Edvard Munch: Images from the depths of the soul
A month after Edvard Munch’s The Scream broke all records at auction, the Tate will open Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, a ground-breaking show of his work. Mark Hudson explores the life of ‘illness, madness and death’ that spawned the artist’s uniquely dark visions.
After Edvard Munch’s mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, his father, a priest, prayed for days on end, continuing often late into the night. The young Munch, then only five years old, was terrified by the sight of his father’s kneeling form. And it’s worth reflecting that for much of the time he would have perceived it not in darkness or by candlelight, but in the eerie glow of the midnight sun.
Has any other artist created a more powerful sense of objects and human forms imbued with ominous force, of the individual hemmed in not by darkness, but by a light in which the terrors of day and night become fused?
Munch wasn’t an artist of horror. He intended to paint simply what he “had seen”. But as one of the most autobiographical of artists, the character of his life, and particularly his childhood, inevitably permeated everything he did. His father, he wrote, was “obsessively religious to the point of neuropsychosis”. His elder sister Sophie died, also of tuberculosis, when he was 13, while a younger sister, Laura, was diagnosed with mental illness at the age of five. “Illness, madness and death,” he wrote, “were the dark angels who watched over my cradle, and have accompanied me throughout my life.”
Yet if Munch is in many ways art’s ultimate outsider, this isn’t just because of his troubled life story, his preference for solitude and his challenging of mainstream values, but because of the simple fact of where he came from: Norway in particular, and Scandinavia in general.
Munch is unarguably a huge figure, creator of some of the world’s most famous and instantly recognisable images – not least The Scream, which recently became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. Yet he still feels oddly marginal. His work intersects with some of the critical movements of the last century and a half – Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism – yet he all too easily gets left out of our sense of the sweep of art history, strung out up there on Europe’s cold northern edge. It’s all part of a pattern whereby we simultaneously admire and patronise the region that gave us Ingmar Bergman, Abba and all that immaculately stylish postwar design.
Yet it’s possible that the popular image of Munch as an angst-ridden fin-de-siècle romantic has obscured his work’s richness and complexity. An ambitious new exhibition at Tate Modern proposes a more modern Munch: an artist who was born in the 19th century, but created the bulk of his work in the 20th century. Rather than tell Munch’s life story, the exhibition breaks his work down into themes that show how he responded to photography, film, popular culture and problems with his own vision. Yet all the time it concedes the impact of “illness, repeated bereavements, emotional dramas and problems with alcohol and depression”.
The photographic self-portraits assembled in Tate’s exhibition show Munch’s craggy features and pale eyes set always in the same expression of lugubrious remoteness. Yet if the bold nose and formidable jawline give an impression of physical vigour, Munch was prey to ill health throughout his life, and grew up in an atmosphere of dread. His family’s respectability was undermined by continual money problems, while his father, essentially a kindly man, would read his children ghost stories, the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Norse myths – hardly the most settling bedtime fare. All his life Munch was burdened by a sense of personal cursedness. “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies,” he later wrote, “the heritage of consumption and insanity.”
As an artist, his early style veered towards stolid Scandinavian realism, dour landscapes and views of churches under snow. Though even at this stage his work was dogged by controversy; an apparently innocuous image of a girl sitting on her bed was lambasted as immoral. From the mid-1880s, the influence of Impressionism became apparent – The Ball (1885) was considered the first Norwegian Impressionist painting. Yet all the time you feel he’s trying to paint someone else’s idea of what the world looks like. Then, gradually, another sensibility begins to seep into the work: lines become more free-flowing as though they can’t be contained by the objects they describe, heightened colour bleeds out of objects into the mind and vision of the viewer.
It’s difficult to tell whether this shift, with its increasing preoccupation with anguish and death, is a reflection of Munch’s growing inner turmoil or simply of the fashionable influences of Symbolism and Art Nouveau and the morbid, decadent mood of the fin de siècle. While Munch spent time in Paris, where he absorbed the influence of Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, and lived for long periods in Germany, where he came into contact with the Swedish playwright Strindberg and other notable avant gardists, he claimed that his vision was formed in the Oslo bohemian circles dominated by the nihilist writer Hans Jaeger.
A patently sinister figure, Jaeger advocated suicide as a means to freedom, and drove at least one of his disciples along that path. The young Munch might have appeared a vulnerable figure, moving in his wake, but even in this society of ostentatious individualists he stood out. This “fair Nordic Viking”, as his cousin Lodvig Ravensberg described him, “a lonely man who remained very much a mystery. There was something about him of the child… and then again this incredible complexity, this knowledge of deep secrets.” While Jaeger’s injunction that Munch should “write his life” – draw directly on his own experience – had a liberating effect on his art, the self-destructive behaviour of Jaeger’s circle, with its heavy drinking, brawling and playing with knives and guns, were a key factor in pushing Munch into outright psychosis.
While Munch “wrote his life” in paint, exploring the themes of love, angst and death in images that he revisited and reworked throughout his life, he also wrote it in words, in journals, notebooks and quasi-fictional texts in which he endlessly re-explored incidents from different periods of his life.
Munch’s sense of his tainted inheritance, that he “lived among the dead” – his deceased family members – poisoned his relations with women, who appear in his paintings in many guises: as embodiments of serenity and strength (as in the many paintings of his sister Inger); or as femmes fatales and harbingers of death (this was a time when every man lived in terror of syphilis). When Munch was offered happiness at the age of 34 by a beautiful woman of independent means named Tulla Larsen, he ran.
Believing himself unfit to father children, and wanting to preserve the solitude that he thought fuelled his art, he fled to Berlin. After a four-year on-off relationship, culminating in a shooting incident in which he lost one of his fingers, Tulla lost patience with Munch and married one of his younger colleagues; a “betrayal” on which he brooded for years.
Munch’s paranoia is palpable in his written accounts of these events – which recall his dream the night after his first meeting with Tulla that he was sleeping with a corpse. But if he was paranoid, that didn’t mean she wasn’t out to get him. Obsessed with Munch, Tulla sued the artist for breach-of-promise following a tentative proposal that had clearly been manipulated out of him.
“She was a powerful and controlling woman who wanted her own way,” says Sue Prideaux, author of Edvard Munch, Behind the Scream, the first biography of the artist in English. “She was prepared to use her wealth, at a time when he was very poor, to get what she wanted.”
After a major breakdown in 1909, Munch sought treatment, and thereafter led a more measured existence. Public acceptance of his work increased, and honours and major public commissions followed. There is a widely held, romantic view that genius was cured out of Munch along with insanity. Certainly the majority of his best-known works were created in the troubled first third of his career.
Yet Sue Prideaux sees his post-breakdown rehabilitation as not so much a cure, more a coming to terms with the quirks of his personality. As he said himself, “I would not cast off my illness, because there’s much in my art that I owe to it.” But Prideaux doubts, contrary to Munch’s own beliefs, that he was ever congenitally insane. “There are lots of aspects to his condition, which makes it difficult to sum up,” she says. “He certainly wasn’t bipolar, which has often been claimed. When you examine the attacks he suffered in the early part of his career, they conform to the effects of heavy absinthe drinking, something he certainly did.”
Like his near contemporaries Gauguin and Van Gogh, Munch gives us a sense of the artist in full that is almost unimaginable in today’s world of detached, ideas-driven art. And perhaps even more than with his great peers, his work is characterised by a dogged, self-lacerating honesty, a plumbing of the depths of the soul, which feels profoundly Scandinavian, but is ultimately universal in its relevance and appeal.
Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888) from June 28 to Oct 14
The photographic self-portraits assembled in Tate’s exhibition show Munch’s craggy features and pale eyes set always in the same expression of lugubrious remoteness. Yet if the bold nose and formidable jawline give an impression of physical vigour, Munch was prey to ill health throughout his life, and grew up in an atmosphere of dread. His family’s respectability was undermined by continual money problems, while his father, essentially a kindly man, would read his children ghost stories, the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Norse myths – hardly the most settling bedtime fare. All his life Munch was burdened by a sense of personal cursedness. “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies,” he later wrote, “the heritage of consumption and insanity.”
As an artist, his early style veered towards stolid Scandinavian realism, dour landscapes and views of churches under snow. Though even at this stage his work was dogged by controversy; an apparently innocuous image of a girl sitting on her bed was lambasted as immoral. From the mid-1880s, the influence of Impressionism became apparent – The Ball (1885) was considered the first Norwegian Impressionist painting. Yet all the time you feel he’s trying to paint someone else’s idea of what the world looks like. Then, gradually, another sensibility begins to seep into the work: lines become more free-flowing as though they can’t be contained by the objects they describe, heightened colour bleeds out of objects into the mind and vision of the viewer.
It’s difficult to tell whether this shift, with its increasing preoccupation with anguish and death, is a reflection of Munch’s growing inner turmoil or simply of the fashionable influences of Symbolism and Art Nouveau and the morbid, decadent mood of the fin de siècle. While Munch spent time in Paris, where he absorbed the influence of Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, and lived for long periods in Germany, where he came into contact with the Swedish playwright Strindberg and other notable avant gardists, he claimed that his vision was formed in the Oslo bohemian circles dominated by the nihilist writer Hans Jaeger.
A patently sinister figure, Jaeger advocated suicide as a means to freedom, and drove at least one of his disciples along that path. The young Munch might have appeared a vulnerable figure, moving in his wake, but even in this society of ostentatious individualists he stood out. This “fair Nordic Viking”, as his cousin Lodvig Ravensberg described him, “a lonely man who remained very much a mystery. There was something about him of the child… and then again this incredible complexity, this knowledge of deep secrets.” While Jaeger’s injunction that Munch should “write his life” – draw directly on his own experience – had a liberating effect on his art, the self-destructive behaviour of Jaeger’s circle, with its heavy drinking, brawling and playing with knives and guns, were a key factor in pushing Munch into outright psychosis.
While Munch “wrote his life” in paint, exploring the themes of love, angst and death in images that he revisited and reworked throughout his life, he also wrote it in words, in journals, notebooks and quasi-fictional texts in which he endlessly re-explored incidents from different periods of his life.
Munch’s sense of his tainted inheritance, that he “lived among the dead” – his deceased family members – poisoned his relations with women, who appear in his paintings in many guises: as embodiments of serenity and strength (as in the many paintings of his sister Inger); or as femmes fatales and harbingers of death (this was a time when every man lived in terror of syphilis). When Munch was offered happiness at the age of 34 by a beautiful woman of independent means named Tulla Larsen, he ran.
Believing himself unfit to father children, and wanting to preserve the solitude that he thought fuelled his art, he fled to Berlin. After a four-year on-off relationship, culminating in a shooting incident in which he lost one of his fingers, Tulla lost patience with Munch and married one of his younger colleagues; a “betrayal” on which he brooded for years.
Munch’s paranoia is palpable in his written accounts of these events – which recall his dream the night after his first meeting with Tulla that he was sleeping with a corpse. But if he was paranoid, that didn’t mean she wasn’t out to get him. Obsessed with Munch, Tulla sued the artist for breach-of-promise following a tentative proposal that had clearly been manipulated out of him.
“She was a powerful and controlling woman who wanted her own way,” says Sue Prideaux, author of Edvard Munch, Behind the Scream, the first biography of the artist in English. “She was prepared to use her wealth, at a time when he was very poor, to get what she wanted.”
After a major breakdown in 1909, Munch sought treatment, and thereafter led a more measured existence. Public acceptance of his work increased, and honours and major public commissions followed. There is a widely held, romantic view that genius was cured out of Munch along with insanity. Certainly the majority of his best-known works were created in the troubled first third of his career.
Yet Sue Prideaux sees his post-breakdown rehabilitation as not so much a cure, more a coming to terms with the quirks of his personality. As he said himself, “I would not cast off my illness, because there’s much in my art that I owe to it.” But Prideaux doubts, contrary to Munch’s own beliefs, that he was ever congenitally insane. “There are lots of aspects to his condition, which makes it difficult to sum up,” she says. “He certainly wasn’t bipolar, which has often been claimed. When you examine the attacks he suffered in the early part of his career, they conform to the effects of heavy absinthe drinking, something he certainly did.”
Like his near contemporaries Gauguin and Van Gogh, Munch gives us a sense of the artist in full that is almost unimaginable in today’s world of detached, ideas-driven art. And perhaps even more than with his great peers, his work is characterised by a dogged, self-lacerating honesty, a plumbing of the depths of the soul, which feels profoundly Scandinavian, but is ultimately universal in its relevance and appeal.
Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888) from June 28 to Oct 14
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