaming in through the curtains to the left casts deep shadows creating shimmers of red-violet, brown and bluegreen hues. The pastose, emphatic brushstrokes seem tossed onto the canvas with the same casual attitude as the character on the sofa.

Hans Jæger was a central figure in the group known as the Christiania Bohemians - a small but conspicuous group of young students, artists and writers living in the capital who shared radical and incisively critical views on bourgeois society. Munch belonged to this circle in the 1880s. Their “credo” was partly summed up in the commandment: “Thou shalt write thy life.” Jæger’s book From Christiania’s Bohemia (1885) was banned due to what were regarded at the time as pornographic scenes, for which in 1886 he was fined and sent to prison.

Although Munch gradually distanced himself from the Bohemian circle, he retained his respect for Jæger - almost ten years his senior - as both an individual and an idealist. For many years the painting remained in Munch’s possession, and was shown in most of his exhibitions in the 1890s. In 1897 he offered it to the National Gallery, which duly purchased it, whereupon the Bohemian found his place on the wall alongside national literary heroes such as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Disappointed by the reception and rejection of The Sick Child, Munch reverted to a more common Naturalist style after 1886 in renditions of subjectively evocative landscapes and in portraits that more readily found a market than did his experimental bohemian works. In a daringly provocative, speculative gesture he collected his works into a large one-man exhibition at the Studentersamfund, Kristiania, in April and May 1889, an event unprecedented in Norway except in the contemporary celebration of the renowned, elderly academic landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude.

The works Munch exhibited demonstrated his move from Impressionist experiment with form dissolved in the summer sun towards a more firmly modelled Naturalism in which effects of light were manipulated for emotive value. In place of the failed Sick Child he substituted a massive new painting on the same theme, Spring in which Munch concentrated on effects of sunlight pouring in through a brightly illuminated window, an emblem of hope set in contrast to the desperation of the convalescent girl and her concerned companion. With this remarkable demonstration of painterly bravura and a monumental portrait of Hans Jaeger after his release from prison as its centrepieces, the exhibition succeeded in obtaining for Munch a state grant to study drawing with L�on Bonnat in Paris.

This night landscape represents the coastline at Åsgårdstrand, a small beach resort south of Oslo in Norway, where Edvard Munch spent his summers from the 1880s onward. Here Munch tried to capture the emotions called forth by the night rather than to record its picturesque qualities. The colour blue conveys the mysticism and melancholy of the landscape, which seems full of premonitions. An abstract mound at the right represents a clump of trees; a white fence runs diagonally in front. The vaguely defined shape on the fence may be a shadow of two lovers, a recurring theme in Munch’s work. He used an undulating line to depict the shoreline that continues into the trees at the right. Stars reflect in the water, and a flash of light in the trees shines brightly.

Varying thicknesses of blue and green paint are blended to form the impression of a night sky. Some areas are thickly painted, while others are left bare to convey the lighter segments of the sky or a celestial phenomenon.

The present painting dates to summer 1891, which Munch spent at the seaside resort of Åsgårdstrand. The artist’s closest companions there were his first teacher Christian Krohg, a realist painter and a fixture of the Kristiania-Boh�me, along with Krohg’s wife Oda; the youngsters in the present scene, shown picking berries, are the Krohgs’ two-year-old son Per and a friend.

Around 1890 Munch absorbed the plein air ethos of Impressionism in Paris where he encountered the latest work of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. The theme of children in a garden was popular among the French Impressionists; Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot had all painted their own offspring in this way.

Munch demonstrated an Impressionist’s sensitivity to light as well in this early-evening vignette, capturing the last rays of the sun as they illuminate the bend in the path. The impact of Divisionism is felt principally in the heightened colour contrasts, particularly the pairing of complementary hues - red against green, blue against orange - on the right side of the canvas.

The quiet charm of this plein air scene stands in marked opposition to the artist’s own psychic distress during the summer of 1891. Oda Krohg’s ongoing affair at Åsgårdstrand with the writer Jappe Nilssen brought back for Munch excruciatingly painful memories of his own earlier liaison with a married woman, Millie Thaulow, which had left him jealous and humiliated. In the present canvas, only the deepening violet shadows hint at Munch’s profound melancholia, which he assuaged throughout the summer with copious doses of absinthe, brandy, and champagne.

It was in 1889 that Edvard Munch spent the first of many summers in Åsgårdstrand. In 1898 he bought a house built at the end of the 18th century. The house is now a small museum, open to the public where everything has been retained as it was when the artist lived there.

Munch was strongly influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, in particular their use of colour and form to evocative, expressive ends. In the late 1880s, Munch conceived an epic series of paintings entitled “The Frieze of Life,” which dealt poetically and symbolically with life, love, and death. Many of his most memorable images were part of this ultimately unfinished project.

“Summer Night’s Dream,” the first work in the cycle of Love, portrays the initial glimmer of adolescent sexual awakening. Bathed in an eerie light, the painting is probably set in the Borre Forest, a traditional place of courtship during Norway’s long midsummer nights.

This picture appears to be a more complex and personalized version of Woman in Three Stages (1895), with an innocent woman in white on the left, a sensual woman dancing with the man, and an anguished woman in black on the right. All three resemble Tulla Larsen; the girls dancing in the background may also represent her. The man in the foreground appears to be Munch. The dramatic romantic involvement with the Norwegian woman, Tulla Larsen, caused Munch to seek to restore his nervous and physical strength in the sanatorium of Kornhaug in Gudbrandsdalen in 1899-1900.

Edvard Munch’s life and art - particularly his iconic work The Scream - have come to epitomize modern notions of anxiety. Yet the same year he painted his radical image, Munch was experimenting with other styles and themes. Frequent visits to Paris and Berlin between 1889 and 1893 brought the Norwegian artist into direct contact with the Impressionists and Symbolists. These travels encouraged him to adopt their bold brushwork, daring compositions, and imagery. But he nonetheless continued to incorporate the Romantic subjects of the northern European artists long familiar to him, such as a lone figure at an open window. This combination is powerfully manifested in The Girl by the Window, made soon after his return home to Norway.

In the dead of night, a young girl in her nightgown stands in a darkened room gazing out at the city. The steep angle of the floor and the deep shadows that obliterate everything in the room, save a suggestion of a piece of furniture at the lower right, create an unsettling and enigmatic scene. Loosely applied, sombre brown tones mingle with violets and blues, evoking a feeling of melancholy and anticipation. The window functions as a symbolic barrier, separating the interior from the outside world. The sense of mystery is deepened and complicated by the fact that we cannot see the expression on the girl’s face, nor do we know what she covertly observes.

The Scream is one of the most well-known pictures in the history of art and has become a popular icon of our time. The figure in the picture has been used in many different contexts and appears in everything from political posters to horror films. It even has its own emoji. The motif Edvard Munch created 130 years ago has now become a symbol we use to convey emotions. The Scream is often interpreted as a universal expression of anxiety and alienation.

The figure in The Scream has become a mysterious presence that is difficult to define. Is the figure we see a woman or a man? Is it wearing a black coat or a dress? Is it a skull or a face we are looking at? Why doesn’t the figure have hair? These difficult and indistinct features of the figure make The Scream into a visual enigma.

The Scream is both simple and complex. It is complex because it lends itself to so many different interpretations. Its simplicity has to do with the actual execution of the picture. We know that Munch drew sketches and worked with the motif over a long period of time, but the painting technique and lack of detail give the impression that it was painted quickly and spontaneously. This approach, along with the vibrant, non-realistic colours, signified a new way of creating art. The Scream marks a decisive point in art history where form and content are closely interrelated and are meant to express the same subject matter. The work is a key turning point from the symbolism movement in art to the expressionism of the 1900s.

The landscape we see in the picture is recognisable and shows the Kristiania fjord (Oslo fjord) seen from Ekeberg hill. Two men are walking in the background on the left.

Conceived as part of Munch’s semi-autobiographical cycle “The Frieze of Life,” The Scream’s composition exists in four forms: the first painting, done in oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (1893, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo), two pastel examples (1893, Munch Museum, Oslo and 1895, private collection), and a final tempera painting (1910, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo). Munch also created a lithographic version. The various renditions show the artist’s creativity and his interest in experimenting with the possibilities to be obtained across an array of media, while the work’s subject matter fits with Munch’s interest at the time in themes of relationships, life, death, and dread.

Conceived as part of Munch’s semi-autobiographical cycle “The Frieze of Life,” The Scream’s composition exists in four forms: the first painting, done in oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (1893, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo), two pastel examples (1893, Munch Museum, Oslo and 1895, private collection), and a final tempera painting (1910, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo). Munch also created a lithographic version. The various renditions show the artist’s creativity and his interest in experimenting with the possibilities to be obtained across an array of media, while the work’s subject matter fits with Munch’s interest at the time in themes of relationships, life, death, and dread.

Munch’s most famous motif apparently started with a walk he took with two friends around sunset. The colourful spectacle provoked a strong reaction in Munch, while his friends remained indifferent. He tried to come to terms with this happening by putting it down on paper both in words and images, resulting in several versions of The Scream.

As was the case for other artworks, Edvard Munch produced various versions in order to satisfy the demands of his clients, or to keep one for himself.

Conceived as part of Munch’s semi-autobiographical cycle “The Frieze of Life,” The Scream’s composition exists in four forms: the first painting, done in oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (1893, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo), two pastel examples (1893, Munch Museum, Oslo and 1895, private collection), and a final tempera painting (1910, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo). Munch also created a lithographic version. The various renditions show the artist’s creativity and his interest in experimenting with the possibilities to be obtained across an array of media, while the work’s subject matter fits with Munch’s interest at the time in themes of relationships, life, death, and dread.

Munch spent much of 1885-86 working on a single painting, The Sick Child. It depicts a teenaged girl propped up against a pillow in a large armchair, next to an older woman who bows her head in despair and grief. Grounded in Munch’s recollections of his sister’s death ten years earlier, in accordance with Jaeger’s dictum of the primacy of personal experience, and possibly influenced by the contemporary success of thematically similar paintings in Scandinavia and Central Europe, The Sick Child was conceived in a variation of Impressionist technique. In the course of a year-long alteration, Munch built up thick coagulations of paint into which the final remaining image was more scratched than painted, and over which a veil of thin rivulets of paint was placed (to be removed during a partial repainting c. 1893).

In his experimentation, Munch created effects similar to those achieved in the late 1880s by James Ensor and Vincent van Gogh in works today recognized as precursors of 20th-century Expressionism. In Norway in 1886, however, there was no measure by which The Sick Child could be judged. Exhibited at the 1886 Høstutstilling in Kristiania as A Study, the painting was vehemently attacked by critics and fellow artists alike, so that only Hans Jaeger in the newspaper Dagen dared to defend it, describing it as an intuitive work of genius. Today the work is considered to mark Munch’s breakthrough, it was here that he demonstrated the independence and willingness to break fresh ground.

The chronology of womanhood becomes the main symbolic content in Woman in Three Stages. It is characteristic for Munch to seek plausibility even in his most fanciful themes, but such insistence upon credibility does not reduce the power of Munch’s symbols. The virgin is white, in a billowing dress with flowing hair, standing on the sand strip between water and forest and straining toward a distant horizon. The central position is occupied by Woman in full and sensuous maturity. Here she is rendered naked, provocatively frontal, red-haired and red-lipped, with her arms raised and her head tilted in brazen coquetry and whorish contrast with her other-selves. Close to her, like a shadow, is a dark image of spent womanhood whose embodiment stands with raised shoulders, slim waist, and pointed mouth. This last of the three women is nearest to Man, both in position and in the sombre black clothing.

The motif Woman, or Sphinx, can be found in several versions, as a painting, etching, and lithograph. Another title used for the motif is Woman in Three Stages.

Munch and several of his contemporary artist colleagues had a difficult relationship with women. They could see women as complicated and mystical, and full of contradictions.