Munch at Moderna Museet

Moderna Museet has a large and representative collection of Munch’s graphics, which contains many of his most important pieces. The present exhibition shows this collection for the first time in its entirety.

Munch’s graphics contain exciting experiments in technique as well as dramatic thematic innovations. Munch is one of the greatest of graphic artists and his penetrating psychological pictures are both timeless and timely. The exhibition also includes paintings by Munch owned by the museum.

Images on the back of the eye

When Edvard Munch created it was a matter of life and death, and everything in between: Love, passion, illness, jealousy, anxiety and melancholy. His human characters aren’t “beautiful” – they are obsessed with their urges and destinies. And his animals can be beastified humans. One can perhaps find calm reflection in his portraits, but they are dominated by a vibrant human presence. Edvard Munch is in quest of the essence. We see people and events that took place a hundred years ago, but, apart from the clothes and furniture, they could just as well be contemporary.

Edvard Munch does not only relate stories from his own time, he presents paintings and graphic works that are about his own thoroughly lived experiences:

“I don’t believe in art that has not been forced out by man’s need to open his heart. All art, literature and music, must be born from one’s heart’s blood. Art is the blood of one’s heart.”

It may appear self-centred, private and individualist, but Munch’s mastery as a painter and graphic artist creates a visual drama that relates not merely to his own life – but to ours. The Norwegian critic Jens Thiis, a contemporary of Munch, said, “His art is an expression of a temperament, but serves as a philosophy of life.”

Edvard Munch came from an old Norwegian family of humanists, scientists, officers and clergy. His father was originally a ship’s doctor, who later worked in Christiania’s less well-off neighbourhoods. Edvard Munch was the second of five children. He grew up in a family with intellectual interests, where reading aloud to each other from contemporary literature was habitual. Over the years, his father’s religious fervour grew. At the age of five, little Edvard lost his mother. Nine years later, his sister Sophie died of tuberculosis, like his mother. “Sickness, madness and death are the black angels that guarded my cot and have followed me throughout my life.”

In 1881, Edvard Munch was accepted at the Royal School of Drawing. The next few years he devoted to investigating various styles, particularly impressionism and naturalism. He mixed with the bohemians of Christiania, the capital’s intellectual radicals of the 1880s. The leader was the novelist Hans Jaeger, whose novel Fra Kristiania-Bohemen (From the Christiania Beohemia) gave the circle its epithet and led to a prison sentence for its originator, on an indecency charge. The discussions at the Café at the Grand Hotel concerned the new ideas from Paris, conveyed to Scandinavia by the Danish writer Georg Brandes. Life was wild, with little sleep and liberal doses of alcohol. However, Edvard Munch continued to work hard. He produced the first versions of some of his most famous works – The Sick Child, Puberty, and The Day After, the latter of which was typical of the period. He also held his first solo exhibition in 1889, and travelled the same year to Paris to study with Léon Bonnat.

Cultural life in the French capital in the 1890s was dominated by the ideas of naturalism: life was predestined by man’s urges; but also by the symbolists’ bottomless preoccupation with the unknown depths of the human psyche, especially evident in literature and drama. The fine arts celebrated names such as Gauguin, van Gogh and Les Nabis (“The Prophets”). And of course, no one could ignore Toulouse-Lautrec. Form and expression were renewed, simplified and enhanced. There was a strong oriental influence. Japanese woodcuts were in fashion. Synthetism combined all the elements of the picture into a fully composed entity. Munch used this method, but the infusion of distinct strong emotion heightens the expressiveness of his images to such a degree that he stood godfather to the 20th century expressionists. It was only to be expected that the Nazis were to brand his art as “entartete”, degenerate, in the 1930s.

In the 1890s, Munch constantly travelled between Paris, Berlin, Lübeck, Copenhagen, Stockholm, the Riviera, German bathing resorts, and elsewhere. However, he always returned to Norway in the summers. He survived financially thanks to collectors and patrons, including Dr Max Linde and Harry Graf Kessler in Germany, and the banker Ernst Thiel in Stockholm. In Berlin he embarked on his great life work, The Frieze of Life, and exhibited the six first paintings under the collective title Die Liebe (Love). Over the years, this work was to express his quintessential philosophy of life: a pantheism, in which life and man unite in a “life seed”, a “life spirit” – a nature in which natural urges, incorporating birth, love and death, form the stages of an eternal life cycle.

Berlin had its own bohemia, headed by August Strindberg and Munch’s close friend, the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who also edited the first biography on Munch, Das Werk des Edvard Munch. They would meet at a winebar Strindberg had named Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (“The Black Sucking-Pig”). Back in Paris, he met the poet Mallarmé and the dramatist Lugné-Poe, who specialised in Scandinavian drama in general and Ibsen in particular. Munch illustrated the programme sheets for Peer Gynt at the Théâtre L’Oeuvre, produced graphic works and exhibited at the Salon des Independants.

This was a period of constant toil. In his eagerness to reach a wider audience, he sacrificed his private life. He had always had a highly complicated relationship to women, and it did not grow easier in the instability around the turn of the century, when the new urbanity of industrialism, with disintegration of values, political radicalism and emancipation, blended with patriarchal dominance, street prostitution and the lethal illness that was the threat of the time, syphilis. The femme fatale made her entry: the foremost fin de siècle diva Sarah Bernhardt surrounded herself with leopards and alligators. Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé and Gustav Klimt painted Judith. In 1894, Edvard Munch painted The Three Stages of Woman.

Munch met the rich girl Tulla Larsen, who was the woman in his life during the period when he painted the red-haired Sin (albeit using someone else as his model). The relationship collapsed when Munch refused to commit himself and accidentally shot himself in his left ring finger. Following a nervous breakdown a few years later, he confronted his demons in the graphic series Alpha and Omega, a black parody of his love affair with Tulla Larsen. However, Munch’s universality renders his motifs of anxiety astoundingly modern. The anguish that the pictures exude can never be dismissed as coincidental. Munch’s images are suffused with an existential anguish that stretches far into the 20th century, to Sartre and Beckett.

Munch’s graphic works

In Berlin and Paris, Munch began to work in greater earnest with graphic art. He wanted to reach larger audiences and also needed to earn more money. His works are extraordinary, both in terms of quality and quantity. He had tried his hand at dry-point and etching in the 1880s, initially by making graphic versions of his paintings, and eventually becoming increasingly preoccupied with the graphic techniques themselves. The ancient art of woodcuts and the century-old lithograph were again introduced as prestigious artistic media. With their uniquely lucid illustrative imagery, Munch’s pictures are ideal subjects for the sharp contrasts of graphic art. He skilfully used the black ink and the white blanks of the pictures. In his woodcuts the wood grain and rings are imbued with meaning. He revolutionised colour graphics by fret sawing the wood block into sections, colouring the separate sections and then putting them together again like a jigsaw puzzle. In this way, he did not need to make new blocks for each colour to be printed. This was typical of Munch’s way of working. He would never experiment for the sake of experimenting, but only to make it easier to develop a picture that would convey his life experiences to the viewer as distinctly as possible. The 74 sheets in Moderna Museet’s collection give a good general idea of the motifs and expressions of his graphic oeuvre.

Edvard Munch

*) Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye – it is also the inner pictures of the soul – the images on the back of the eye.

Curator: Sören Engblom