|
Contents:
| Edward Munch List of pictures |
The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is regarded as a pioneer in the Expressionist movement in modern painting. At an early stage Munch was recognised in Germany and central Europe as one of the creators of a new epoch. His star is still in the ascendant in the other European countries, and in the rest of the world. Munch's art from the 1890s is the most well-known, but his later work is steadily attracting greater attention, and it appears to inspire present-day artists in particular.
Edvard Munch grew up in Norway's capital, then called Kristiania. There were several prominent art and culture personalities in the Munch family, headed by the well-known historian P.A. Munch.
In his youth Edvard lived with his family on the east side of Kristiania, in more homely conditions than their social status would indicate. His father was a deeply religious military doctor earning a modest income. He lost his wife who was suffering from tuberculosis when Edvard was only five years old, and Edvard's one year older sister Sophie died of the same disease at the age of fifteen. Edvard himself was often ill. In his art Munch turned again and again to the memory of illness, death and grief.
After a year at Technical School Munch became dedicated to art. He studied the old masters, attended courses in the painting of nudes at the Royal School of Drawing and was corrected for a time by Norway's leading artist, Christian Krohg. For a couple of summers he left the city and painted at Frits Thaulow's improvised open-air academy;. He soon acquired a French-inspired Realism.
His brushwork quickly became bolder and less bound by the conventions of Realism. In 1885 Munch went on a short study tour to Paris. That year he started on the work that was to be his breakthrough, The Sick Child;. He struggled with the motif for a whole year in order to find a valid expression for a painful, personal experience. The result was radical and some of the criticism was crushing. He had renounced perspective and plastic form, and had attained a composition formula reminiscent of an icon. The coarse texture of the surface displayed all the signs of a laborious creative process.
Love and anxiety are like magnetic poles in Munch's art. In Evening; of 1888 he introduced for the first time the erotic triangle drama, though at that time discreet and in a realistic form. Inger on the Beach; painted in the following year shows Munch's ability to portray a lyrical atmosphere, in keeping with a new romantic trend in the Norwegian art of painting.
In the summer of 1889 Munch and his family rented a house in Åsgårdstrand, a little coastal town south-west of Kristiania. It is this region's characteristic coastline we find used as a meaningful leitmotive; in so many of Munch's compositions.
In 1889 he painted the portrait of the leader of the Kristiania bohemians, Hans Jæger. Munch's association with Jæger and his circle of radical anarchists became a crucial turning point in his life and a source of new inner unrest and conflict. At that time Munch commenced an extensive biographical literary production which he resumed at different periods in his life. These early writings serve as a reference for several of the central motifs of the 'nineties. In keeping with Jæger's ideas he wanted to present truthful close-ups of the modern individual's longings and agonies - he wanted to paint his own life.
In the autums of 1889 he held a large separate exhibition in Kristiania and applied for a government grant. His most recent major works had a less provocative form than The Sick Child;, and he was accorded a travel grant for three consecutive years. He went to Paris where for a short time he was a pupil of Leon Bonnat, but he became more inspired by acquainting himself with the city's art life. At that time a Post-Impressionist breakthrough was in progress along with different anti-naturalist experiments. This had a liberating effect on Munch, who found Realism unsatisfactory. During these years he spent some time in Nice; the summers he spent in Norway.
Shortly after Munch had arrived in France the first autumn, he was informed that his father had died. The loneliness and melancholy in the painting Night; (1890) are often seen with this in mind. The dark interior with the lonely figure at the window is completely dominated by tones of blue - painting of nuances which may be reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler's nocturnal colour harmonies.
At the autumn Exhibition in Kristiania in 1891 Munch showed among other things Melancholy;, in which he continued with the themes from Evening; and Inger on the Beach;. Great curved lines and more homogeneous colour surfaces dominate here; there is a simplifying and formalising of the motif similar to that found in French Synthetism. The very landscape first and foremost conveys an atmosphere. Christian Krohg was enthusiastic and pointed out the relationship to the new Symbolist movement. At this time Munch did the first sketches of the well-known The Scream;. He also painted several pictures in an Impressionist style verging on pointillisme, with motifs from the Seine and from Kristiania's promenade, Karl Johan.
In the autumn of 1892 Munch gave a broad presentation of his art, in which he included the fruits of his sojourn in France. This exhibition resulted in Munch being invited to show the same paintings to the Artists' Association of Berlin. It was a formidable succces de scandal;. The general public and the older painters interpreted Munch's art as anarchistic provocation, and the exhibition was closed in protest.
Because of that, Munch had made a name for himself in Berlin when he decided to stay there. He entered a circle of literati, artists and intellectuals, including a strong element of Scandinavians. The circle numbered among others the Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland, the Danish writer Holger Drachman, the Polish poet Stanislaw Przybyszewski and the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe. Of most importance to Munch was the meeting with the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. They discussed the philosophy of Nietzsche, Symbolism, psychology and occultism, and Munch lived a life that was an extension of his bohemian days in Kristiania. Basic aspects of his psyche were accentuated and released in this milieu. In 1894 Stanislaw Przybyszewski along with three art historians produced the first publication about Munch.
In December 1893 Munch had an exhibition on Unter den Linden where he showed a number of paintings which formed a part of a cycle that he later called the Frieze of Life;. It includes motifs that are steeped in atmosphere such as The Storm;, Moonlight; and Starry Night;, where one dimly perceives the influence of Arnold Bøcklin. Other motifs illuminate the nocturnal side of love, such as Rose and Amelie; and Vampire;. Several paintings have death as a theme; Death in the Sickroom; (1893) created quite a stir. In this composition Munch's debt to the French Synthetists and and Symbolists is obvious. Painted in garish and pallid colours the picture shows a scene frozen fast like the tragic final tableau in a drama. The motif is based on the memory of his sister Sophie's death, and the whole family is represented. The dramatic focus in the picture is on the figure who represents Munch himself. The following year the Frieze of Life; was enlarged by motifs such as Anxiety;, Ashes;, Madonna; and Woman in Three Stages.
In the spring of 1896 Munch left Berlin and settled down in Paris, where his associates again included Strindberg. He was now devoting greater attention top the graphic medium. In Berlin he had begun etching and lithography; he was now making exquisite colour lithographs and his first woodcuts in partnership with the famous printer Auguste Clot. Munch had also plans for publishing a portfolio titled The mirror;, a graphic version of the Frieze of Life;, Today Munch is regarded as one of the classics in graphic arts, owing to his unique command of the medium and his great artistic originality.
In 1896 and 1897 Munch made programme placards ofr Lugne-Poe's Theatre de L'Oeuvre for two performances of Ibsen. After the turn of the century he was engaged by Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater Kammerspiele to plan different stage settings for yet another two plays of Ibsen. In 1898 he was responsible for the illustrations in an edition of the German periodical Quickborn; in which Strindberg was responsible for the text.
Towards the end of the century Munch painted a number of new pictures, several of them in a larger format and to some extent featuring the art nouveau easthetics of the time. The psychological tension is strong in the motifs Red Virginia Creeper; and Melancholy Laura;. Metabolism; and Fertility; are of a more mythical and overindividual character. The Dance of Life; brings the love aspect to a close in the Frieze;. In this period he painted several monumental landscapes of Kristiania Fjord; decorative and sensitive studies of nature.
He then spent some time in a sanatorium because of trouble with his nerves. He also had a turbulent love affair with a well-to-do bohemian from Kristiania. The affair came to a dramatic end with a revolver scene in Åsgårdstrand in 1902, where Munch had one of the fingers of his left hand destroyed. Munch became obsessed by this incident and he span paranoid myths around it. In a series of burlesque caricatures he poured out his contempt for Tulla and his former friends from the Kristiania bohemian milieu. Tulla's features appear again in the motif Death of Marat; (1907).
Otherwise 1902 was a significant year for Munch's breakthrough on the Continent. He acquired his first patron of consequence, Dr. Max Linde of Lubeck. Linde had just brought out an enthusiastic publication Edvard Munch and die Kunst der Zukunft;. Productive years followed, full of hectic exhibitions and portrait orders from prominent people. As time went by Munch's portraits, usually full-length, constituted an important part of his work. After the turn of the century children and their world took up a central place in his art. The group portrait of Dr Linde's sons (1904) is reckoned to be one of the masterpieces of modern portraiture.
Nervousness and a disorderly way of life led to a steadily increasing alcohol problem. Self-portrait with Bottle of Wine; of 1906 shows a static and powerless figure. The glowing redd mass behind the man's head expresses the emotional high pressure in Munch's inner being. At this timehe did his monumental fantasy portraits of Friedrich Nietzche. Because of the work he did for max Reinhardt, Henrik Ibsen was accorded and increasingly more important place in his imagination.
Some works from this period made the critics associate him with the new French Fauves, because of a brutal style of painting with coarse and streamlined colour effects. The group die Brucke; were interested in Munch, but they did not succeed in getting him to show his paintings at their exhibitions.
The motifs from this period show clear signs of a more extrovert orientation. Bathing Men; (1907-08) is a vigorous tribute to vital manliness. However the combination of alcohol and his nerve trouble resulted in a breakdown, and Munch spent eight months in a clinic in Copenhagen.
From 1909 and for the rest of his life Munch resided in Norway. At first he settled down in Kragerø, a coastal town further south. Here he painted several classic winter landscapes among other things.
After prolonged controversy Munch's design for the decoration of the new auditorium in the University of Kristiania was accepted. By then Munch had been working onthe designs for several years, in large outdoor studios he had had built. The background motif is The Sun;; a sunrise over the fjord, between the crags in front of his house in Kragerø. The explosive composition may also be viewed as a symbol of a boundless and life-giving power in life. History; and Alma Mater; hang like pendants in the auditorium: an old man is sitting under a great oak tree relating the saga of mankind to a little boy; the woman is sitting on a seashore with a child at her breast, while bigger children are exploring the landscape. These motifs are archetypes;, with the grand monumentality of the early Renaissance and a cool fresco-like colouring. The surface has a decorative effect, painted in Munch's lyrical lines.
Munch showed an interest in the growing labour Movement in several motifs of this period, some of them monumental in character. However, Workers ontheir Way Home; of 1913-15 is just as much a study of movement and perspective: a picturesque treatment of optical phenomena.
In 1916 Munch bought the property Ekely outside Kristiania (renamed oslo in 1924). Here he lived to a steadily greater degree in self-chosen isolation, spartan, surrounded only by his pictures. He was constantly productive, but parted only reluctantly with his children;. Arrangements were made to lend the pictures to a number of international exhibitions.
The later Munch moved away from the Symbolism of his youth and soul painting;, and put more emphasis on the monumental and the picturesque. Landscapes, people in harmony with nature, horses ploughing - these were the motifs which were now portrayed in strong, clear colours. He paid a rough and sensuous tribute to sun, air and earth with fresh and spontaneous brushwork.
In the 1920s particularly, Munch painted a number of studies and compositions using a model. Many of these have a vigorous and life-embracing quality, while in others he continued to explore the conflict-filled themes of the 1890s. He still produced a considerable number of graphics, including a number of lithographic portraits.
In 1940 Munch decided that his huge collection of pictures and uncatalogued literary and biographical notes was to be left to the municipality of Oslo after his death. Consequently the Munch Museum in Oslo has a unique collection of Munch's art and other material which illuminates all the phases of the artistic process. At all times the Museum shows a representative collection of his works, while it makes extensive arrangements for international exhibitions. Because of the size of the collection, the general public is all the time able to see new works of this extremely productive artist who made his highly personal contribution to the world of art.