EDVARD MUNCH: THE MODERN EYE

EDVARD MUNCH: THE MODERN EYE

 Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was born when the American Civil War was at its height and he died just before the end of World War Two.  His life can be said to straddle all the main events of early modernity. Munch was born in Christiania, Norway and began his art career in Christiana ( Oslo's original name) as a central figure in Christiania's artistic bohemia. In this early period he completed  formative works especially The Sick Child (1886) based on his sister's early death.  Subsequently Munch moved to Paris and Berlin where he was involved with the Expressionist and Symbolist movements in art. Munch was on the fringes of Die Brücke (The Bridge), an art movement of primitive and expressionist artists based on a small group of architecture students from Dresden but he never became a fully fledged member. Indeed although he was associated with various movements he was never an instigator but merely an associate. 

The exhibition Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye focuses on Munch as in individualist art creator not on his connections with groups and also the way in which he returned to early works throughout his life to re-work and re-orchestrate them. By the time he had become a 20th century artist Munch had begun to be influenced by the artists he had originally influenced with his naturalistic works which became absorbed by early proto-expressionism as exemplified in The Sick Child. The re-workings verge from naturalism to abstraction, dark inhospitable interiors to lighter exterior works with the style becoming increasingly freer, more fluid and more modern. Munch re-worked The Vampire (1893) into another yet related work of 1916-17 which exemplifies the changes that had gone on in his personal art development but also robust personal traumas such as a nervous breakdown compounded by alcohol and brawling in 1908. 

Munch's own heroic narrative of the artist as revolutionary is altered by his encounter with new technologies such as photography and new artforms such as cinema. His work is subtly altered as its visionary power is knocked down by elements of robust cinematic melodrama, even incorporating stunts (for example his work The Fight, 1930 which depicts an earlier bloodied encounter but also hints of cuts, dissolves and exterior angles. Munch becomes the hero of his own home movie.  Munch never joined any of the big yet intrinsically ephemeral art movements of his time, such as the Impressionists, the Expressionists, the Cubists (although he is depicted as a precursor of Expressionism) perhaps because he realised how ephemeral, how intrinsically meaningless and pretentious they were.  His best works are made when he is in his own Mack Sennet melodrama. Munch is easily recognised since he wears white. His bad artist nemesis wears black. 

This exhibition focuses on how an artist re-assesses and begins to re-assemble his career after various traumas when his own personal art evolution almost disappeared and for that reason it offers invaluable insights into Munch's life and often harrowing struggles.  Also we tend to remember Munch not his enemies, which includes the entire Nazi movement (which obviously condemned his art as 'degenerate').

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern

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