EDVARD MUNCH AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

EDVARD MUNCH AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

11^th of June 2019

This exhibition at the British museum concentrates on Munch's work beyond painting as he sought to use lithographs, woodcuts and other media.  Intricate technical details of these processes are provided to indicate the diversity of Munch’s artistic methods.  While he experimented, he also tended to go back to oil painting as his first point of reference.  He used these other forms in order to make his work more accessible to the general public.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) began his artistic career in Kristiania, the former name for Oslo, capital of Norway.  Munch was a member of the Kristiania Bohemia, a group of artists, writers and intellectuals who met in clubs in the city to discuss ideas, new movements in ideas and the arts and presumably to drink absinthe, the preferred drug of the avante garde of that time.  An early lithograph represents Hans Jaeger (1854-1910), a member of the Kristiania Bohemia, whose work was suppressed. He was also gaoled for 60 days and fined for writing pornographic and blasphemous works. Norway was still gripped by Lutheran Protestantism and it was to be artists like Munch and writers like Jaeger and Ibsen who began to create more secular visions. In Kristiania syphillis was rife among the middle classes. Young working women had two jobs, as scullery maids and servants and then as prostitutes since ordinary wages were very low.  Norway’s artists and writers began to expose the barren hypocrisy of Kristiania’s bourgeosie by depicting the issues that Norway’s middle classes would have preferred to have been supressed.  In works like Ghosts Ibsen depicts the sins of the fathers when Osvald inherits syphilis from his father, Captain Alving, who is dead when the play begins.  Osvald’s mother is using Captain Alving’s fortune to build an orphanage in order to prevent Osvald from inheriting the money.  He in turn is in love with the maid, Regina Engstand, who Osvald’s mother realises is Captain Alving’s illegitimate daughter and therefore Oswald’s half-sister.  The critical response to Ghosts was like the reception to Munch’s paintings.  Horrified critics spoke of it as a work from the sewer just as Munch’s painting The Sick Child was compared by critics to washing hung out on a line.  In fact, the dirty laundry of Kristiania’s middle classes was being hung out, a necessary act that meant that both Ibsen and Munch were forced to leave Norway for Europe’s liberal capital cities, Paris, Berlin and Rome.  

The Sick Child was completed in 1885 and was Munch’s first major work.  It depicts his sister Johanne Sophie just before her death from tuberculosis at the age of 14.  Later versions completed from 1885 to 1926, were completed as drypoint etchings or as lithographs.  The exhibition shows us various versions of the work, including the drypoint version from 1894 as well as the original completed in oils on canvas.  The exhibition traces the development of Munch’s art in the way that it develops original works in a variety of forms before eventually leaving them to go on to a new set of images.

After leaving Kristiania Munch went firstly to Paris where he was exposed to the new movement in art exemplified by Paul Gaugin, Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh.  They would come to be known as the post-Impressionists.  He then moved to Berlin at the behest of the Union of Berlin Artists.  His one-man exhibition only lasted a week when it was closed by the Union.  The show evoked controversy and came to be dubbed “the Munch affair”. He also began to make a set of new contacts there, including Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1927), depicted in a portrait by Munch.  His lover Dagny Juel (1867-1901) played an important part in Munch's life.  

Munch also met and painted the Swedish playwright Auguste Strindberg (1849-1912) when he attended the Black Piglet (Zum schwarzen Ferkel), a club in Berlin frequented by members of the European Avant Garde.  Munch was now at the forefront of a movement of emigres and artists who had abandoned their collective homelands, gathering together in Berlin, a city without the resonance of Paris or London but nevertheless big, bold and cosmopolitan.  The portraits of these personalities are included in the British Museum’s exhibition, illustrating the importance of the personal contacts that Munch made when he left Norway.

This ferment was a prelude to Munch’s masterpiece The Scream (1893), an iconic work of the nineteenth century, in the same way that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (La Giaconda) was an icon of the sixteenth.  The Scream is depicted here in a variety of guises, as a painting and later as a lithograph.  Other works like Munch's painting Angst from 1896 depicting the daily promenade in Kristiania when the bourgeoisie greeted each other, illustrates Munch’s feelings about Kristiania’s middle classes.  Their faces are devoid of hope, their coal black attire underlines their sanctimonious piety and the sky above is just a few glaring red streaks.  The work speaks of another world, the world of the unrepressed, Kristiania’s working classes who demand our attention as souls possessed of life and the capability to love.  This exhibition is less concerned with the meanings of The Scream but more with the materials from which it was constructed, the methods by which it was made and the influences that Munch encountered.  One of these influences was the bound Peruvian mummy which he saw at the Musee d’Ethnologie du Trocadero in Paris in 1889 which may have influenced the figure in The Scream.  The unfamiliar cloud formation with wispy, trailing clouds found in the paintings made at this time may allude to cloud formations found only in Norway.  The exhibition notes that, as a further twist of fate, Munch’s sister Laura was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and institutionalised in a hospital near the site of The Scream.  But Laura’s fate is a further comment on the repression implicit in Norway’s class ridden society.  Schizophrenia is presumably the only means of escape into a personal world beyond the duties, expectations and impositions of life at the time.

The most remarkable portrait in the exhibition is surely Henrik Ibsen at the Grand Café, Kristiania (lithograph, 1902).  Munch first met Ibsen in 1893 in Kristiania, the two men were exiles who eventually returned to their homeland.  Ibsen’s portrait is disembodied against a stark black backdrop, his hair and beard resemble a pentacle star and the curtain behind resembles a theatre’s curtain, slightly drawn back to reveal a street scene beyond.  The work conveys the sense in which lithography offered so much more to Munch after his initial work in oils on canvas. 

In this exhibition we are led into Munch’s world, right into the very heart of Kristiania to wonder at the joys and iniquities of a world now diminished, its light quite put out.

Paul Murphy, The British Museum, 2019