Edvard Munch: Astride Two Eras - Jim Hanlon

July 2011 Munch at the Tate Modern

Edvard Munch - Puberty

The pleasing prospect of seeing expressionist painter Edvard Munch at the Tate Modern is immediately one relying on memories of his many iconic works, such as Vampire, The Kiss and Puberty. The combination of Art Nouveau’s sinuous lines and the primal colour and application of the Fauvists, characterizes Munch’s enduring appeal. He is still best known for his images of sexual torment and alienation but this show reveals the multifaceted Norwegian in a new context of engagement with the modern world, with rooms devoted to his photography, theatre design and film making.  

Like masterly bookends the exhibit begins and ends with a selection of Munch’s numerous self-portraits. Those expecting the gloomy macabre of Munch’s tortured genius will not be disappointed. In the early work he demonstrates his traditional skill as a painter and in the last paintings depicts himself, an ageing sickly insomniac close to death but with the same bold compositions and assured brushwork.

Edvard Munch - Vampire

 Edvard Munch’s seminal work The Scream was painted in 1893 by which time he was a well established artist. The dizzy perspective and exaggerated placement of the figure in the foreground became a defining characteristic of his output for the next fifty years. History zooms in on this iconic painting and neglects the huge body of work Munch carried on producing well into the modern era.

Edvard Munch - Self Portrait

This intriguing exhibition reveals little known aspects of Munch’s creative life. His fascination with the developments of the mechanical age is not untypical of his artistic contemporaries. The Norwegian takes this interest a step further with a considerable output of photography and even a foray into film-making. Sadly only 5 mins 17 seconds of his footage survive, demonstrating his delight in experimenting with this new medium. Munch also explored artistic possibilities of photography in his own unique way with early prototype cameras. The exhibit includes some of his surviving archive of 244 photographs, taken over 30 years from 1902. The photographic prints are very small in contrast to the large canvases and this gives them a compelling intimacy. This autobiographic work often depicts the artist posing with groups of his paintings, who he famously called his children, in a way that suggests self-parody. Using unusual angles, motion blur and double exposure, Munch uses the medium as a means of self examination. There are many striking self portraits, where Munch depicts himself looking away from or beyond the camera lens, in sharp contrast to the usual view we have of ourselves directly facing a mirror. Some are posed naked in his garden and some where he appears to be holding the camera at arms length, though all seem to suggest a dry self effacing humor. 

Edvard Munch - Madonna 1902

Contemporary cinema clips are cleverly juxtaposed with a group of paintings employing the dynamic compositions inspired by these technical advances. In Galloping Horse and Workers On Their Way Home Munch resonates the dramatic cinematic device of figures moving towards the camera, with exaggerated perspectives and flickering brush strokes.  Munch’s artistic journey is also charted by his 1906 collaboration with theatre director Max Reinhardt. For a production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts he not only produced sketches for furniture and décor but also a series of paintings depicting scenes from the play, the colour, lighting and psychological intensity of the interior space enhancing the drama. Munch went on to explore this dramatic subject matter in a series of compelling paintings called The Green Room, where claustrophobic scenes imply a narrative but with little suggestion of the surrounding sequence of events. 

Edvard Munch - Uninvited Guests 1932-5

Always keeping abreast with scientific discoveries, Munch was well aware of new understanding of radio waves, x-rays and radioactivity. At the beginning of the 19th century lines were blurred between science, spirituality, clairvoyance and telepathy. Perhaps in response he played with ghostly double exposures in his photography and in the extraordinary 1910-13 painting The Sun represented a transcendent cosmic vision. The artist’s engagement with his contemporary world led to many paintings of current events, and on a more personal level, of significant events in his life, like the disturbing Uninvited Guests of 1932-5, one of a series exploring a violent incident with fellow artist Ludvig Karsten. 

Edvard Munch - The Scream

In seeking to rationalize and quantify the work of Edvard Munch, it’s too easy to define him by the work he produced in the 1880’s and 1890’s. My own comfortable impression of Munch was as a symbolist painter of that era, an impression unchanged for several decades. The Tate Modern’s revisionist show has challenged that perception entirely. Munch was, it turns out, a man who new how to laugh.