Frank Hoyfödt
INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA
Magazine number:
“THE SCREAM” BY EDWARD MUNK IS THE TRUE EMBODIMENT OF MODERN MAN, ALMOST THE MOST FAMOUS PICTURE IN THE WORLD, AN ICONIC WORK OF EXPRESSIONISM. THIS PICTURE IS A PICTURE REFLECTION OF THE FRAGILICITY AND TRAGICITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE. CREATIVELY INVOLVED TO VINCENT VAN GOGH AND PAUL GAUGIN, MUNK (1863-1944) STRIVED FOR NEW, DEEP AND AUTHENTIC ART. TODAY HIS “SCREAM” HAS BEEN TURNED INTO ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS IMAGES - IT IS PART OF FOLK CULTURE AND AT THE SAME TIME AN IRONIC “APPROPRIATION” OF POSTMODERNISM. BOTH OF THESE EXTREME ARE RELEVANT FOR UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXT OF THE IMPRESSIVE PRICE OF UP TO 120 MILLION. DOLLARS PAID IN SPRING 2012 FOR THE PASTEL VERSION OF THIS PICTURE. THE GLORY OF “THE SCREAM” HAS EXCEEDED THE GLORY OF ITS AUTHOR, ALTHOUGH AT LARGE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS WHERE THE PUBLIC IS QUITE WELL AWARE OF MUNK’S CREATIVE HERITAGE, SUCH A GAP APPEARS NOT TO ARISE. THE MOST INCREDIBLE PRESENTATION OF MUNK'S WORK TOOK PLACE IN OSLO IN THE SUMMER OF 2013 ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARTIST'S BIRTH.
Munch grew up in the capital of Norway, Christiania (later Christiania, from 1925 Oslo). His father, a military doctor, was deeply religious. His mother (20 years younger than her husband) died of tuberculosis when Edward was five years old. His sister Sophie died of the same disease at the age of 15; Laura's younger sister was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Brother Andreas died of pneumonia at the age of 30. And Edward was not in good health from his youth. The significance of all these circumstances for Munch's work cannot be considered indisputable, but he did turn - particularly in the 1890s - to the sad memories of his childhood, both in expressive images and in poetic lines: “Illness, madness and death were black angels at my cradle" 1 . With all this, one cannot help but admit that his family readily supported his cultural aspirations. In May 1884, his sister Laura writes in her diary that she went to the library and brought Henrik Ibsen’s play “Caesar and the Galilean” to her sick brother - a work quite serious and difficult for a twenty-year-old boy to understand 2 .
"Russian" period
Munch was able to take advantage of the very limited opportunities that Norway at that time provided to aspiring artists, in particular, free art education. His teacher turned out to be the staunch realist Christian Krogh - this influence is quite noticeable in Munch's early works. In 1885, Munch reached a new level of creativity, creating the painting “The Sick Girl” - this was a decisive break with the language of realism. Remembering his sister Sophie, he told how he tried to revive the “first impression”, how he searched for an acceptable pictorial equivalent to painful personal memories 3. Having abandoned perspective and volume modeling, he arrived at a compositional form close to the icon; In the very texture of the work, traces of a long and labor-intensive work process are clearly visible. Official critics did not accept the work, speaking rather harshly about it, so after this Munch became a kind of enfant terrible among the galaxy of young artists.
The mid-1880s were marked by a serious turn in his life and artistic views. At this time, Munch began to communicate with a company of radical anarchists from Christiania - it must be admitted that they were nothing more than a pale shadow of their contemporaries, the nihilists from St. Petersburg 4. Russian literature at that time gained enormous prestige, and therefore it is not surprising that in 1883 the novel by F.M. was translated into Norwegian. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment". The book's exploration of the depths of human psychology immediately attracted Munch's attention: “Some pages are independent works of art,” he wrote in a letter to a friend 5 . Later, looking back on the 1880s, he would ask: “When will anyone be able to describe those times? It takes Dostoevsky, or at least a mixture of Krogh, Jaeger and, perhaps, myself, to describe, as convincingly as Dostoevsky did with the example of a Russian Siberian city, the vegetation in Christiania - not only then, but also now.” 6 In Christiania, Hans Jäger was a key figure of bohemia; he was even sentenced to prison for a provocative novel a clef from the life of the same bohemia. Munch not only painted a portrait of Jaeger in 1889, but, inspired by the program requirement “you must describe your life,” he began to keep detailed notes.
France
After a large solo exhibition in 1889, Munch was awarded a government scholarship to complete his education abroad. He spent the next three winters in France. There he witnessed the post-impressionist breakthrough and various experiments directed against blind adherence to nature, which helped him feel liberated: “The camera cannot compete with the brush and palette, because it cannot be used either in hell or in heaven” 7.
In the work “Night in Saint-Cloud”, a lonely figure in a darkened interior, rendered in dark blue tones, is reminiscent of the harmony of James Whistler’s nocturnes - this is a response to the news received in November about the sudden death of his father. There is a clear echo here of Munch’s diary notes made during the first period of his stay abroad, in which remorse is persistently heard. Without going into biographical details, critics unanimously correlated Munch’s painting with the concept of “decadence” at the turn of the century.
In depicting Parisian boulevards and Karl Johan Street - the central thoroughfare in Christiania - Munch began to use impressionistic and pointillist painting techniques, and the French Riviera received all the sensual beauty available to his palette.
During the first period of his stay in France, Munch painted a noble and ascetic portrait of his sister Inger, as well as the main image of “The Kiss” and the gloomy “Evening on Karl Johan Street” - perhaps his second work, in which the shift from realism to symbolism is quite clearly manifested: “Symbolism is nature sculpted by the state of the soul” 8. The main street of the Norwegian capital is transformed into a terrifying backdrop to capture the tragic mood of modern city life.
A similar worldview permeates the widely known novel “Hunger,” written by one of Munch’s good friends, the writer Knut Hamsun—they worked closely together in the 1890s. Hamsun was also a big fan of Dostoevsky's work; critics tried to accuse Hamsun of plagiarism after the publication of his early story “Excitement” (1889), seeing in it certain parallels with Dostoevsky’s novel “The Gambler.” In 1892, Munch made (at the Monte Carlo casino) an attempt to capture gambling addiction both in visual images and in words 9 .
Berlin
In 1892, Munch received an unexpected offer to exhibit his paintings in Berlin. A huge scandal followed, after which Munch's name gained some fame in the German capital. Deciding to stay in this city, he joined the then quite famous circle of artists and intellectuals who gathered in the cafe “At the Black Pig” - among its regulars were, for example, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg and the Polish writer Stanislav Przybyszewski. In this creative environment, Munch developed his own line of expressive symbolism and created a number of such later famous works as “Starry Night”, “The Voice”, “Death of a Patient”, “Woman”, “Anxiety” and “Vampire”. Reproducing the damaged original, Munch painted two new versions of “Puberty,” a painting depicting a young naked girl sitting facing the viewer on the edge of a bed and covering her genitals with her palms, while an ominous dark shadow stands behind her. 10 The classic version of The Scream was also written in Berlin. Here, any traces of realism disappear: the landscape turns into a flat juxtaposition of shades of color, wavy lines deprive the space of any sense of stability, and the main figure is turned into a primitive sign, appearing before the viewer as a symbol of primitive horror. Following the example of the blank verses that his literary friends wrote in Christiania, Munch accompanied the painting with appropriate text, describing the experience he had experienced - it was the sunset that served as the stimulus for him to a frightening revelation: “I was walking with two friends along the road - the sun was setting... I I felt like nature was pierced by a powerful, endless scream.” 11 Perhaps the most famous work of Munch has acquired a great variety of comments and interpretations; With all the diversity of views, their essence is that the main thing in a picture is its ability to evoke a deep personal experience in the viewer 12. "The Scream" was included in the thematic series "Love", which preceded the cycle "Frieze of Life". In 1895, a large exhibition in Christiania gave rise to a real scandal, to the point where the artist’s mental health was called into question. Munch was passionately defended by his friend, the poet Sigbjörn Obstfelder. When playwright Henrik Ibsen, who had already gained world fame at that time, visited the exhibition, thereby expressing his sympathy and support for the artist, it made a deep impression on Munch. Munch would later claim that his painting Woman (1894) was the inspiration for Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken. The National Gallery acquired Self-Portrait with a Cigarette, the same work that sparked debate about Munch's mental health; This is not surprising, for the painting depicts an aristocratic young man emerging from a mysterious blue fog, in whose graceful hand the cigarette seems to tremble from hypersensitivity and hypersensuality. At the center of the controversy surrounding the exhibition was “Woman in Ecstasy,” or the famous “Madonna.” “Moonlight glides across your face - full of earthly beauty and pain,” Munch writes in the accompanying text. “For Death stretches out the hand of Life - such is the chain that connects thousands of generations gone by with thousands of generations that are yet to come.” “For me, his Madonna is the very embodiment of his art,” Obstfelder commented. “In my opinion, such a deeply religious perception of a woman, such glorification of the beauty of suffering can only be found in Russian literature” 13.
Engravings and Paris
Madonna was translated into lithography in 1895, as was The Scream. Another famous lithograph from the Berlin period is Self-Portrait with Skeleton Hand. The round white stand-up collar and the head, which stands out brightly against the velvet black background, give the depicted a resemblance to a priest. The name and year inscribed at the top can be read as an epitaph, especially since it quite echoes the gloomy memento mori - the hand of a skeleton at the bottom of the work. The formal similarity of this lithograph with a woodcut by the Swiss artist Felix Vallotton has often been emphasized - and this is hardly a mere coincidence, especially since Vallotton’s work is a portrait of Dostoevsky.
Munch's first experiments in printed graphics were intaglios based on subjects from his own paintings. He soon turned to lithography, especially since upon his arrival in Paris in early 1896 he had access to the best printers and printing presses of the time. While creating a new pictorial version of “The Sick Girl” commissioned by a Norwegian collector, Munch also made a lithograph from it, limiting himself to depicting the girl’s head in profile. The work was printed in various color combinations and is highly regarded in Munch's legacy. Taking a creative approach to the woodcut technique, he sawed boards in order to print in several colors simultaneously - a similar technique was used by Paul Gauguin. An example is the numerous versions of the work “To the Forest,” which differ somewhat from each other, but they can safely be called not only accurate and expressive, but also unusually subtle from an aesthetic point of view.
In Paris, Munch created graphic portraits of several familiar poets, as well as posters and programs for two productions of Ibsen at the Theater de I "Oeuvre), but the order for the preparation of illustrations for Charles Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil" never progressed further In 1897, Sergei Diaghilev, the famous impresario and "midwife" of modern art, organized an exhibition of Scandinavian art in St. Petersburg. It included a self-portrait of Munch from 1895. In a letter to Munch, Diaghilev asks for the inclusion of a new one in the exhibition version of "The Sick Girl" 14. "Who is this Diaghilev, no one knows him" - such a comment appeared in Christiania's leading newspaper Aftenposten - a comment clearly skeptical about the strange Russian and his equally strange selection of works. Diaghilev chooses from everything new the newest: “one might say, still unfinished,” the critic complains, repeating the critical assessments of Munch’s works that often appeared in Aftenposten 15 .
At the turn of the century
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - a time of ceaseless experimentation - Munch devoted more and more energy to the “Frieze of Life” project and created a number of large decorative canvases. One of them - "Metabolism" - was first presented to the public under the title "Adam and Eve", which clearly indicates how important the biblical myth of the Fall of man occupied in the formation of Munch's pessimistic view (if you like, philosophy) on love. The titles "The Empty Cross" or "Calvary" (both created around 1900) indicate both the religious upbringing Munch received as a child and one of the main metaphysical trends characteristic of the last decade of the 19th century. "The Dance of Life" represents Munch's bold and deeply individualized transformation of the synthetic Nabist style, and at the same time a return to his own work of six years earlier, "Woman". The series of landscapes of Christiania Fjord he painted at the turn of the century, decorative and at the same time sensual, represents the pinnacle of Scandinavian symbolism. Next summer, Munch will write in Åsgårdstrand the textbook work “Girls on the Bridge” - perhaps his favorite subject.
Success and crisis
In the first years of the new century, Munch's career developed quite successfully, and he gained some fame in Germany. At the Berlin Secession exhibition in 1902, he exhibited for the first time the complete “Frieze”: “The Birth of Love”, “The Rise and Decline of Love”, “The Fear of Life” and “Death” 16. Portraits occupied a significant place in this period of his work, which brought the artist some financial stability. The Sons of Dr. Linde is a masterpiece of modern portraiture. This work was commissioned to support the artist - a truly priceless gesture. However, his artistic success was accompanied by internal contradictions: Munch suffered from the consequences of a very dramatic love affair, which ended in 1902 with a violent quarrel and an accidental gunshot wound, after which one of the fingers of his left hand was permanently crippled. The artist extinguished the obsessive thoughts that traumatized his psyche with alcohol.
In 1906, after the death of Henrik Ibsen, Munch received a commission for a series of sketches for Max Reinhardt's production of Ibsen's Ghosts at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The self-revealing “Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine,” written the same year, clearly points to Munch’s resemblance to Oswald, the main character of Ibsen’s drama. By that time, the artist’s fame had become sufficient for art historian Gustav Schiefler to begin compiling a catalog of the rising star’s graphic works, while Munch himself spent more and more time in the resort towns of Thuringia, trying to overcome alcoholism and cope with a nervous breakdown.
Munch spent the summer seasons in 1907 and 1908 in Varna-münd on the Baltic Sea coast. There, an important project for him, “Bathers,” was implemented - a provocative image of male power. The work was done in a constructive Cézanne style. However, his personal crisis reached a critical point at this time, and Munch was forced to agree to undergo treatment at a clinic in Copenhagen, where he spent eight months.
Return
Eventually returning to Norway in 1909, Munch settled in the coastal town of Kragerø. Creatively coming into contact with the reality around him, Munch boldly and energetically transferred the rugged shores and pine forests that opened before his eyes to his canvases. The National Gallery in Christiania acquired a significant number of his works, thereby marking belated recognition in his homeland.
In 1912, the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne was the first most complete demonstration of the achievements of European modernism. Munch was honored to receive a separate room for his works. Two decades after the Berlin scandal, he was placed on the same level as such pioneers of modern art as Van Gogh, Gauguin or Cezanne. He continues to experiment and expand the range of his characters: during this period, bathers, farmers, workers appear among them, and images of animals are also common. After the opening of the assembly hall he designed at the University of Christiania, Munch acquired the Ekeli estate not far from the capital and moved there.
The four-volume monograph “Edvard Munch: Collected Works” (author Gerd Woll), published in 2008, presents many works of the late period: portraits of friends and collectors, rural landscapes, nudes. His never-waning commitment to the work of Henrik Ibsen found a new manifestation: a significant number of drawings are associated with “Peer Gynt”, woodcuts with “The Struggle for the Throne”, and a number of drawings, works of printed graphics and paintings are more or less explicitly associated with play "June Gabriel Borkman". Another notable cycle of Munch's works is his late self-portraits. In the completely unostentatious and relatively little-known “Self-Portrait in a Coat and Hat,” all attention is drawn to facial expression. For many years Munch worked on the monumental painting “Towards the Light”, or “The Human Mountain”. The composition takes us back to the symbolism of the 1890s, as evidenced by the accompanying lyrics written by Munch: “My art has given my life meaning. Through him I sought light and felt that I could bring light to others." 17
Munch's long-time friend, art historian Jens Thiis, published a monumental biography of the artist on his 70th birthday. “Dostoevsky was important to me beyond measure. More than many others, even combined,” Munch emphasized in a letter to Thiis. - Ibsen and Dostoevsky: I think they were more important than everyone else” 18. Despite his relative seclusion in his later years, Munch, fortunately, still had friends who shared his passion for the Russian writer. Crime and Punishment had been a source of inspiration for him since the late 1880s 19 ; Munch repeatedly mentioned his continued interest in The Brothers Karamazov; However, the deepest chords in him were touched by Prince Myshkin (“The Idiot”) 20. Djaevlene, a Danish edition of The Devils, was lying on his bedside table at the time of his death.
In the farewell “Self-Portrait between a Clock and a Bed,” the artist stands near a large grandfather’s grandfather clock without hands, as if denoting a final departure from everything worldly. The bed is symbolically connected by associations with the most important moments of the life cycle: birth, illness, love and death. In the room behind the old artist are his works, they are illuminated with golden light. Above the bed hangs a sketch of a nude in blue; the same figure is depicted - twice - halfway up the mountainside in the programmatic work "Towards the Light" 22. This work actually hung over Munch’s bed; it was called “The Meek” after Dostoevsky’s story 23.
- Museum of E. Munch (hereinafter MM). Inv. No. 2759. L. 3 vol.
- MM Archive. Diary of Laura Munch. May 1884.
- Edward Munch. Livsfrisens tilblivelse. Oslo, 1928, pp. 9-10.
- The image of Russian nihilists, as conveyed by the Norwegian media, was not without romantic charm. See: H0if0dt, Frank. The Kristiania Bohemia reflected in the art of the young Edvard Munch // Edvard Munch. An Anthology (Ed. Erik M0rstad). Oslo, 2006.
- Letter from Munch to Olav Paulsen, a friend of the artist, dated March 11, 1884 (copy in MM).
- Quote by: Stang, Ragna. Edward Munch. Men-nesket og kunstneren. Oslo, 1982. P. 51.
- Munch's aphorism. See: MM. Inv. No. 570.
- From a sketchbook. 1890-1894. MM. Inv. No. T 127.
- Read more about the connection between the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky and the texts and paintings of Munch, see: Morehead, Allison. “Are there bacteria in the rooms of Monte Carlo?” The Roulette Paintings 1891-93 // Munch becoming “Munch” (catalogue). Munch Museum, 2008, p. 121.
- The Munch Museum presented an exhibition conceptually related to the version of the painting “Puberty”. See: Edward Munch. Pubertet // Puberty. Munch Museum, 2012.
- MM. Inv. No. T 2760-56r.
- Possible literary influences include the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and the Bible, as well as the image of Rodion Raskolnikov in the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment". For the latter, see: Eggum, Arne. Livsfrisen fra maleri til grafikk. Oslo, 1990, pp. 234-235.
- Obstfelder, Sigbj0rn. Edward Munch. Et fors0g. Samtiden, 1896.
- A letter (undated) from Sergei Diaghilev to Munch (“Dear Munch...”) written on letterhead “Hotel Victoria, Christiania” (kept in MM). While preparing the exhibition, Diaghilev visited the capital of Norway in the summer of 1897.
- Skandinavisk Udstilling i St. Petersburg // Aftenposten (Aften), 10.28.1897.
- Munch's frieze "Eiene Reihe von Lebensbildern" was presented at the Berlin exhibition under these four titles.
- MM. Inv. N 539.
- MM. Inv. No. 539.
- Draft letter (undated) to Jens Thiis (circa 1932). See: MM. Inv. No. 2094.
- In 1891, Munch received the book from his friend, the Danish poet. He reports that the book has taken its rightful place in his “little library,” consisting of “the Bible, Hans Jaeger and Raskolnikov.” See Munch's letter to Emmanuel Goldstein, dated February 2, 1892 (MM, inv. no. 3034). This is reported by the author in the work: Dedekam, Hans. Edward Munch. Kristiania, 1909. R. 24. Munch’s attending physician, Professor K.E. Schreiner and Joos Roede confirm in the book: Edvard Munch som vi kjente ham (see footnote 21).
- See: Johs Roede. Spredte erindringer om Edvard Munch // "Edvard Munch som vi kjente ham. Vennene forteller", Oslo, 1946, p. 52; Martin Nag. Dostojevskij og Munch // "Kunst og Kultur" 1993, no. 1, note 1, p. 54.
- There is a photograph (MM, inv. B 3245) which confirms that the blue Nude was at some point attached to the large canvas. See: Collected Paintings. Vol. III. P. 847.
- Dostoevsky's story "The Meek" was published in Norway in 1885; in 1926, a new edition was published under the title “Skriftema"l” (“Confession”). Munch’s friend and lawyer Jus Röde reports that it was he who proposed the title “The Meek”, and Munch approved this proposal. See above
Moving away from civilization, Gauguin pointed the way to the south - to virgin Polynesia. The second fugitive from bourgeois society climbed into the icy wilderness, to the northernmost point of Europe.
The artist most related to Gauguin, the one who, without exaggeration, can be called Gauguin's double in art (this does not happen often), is a typical representative of the North.
Like Gauguin, he was obstinate and, when appearing (this happened to him in his youth) in society, he managed to offend even those whom he did not intend to offend. They forgave him for his absurd antics: he drank a lot (“oh, these artists lead a bohemian lifestyle!”), he expected tricks from ladies’ attention and could be rude to the ladies (biographers claim that this was from shyness), he was a mystic (like all northern creators, however), listened to his inner voice, and not at all to the rules and regulations - all this justified his unexpected escapades.
Several times he even spent time in a clinic, being treated for alcoholism; he consulted with a psychoanalyst - he wanted to overcome asociality. Portraits of doctors remain from visits to clinics; but the artist’s behavior did not change. When the master eventually chose solitude and built a workshop in the cold wilderness of the forest, no one was surprised.
In his previous years in the city, it happened that he stopped painting for several months - he fell into depression or went on a drinking binge. No, not the pangs of creativity, not unrequited love - apparently, this was how the urban environment affected him. Left alone, surrounded by snow and icy lakes, he gained that calm confidence that allows him to work every day.
We are, of course, talking about the Norwegian Edvard Munch, a master who is extremely similar to Gauguin not only stylistically, but also essentially.
"Scream." One of the variants of the most famous painting by Edvard Munch. 1893
The fact that these two masters embody the extreme points of European civilization - northern Scandinavia and the southern colonies of France (what could be further south?) - should not be confusing: the coincidence of extreme points in culture is a known thing. So Irish storytellers were sure that from the towers of Cork they could see the fortress towers of Spain.
Munch and Gauguin are even related in their palette, and this despite the fact that the viewer associates with Gauguin the bright colors of the southern seas (the Frenchman specifically strove to those lands where the colors burn and sparkle, where the simplicity of forms sets off the local color), and the Norwegian Munch, on the contrary , loved the winter, gloomy range of colors.
Their palettes, however, have in common a special life of color, which I would define as hidden contrast. Both Munch and Gauguin paint in likenesses, avoiding head-on clashes of colors (contrasts so beloved by Van Gogh), they softly arrange blue with blue, and blue with lilac; but among the quiet similarities there is always a flash of contrasting color hidden, which the artist unexpectedly presents to the viewer’s eye after introducing the viewer to the range of similarities.
Thus, in the golden sum of Gauguin’s colors, the dark violet night opposed to gold sounds powerfully; but violet does not immediately enter the picture, night descends latently, reminds of itself quietly. But, having descended, the night covers and hides everything: golden tones and quivering colors disappear in the darkness. Dusk, which gradually and inevitably thickens, is perhaps the most adequate description of Munch’s palette. We look at the paintings of Munch and Gauguin with a feeling of dissonance hidden inside the picture - and the stronger the impression when the picture suddenly explodes with contrast and bursts out with a scream.
Look at Munch's painting "The Scream". The cry seems to be ripening from within the canvas, it is prepared gradually, the flashes and lightning of the sunset do not suddenly begin to sound. But gradually, from juxtapositions of deliberately soft colors, a drawn-out, hopeless cry of loneliness arises - and, once it has arisen, it grows and fills the space. And this happens with every painting by Munch.
He painted by lightly touching the surface of the canvas with his brush, never pressing or forcing the stroke; one can say that his movements are gentle. We can say that he is harmonious - he loved soft pastel colors. Don't these quiet colors tell us about the quiet harmony of northern nature?
"Sunlight". Edvard Munch. 1891
Are its flowing wavy lines - now these are mountain streams, now the curls of a lake maiden, now the shadows of spreading fir trees - aren't they meant to calm? Munch’s paintings seem to lull you to sleep; you can imagine that they are quietly telling you a bedtime story. And, however, intensifying this northern harmony of a leisurely story, Munch unexpectedly transforms the melodramatic gentle story into tragedy: imperceptibly for the viewer, the color symphony goes into a crescendo and suddenly sounds a desperate, disharmonious, shrill note.
Strictly speaking, Munch is an artist of bourgeois melodramas, like, for example, his contemporary Ibsen. Munch's lovers, frozen in meaningful poses against the backdrop of the purple night - they could well decorate (and they did decorate) the living rooms of the sentimental metropolitan bourgeoisie; these sugary images can perfectly illustrate vulgar poems.
By the way, it will be said that the Soviet magazine “Youth” of the 60s is a complete reminiscence of Munch, discovered at that time by Soviet graphic artists: the flowing hair of a rural teacher, the chiselled profile of the chief engineer - it’s all from there, from Munch’s northern elegies. And, however, unlike his epigones, Edvard Munch himself is by no means pastoral - through the cloying melodrama one can see through what is impossible to copy and what is difficult to be moved by.
"Alyscamp Alley". Paul Gauguin. 1888
His paintings contain a special, unpleasant feeling - it is prickly, it hurts, it makes us worry. In Munch's paintings there is a northern fairy tale, but there is no fairy-tale happiness - in every picture there is poorly hidden madness.
Thus, a mentally ill person during periods of remission may look almost normal, only the feverish shine of his eyes and a nervous tic betray his abnormal nature. This nervous tic is present in every painting by Edvard Munch.
Hysteria hidden in salon flirtation is generally characteristic of Scandinavian melodrama - remember Ibsen's characters. This probably compensates to some extent for the textbook northern slowness: the action develops slowly, but one day there is an explosion.
There is no play in which the pastel colors do not explode into suicide or perjury. But in Munch’s case it’s even more serious. Painting presents us with the novel of life in its entirety at once; there is no prologue or epilogue in the picture, but everything happens at once, in one moment. Both the cloying melodrama and the prickly madness are visible right away, it’s just that these qualities are combined so unusually for the eye that you want to ignore the madness.
So is the artist himself: a person is constantly in hysterics - it’s just a special, northern, cold hysteria; it may not be noticed. In appearance, the master is calm, even prim, his jacket is buttoned up with all the buttons. It is curious that, even when left alone in the wilderness, Munch retained the prim appearance of a northern city dweller - a boring Scandinavian official, a man in a case: a vest, a tie, a starched shirt, and sometimes a bowler hat. But this is the same person who threw unsuccessful canvases out the window: he threw open the window, tore the canvas off the stretcher, crumpled the painting, threw it out onto the street, into a snowdrift - so that the painting lay in the snow for months.
Munch called this reprisal against art “horse treatment”: they say, if the picture does not fall apart from such a procedure, then it is worth something, which means it can be continued. After weeks, the master began to look for the punished canvas - he shoveled away the snow and looked at what was left of the canvas.
Compare this behavior with the gentle tones of twilight landscapes, with the colors of a pale and gentle sunset; How does rage coexist with melancholy? This is not even the so-called explosive temperament that Gauguin possessed. This is not an explosion, but a permanent state of cold, rational hysteria - described in detail in the Scandinavian sagas.
Munch's “Scream” always screams, this scream simultaneously matures within harmoniously composed tones, but also sounds in all its deafening power. All this at once: delicacy - and rudeness, and melodrama - and cruel madness at the same time.
There are such Scandinavian warriors, glorified in the sagas, the most dangerous in battle - frenzied fighters, as if in delirium. They are recklessly brave, do not feel pain, are in ecstatic excitement, but at the same time maintain composure and calculation - they are terrible on the battlefield: such a fighter cannot be hurt, and he himself acts like a wound-up war machine.
Such warriors are called berserkers - berserkers are mad, but this madness does not prevent them from behaving rationally. This is a special, balanced madness.
The state of rational frenzy is very characteristic of northern aesthetics. Melodramatic insensibility, cloying cruelty - coming from Scandinavia (the birthplace of the Art Nouveau style) to Europe, it determined some of the stylistic features of Art Nouveau. Mortal themes, the Egyptian cult of the dead, skulls and drowned people - and at the same time the most delicate tones, broken irises, lace ornaments, exquisite curves of sliding lines.
Smoldering, decay and defiant beauty; the incongruous is woven together on the pediments of Viennese mansions, in the book illustrations of the British Pre-Raphaelites, on the gratings of Parisian subways - and everything came from there, from the Scandinavian saga, where melodrama easily coexists with inhumanity.
A lithographic self-portrait of Edvard Munch is characteristic. Before us is an impeccable and well-groomed bourgeois, he leaned his elbows on the frame from inside the picture, hung his hand in our direction, towards the audience - but this is the hand of a skeleton.
“Human, all too human” (as Nietzsche liked to say) becomes just material for the aesthetic gesture of modernity. Along with the Norwegian sagas and Ibsen, we must also remember Nietzsche. He is not a Scandinavian, although he stubbornly gravitated toward Nordic aesthetics, and the Nordic character of his philosophy is precisely this: this cold-blooded, hysterical philosopher-poet is also a kind of berserk. Having identified Munch as the hero of the Scandinavian saga, we more accurately see his similarities with Gauguin. They are united by an irrational, fabulous sense of existence, which they contrasted with reality. You can use the expression “mystical beginning”, with the caveat that we are talking about the impact of color on the spectator’s psychology.
Munch's northern fairy tales: spreading spruce trees, proud pines, mountain lakes, blue glaciers, purple snowdrifts, gloomy snow caps of peaks - and Gauguin's southern fairy tales: rushing streams, broad-leaved palm trees, vines and baobabs, reed huts - all this, oddly enough, is extremely It looks like both masters.
They intensify mystery, throwing veil after veil over our familiar existence. Color is nothing more than the covering of a canvas that was originally clean. Imagine that the artist throws one colored veil over another, and so many times - this is the characteristic method of painting by Munch and Gauguin.
It’s interesting, for example, how they write the land. What could be more banal and simpler than the image of the soil under your feet? Most artists, and very good ones at that, are content to paint the ground brown. But Gauguin and Munch act differently.
They both paint flat, monochromatic earth as if it were spreading into different colors, or (perhaps more accurately) as if they were throwing colored covers onto a flat surface, one after another. This alternation of colored covers gives rise to a kind of fluidity of the color surface. Lilac replaces scarlet, dark brown alternates with blue. And when it comes to the cover of night, when both paint the twilight and mysterious lights in the night, the similarity of the artists becomes glaring.
"Mother and daughter". Edvard Munch. 1897
Both masters have a similar understanding of the fluidity of the color environment: color flows into the medium of the canvas, and the object flows into the object, the colored surface of the object seems to flow into the space of the picture.
Objects are not separated from space by a contour - and this despite the fact that Gauguin of the Pont-Aven period briefly imitated stained glass technology! - but framed by the fluid color of space. Sometimes the master draws an arbitrary colored line around the object several times, as if painting the air. These colored streams flowing around an object (cf. a sea current flowing around an island) have no relation at all to real objects or to the objects depicted in the picture.
Munch's trees are entangled, braided with a colored line a dozen times, and sometimes a kind of glow appears around the snowy crowns; sometimes northern spruces and pines resemble the pyramidal poplars of Brittany or the exotic trees of Polynesia - they are reminiscent precisely because artists paint them the same way: like magic trees in a magic garden.
Perspective (as we know from the works of the Italians) has its own color - perhaps blue, perhaps green, and the Baroque masters plunged all distant objects into a brownish haze - but the color of the air of Gauguin or Munch is not associated with either perspective or values (then is without taking into account color distortions due to the removal of an object in the air).
They paint over the canvas, obeying some unnatural, unnatural impulse; they apply the color that expresses the mystical state of the soul - you can paint the night sky pale pink, the daytime sky dark purple, and this will be true to the picture, to the design, and what does nature and perspective have to do with it?
This is how icons were painted - and the flat space of the paintings of Munch and Gauguin resembles icon-painting space; color is applied without taking into account values; These are evenly and flatly painted canvases. The combination of the flatness, almost poster-like quality of the painting and the flowing flows of color moving into the depths results in a contradictory effect.
Munch's paintings call into the distance and at the same time retain a fabulous, iconographic poster quality. Look at Munch’s classic “Bridges” (in addition to the famous “Scream”, the artist painted a dozen paintings with the same bridge extending into space).
The “bridge” object is interesting because its parallel boards lead the viewer’s eye into the depths, like indicating arrows, but at the same time the artist paints the boards as streams of color, like magical flows of color, and this color has nothing to do with perspective.
"Evening on Karl Johan Street." Edvard Munch. 1892
The artist also likes to paint a street stretching into the distance (“Evening on Karl Johan Street”, 1892) - the lines of the road, leading the viewer deeper into the picture, contrast with the flat color. Compare with these paintings similar landscapes by Gauguin - for example, Alley Alyscamps, painted in 1888 in Arles. The same effect of a strange perspective, devoid of perspective; the effect of close distance, stopped running of space.
We recognize Munch's colors not because these colors are similar to Norway - in the painting "The Scream" the artist uses a spectrum equally suitable for the Italian palette - but because the arbitrary color of Munch's space is inherent only in his space, curved, without depth, but at the same time calling into the depths; these are the colors of magic, the colors of transformation.
Gauguin's line is undoubtedly related to the aesthetics of Art Nouveau - so is Munch's line; For both masters, the lines are equally fluid and appear as if by themselves, regardless of the properties of the depicted object.
The Art Nouveau style poisoned the plastic arts of the late 19th century. Everyone, from Alphonse Mucha to Burne-Jones, drew a smooth, flexible and sluggish line at the same time. The lines flow not at the whim of the creator of the picture, but obeying the magical spirit of nature - lakes, streams, trees. There is little feeling in this kind of drawing, it is exclusively indifferent drawing; it was necessary to go very far from Europe, like Gauguin, to climb into deep forests and swamps, like Munch, in order to teach this empty line to feel.
Munch filled this line of the Art Nouveau era (generally speaking, inherent not only to him, but to many masters of that time, this flowing line is a kind of technique of those years) with his special trembling madness, supplied him with a nervous tic of his hands.
Tracing the object depicted dozens of times - this is most noticeable in his etchings and lithographs, where the master’s needle and pencil follow the same path ten times - Munch, like many unbalanced people, seems to be trying to control himself, as if he was deliberately repeats the same thing, knowing that he has a dangerous passion to explode and sweep away everything around him.
This monotony - he returns to the same motive time after time, he repeats the same line over and over again - is a kind of conspiracy, a kind of spell. Among other things, it is necessary to take into account the fact that Munch valued his spells extremely highly - he believed (wrongly or not - for posterity to judge) that he expressed the essence of the quest of those years, namely, he revived the ancient sagas, making the legend relevant.
"Motherhood". Paul Gauguin. 1899
It is easy to compare this intention with the pathos of Gauguin in Polynesia. It is curious, but even the external appearance of the artists, that is, the image in which they presented themselves to the viewer, is the same - both were prone to meaningful poses, they felt like storytellers, chroniclers, geniuses of their time.
The craving for ostentatious significance does not in the least detract from their real significance, but they expressed their chosenness naively. Both were loners, they did not train their intellect in conversations and reading: they imagined that thoughtfulness was expressed in a frowning brow. Both Gauguin and Munch tend to depict people immersed in melancholic, painful thoughts, and the heroes of the paintings indulge in melancholy so picturesquely, so meaningfully that the quality of the reflections is in doubt.
Both masters like a romantic pose: a hand resting on the chin - both painted a great many of these figures, providing the paintings with captions certifying that they are talking about reflection, sometimes about grief. Their self-portraits are often full of pompous grandeur, but this is only the other (inevitable) side of loneliness.
Both artists were escapists, with Munch's reclusiveness aggravated by alcoholism; both artists were prone to mysticism - and each of them interpreted Christian symbolism with the involvement of pagan principles.
Southern mythology and northern mythology are equally pagan; their fusion with Christianity (and what is painting if not an invariant of Christian theology?) is equally problematic. Munch combined mythology with Christian symbolism no less openly than Gauguin - his famous “Dance of Life” (languid couples of Nordic peasants on the shore of a lake) is extremely similar to Gauguin’s Tahitian pastorals.
"Loss of Innocence" Paul Gauguin. 1891
The mystical perception of the feminine gave almost every scene a ritual, if not sexual, character. Compare Munch’s painting “The Age of Transition” and Gauguin’s painting “The Loss of Virginity”: the viewer is present at a ritual ceremony, and it is impossible to identify whether it is a Christian wedding celebration or a pagan initiation of deflowering.
When both artists paint naiads (they paint precisely pagan naiads - although Gauguin gave the naiads the appearance of Polynesian girls, and the Norwegian Munch painted Nordic beauties), then both admire the wave of flowing hair, the bend of the neck, and revel in the way the body flows with its forms into the foamy lines of the surf , that is, they perform a classic pagan ritual of deification of nature.
"Puberty." Edvard Munch. 1895
Paradoxically, masters far from each other create related images - frozen between paganism and Christianity, in that naive (it can be regarded as pure) state of medieval faith, which does not need to interpret Scripture, but perceives Scripture rather sensually, paganly tactilely.
The character of the picture - the hero who came to this colored world - is in the power of the color elements, in the power of the primary elements.
The flow of color often brings the character to the periphery of the canvas: it is not the hero himself that is important, but the flow that carries him. Both artists are characterized by figures that seem to “fall out” of the composition (the effect of a photograph, which Edgar Degas, the most authoritative for Gauguin, resorted to).
The compositions of the paintings really resemble a random shot by an incompetent photographer, as if he failed to point the camera at the scene he was filming; as if the photographer had mistakenly cut off half the figure, so that the empty room was in the center of the composition, and those being photographed were on the periphery of the photograph.
Such are, say, a portrait of Van Gogh painting sunflowers, a painting in which the hero “falls out” of the space of Gauguin’s canvas, and even Gauguin’s self-portrait against the background of the painting “Yellow Christ” - the artist himself is, as it were, forced out of the picture. This same effect - the effect of an outside witness to the mystery, not particularly needed in the picture - is what Munch achieves in almost every one of his works.
Streams of color carry the heroes of the story to the very edges of the picture, the characters are pushed out of the frame by a stream of color; what happens in the picture - colorful, magical, ritual - is more significant than their fate.
"The Four Sons of Doctor Linde." Edvard Munch. 1903
“The Four Sons of Doctor Linde” by Munch (1903) and “The Schuffenecker Family” (1889) by Gauguin; Gauguin's “Women on the Seashore. Motherhood" (1899) and "Mother and Daughter" (1897) by Munch are similar to such an extent in all respects that we have the right to talk about a single aesthetic, regardless of North and South. It is tempting to attribute stylistic commonplaces to the influence of Art Nouveau, but here we are witnessing the overcoming of Art Nouveau.
We are talking about a medieval mystery played out by artists on the threshold of the twentieth century.
The images they created were created according to the recipes of the Romanesque masters - the fact that their attention was focused on cathedrals (in the case of Gauguin this is especially noticeable, he often copied the compositions of the tympanums of cathedrals) - the Art Nouveau style is partly to blame for this. However, medieval reminiscences do not cancel, but rather prepare, the finale.
"The Schuffenecker Family" Paul Gauguin. 1889
Edvard Munch lived long enough to see the full-fledged return of the Middle Ages to Europe. Munch survived the First World War and lived until the Second. His craving for significance served him badly - in 1926 he wrote several things of a Nietzschean nature, but seasoned with mysticism.
So, he depicted himself as a sphinx with large female breasts (located in the Munch Museum in Oslo). Edvard Munch developed the theme of the Sphinx a long time ago. See the painting “Woman in Three Ages (Sphinx)” (1894, private collection), where the naked woman is called the Sphinx. The artist in this painting argues that the feminine principle reveals its powerful essence during the period of maturity: the painting depicts a fragile young lady in white and a sad old woman in black, and between them a naked and mysterious lady at the time of her sexual prime.
With her legs spread wide, a naked Nordic lady stands on the shore of a lake, her hair caught in the north wind. However, the same Nordic beauty with flowing hair was once called “Madonna” (1894, private collection). Munch’s characteristic mixture of pagan mythology and Christian symbolism had an effect.
And so in 1926, the artist depicted himself as a sphinx, giving himself some feminine features (in addition to the chest, there are also flowing curls, although Munch always had his hair cut short). It should be noted that such a mixture of principles, a completely eclectic mixture of the feminine, pagan, quasi-religious, was characteristic of many visionaries of the 30s.
In the Nordic mysticism of Nazism (see the table conversations of Hitler, the dramas of the early Goebbels or the early works of Ibsen, whom Hitler revered) this eclecticism is present with imperiousness. Probably, Gauguin avoided this melodramatic construction (there is no melodrama in Gauguin’s art at all) due to the fact that he did not feel awe of the feminine principle.
He also painted the painting “Mountain of Humanity”: naked, muscular young men climb on each other’s shoulders, creating a meaningful pyramid similar to those that athletes Rodchenko or Leni Riefenstahl built from their bodies. These are extremely vulgar works - and the resemblance to the magician missionary Gauguin is not visible in these paintings.
In 1932, the Zurich Museum held an extensive exhibition of Edvard Munch (on the threshold of the master's 70th birthday), displaying a huge number of works by the Norwegian along with Paul Gauguin's panel “Who are we?” Where are we from? Where are we going?". It seems that this was the first and, perhaps, the only statement about the similarity of the masters.
Subsequent events took Munch's biography into a completely different story.
Edvard Munch's long life led him further and further along the path of mysticism and greatness. The influence of Swedenborg was gradually reduced by the concept of superman, to which Gauguin was in principle alien, and the Polynesian distances saved him from the latest theories.
The Nordic dream of accomplishment arose organically in Munch - perhaps from the characteristics of Nordic mythology. For the Tahitian paradise of equality, glorified by Gauguin, these Junger-Nietzschean motifs sound completely stupid.
Playing modern and the “new Middle Ages” is good until the game turns into reality.
The combination of pagan principles and flirting with paganism in the spirit of Nietzsche turned into European fascism. Munch managed to live until Goebbels sent him a telegram congratulating “the best artist of the Third Reich.”
The telegram arrived in his remote workshop, in the wilderness, where he felt protected from the temptations of the world - he was generally afraid of temptations.
To Munch’s credit, it will be said that he did not accept Nazism, and Goebbels’ telegram stunned the artist - he could not even imagine that he was paving the way for the myths of Nazism, he himself did not look like a superman - he was shy and quiet. To what extent the retro-Middle Ages allows the autonomous individual to maintain freedom and to what extent religious mysticism provokes the arrival of real villains is unknown.
The southern and northern schools of mysticism give rise to comparisons and fantasies.
The artist's last self-portrait - "Self-portrait between a clock and a sofa" - tells the viewer how a superman turns to dust.
He can barely stand, a frail, broken old man, and the clock next to him is ticking inexorably, counting down the last minutes of the northern saga.
Photo: WORLD HISTORY ARHIVE/EAST NEWS; LEGION-MEDIA; BRIDGEMAN/FOTODOM; AKG/EAST NEWS; FAI/LEGION-MEDIA
Edvard Munch "The Death of Marat", 1907 Expressionism Edvard Munch is the most famous Norwegian artist. His famous painting “The Scream” is firmly ingrained in people’s consciousness. Munch was inspired to create this work by the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. The man suffered for a long time from a serious skin disease, which forced him to spend time in the bathroom, where Marat worked on his notes. Marvelous,…
Edvard Munch “Self-Portrait in Hell”, 1903 Munch Museum, Oslo Expressionism Self-Portrait in Hell” painting, painted after breaking up with Tulla Larsen... “Often I woke up at night, looked around the room and asked myself: “Am I in hell?” Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch “Vampire”, 1893 Munch Museum, Oslo Expressionism The artist’s eternal fear of women received its highest expression in this painting. Bright red hair - a clear hint of blood - flows down onto the unfortunate victim. The heroine grabbed the neck of her weak-willed victim predatorily. The work is filled with a thick atmosphere of horror. The colors are chosen with taste to match one’s own fears and complexes….
Edvard Munch “Jealousy”, 1895 Private collection Expressionism Jealousy is a devastating feeling that deforms a person, and the entire world around him. The artist analyzes the reasons, shows the results, philosophizes, but cannot get to the bottom of it, find a cure, name the reasons. Paintings with the same title “Jealousy” are very different. The master experiments with color, looks for angles, mise-en-scène, and compositions. One thing remains unchanged - presence...
Edvard Munch “Girls on the Bridge”, 1901 National Gallery, Oslo Expressionism Contemplation and serenity reign in this work by the great Norwegian. Evening peace. The immaculate surface of the water, the immaculate white houses on the shore. Three girlish figures in bright clothes make you think that everything is happening on a day off. The mood gradually changes, a certain sadness sets in. The day off is passing, the girls are watching...
Edvard Munch “The Dance of Life”, 1899 National Gallery, Oslo Expressionism Life is a dance. A simple idea inspired the master to create this painting. On the left is youth, on the right is old age, in the center is a mature couple. If youth is full of impatient anticipation of the start of the dance, then old age sadly watches the couples, immersed in memories. The central couple is leisurely and thorough, the main thing in them is pleasure...
Edvard Munch “Ashes”, 1894 National Gallery, Oslo Expressionism The plot of the painting can be summed up in one Pushkin line: “It’s all over: there is no connection between us.” The artist draws the viewer's attention to the emotional state of the characters. The man has closed himself off from the world, his experiences are deep inside, he is closed both physically and emotionally, the viewer does not immediately notice him. The woman is, on the contrary, in the center of the composition...
Edward “Evening on Karl Johans Street”, 1892 Collection of Rasmus Meyer, Bergen The painting depicts the central highway of Oslo - Karl Johans Gate, illuminated by evening lights. A bourgeois audience is moving along the sidewalk - gentlemen in top hats and jackets, ladies in fashionable hats. Their pale faces, devoid of any emotions and distinctive features, resemble faceless masks. At a distance from this human stream one can see...
Moving away from civilization, Gauguin pointed the way to the south - to virgin Polynesia. The second fugitive from bourgeois society climbed into the icy wilderness, to the northernmost point of Europe.
The artist most related to Gauguin, the one who, without exaggeration, can be called Gauguin's double in art (this does not happen often), is a typical representative of the North.
Like Gauguin, he was obstinate and, when appearing (this happened to him in his youth) in society, he managed to offend even those whom he did not intend to offend. They forgave him for his absurd antics: he drank a lot (“oh, these artists lead a bohemian lifestyle!”), he expected tricks from ladies’ attention and could be rude to the ladies (biographers claim that this was from shyness), he was a mystic (like all northern creators, however), listened to his inner voice, and not at all to the rules and regulations - all this justified his unexpected escapades.
Several times he even spent time in a clinic, being treated for alcoholism; he consulted with a psychoanalyst - he wanted to overcome asociality. Portraits of doctors remain from visits to clinics; but the artist’s behavior did not change. When the master eventually chose solitude and built a workshop in the cold wilderness of the forest, no one was surprised.
In his previous years in the city, it happened that he stopped painting for several months - he fell into depression or went on a drinking binge. No, not the pangs of creativity, not unrequited love - apparently, this was how the urban environment affected him. Left alone, surrounded by snow and icy lakes, he gained that calm confidence that allows him to work every day.
We are, of course, talking about the Norwegian Edvard Munch, a master who is extremely similar to Gauguin not only stylistically, but also essentially.
"Scream." One of the variants of the most famous painting by Edvard Munch. 1893
The fact that these two masters embody the extreme points of European civilization - northern Scandinavia and the southern colonies of France (what could be further south?) - should not be confusing: the coincidence of extreme points in culture is a known thing. So Irish storytellers were sure that from the towers of Cork they could see the fortress towers of Spain.
Munch and Gauguin are even related in their palette, and this despite the fact that the viewer associates with Gauguin the bright colors of the southern seas (the Frenchman specifically strove to those lands where the colors burn and sparkle, where the simplicity of forms sets off the local color), and the Norwegian Munch, on the contrary , loved the winter, gloomy range of colors.
Their palettes, however, have in common a special life of color, which I would define as hidden contrast. Both Munch and Gauguin paint in likenesses, avoiding head-on clashes of colors (contrasts so beloved by Van Gogh), they softly arrange blue as blue, and light blue as lilac; but among the quiet similarities there is always a flash of contrasting color hidden, which the artist unexpectedly presents to the viewer’s eye after introducing the viewer to the range of similarities.
Thus, in the golden sum of Gauguin’s colors, the dark violet night opposed to gold sounds powerfully; but violet does not immediately enter the picture, night descends latently, reminds of itself quietly. But, having descended, the night covers and hides everything: golden tones and quivering colors disappear in the darkness. Dusk, which gradually and inevitably thickens, is perhaps the most adequate description of Munch’s palette. N and we look at the paintings of Munch and Gauguin with a feeling of dissonance hidden inside the picture - and the stronger the impression when the picture suddenly explodes with contrast and bursts out with a scream.
Look at Munch's painting "The Scream". The cry seems to be ripening from within the canvas, it is prepared gradually, the flashes and lightning of the sunset do not suddenly begin to sound. But gradually, from juxtapositions of deliberately soft colors, a drawn-out, hopeless cry of loneliness arises - and, once it has arisen, it grows and fills the space. And this happens with every painting by Munch.
He painted by lightly touching the surface of the canvas with his brush, never pressing or forcing the stroke; one can say that his movements are gentle. We can say that he is harmonious - he loved soft pastel colors. Don't these quiet colors tell us about the quiet harmony of northern nature?
"Sunlight". Edvard Munch. 1891
Are its flowing wavy lines - sometimes mountain streams, sometimes the curls of a lake maiden, sometimes the shadows of spreading fir trees - aren't they meant to calm? Munch’s paintings seem to lull you to sleep; you can imagine that they are quietly telling you a bedtime story. And, however, intensifying this northern harmony of a leisurely story, Munch unexpectedly transforms the melodramatic gentle story into tragedy: imperceptibly for the viewer, the color symphony goes into a crescendo and suddenly sounds a desperate, disharmonious, shrill note.
Strictly speaking, Munch is an artist of bourgeois melodramas, like, for example, his contemporary Ibsen. Munch's lovers, frozen in meaningful poses against the backdrop of the purple night - they could well decorate (and they did decorate) the living rooms of the sentimental metropolitan bourgeoisie; these sugary images can perfectly illustrate vulgar poems.
By the way, it will be said that the Soviet magazine “Youth” of the 60s is a complete reminiscence of Munch, discovered at that time by Soviet graphic artists: the flowing hair of a rural teacher, the chiseled profile of the chief engineer - it’s all from there, from Munch’s northern elegies. And, however, unlike his epigones, Edvard Munch himself is by no means pastoral - through the cloying melodrama one can see through what is impossible to copy and what is difficult to be moved by.
"Alyscamp Alley". Paul Gauguin. 1888
His paintings contain a special, unpleasant feeling - it is prickly, it hurts, it makes us worry. In Munch's paintings there is a northern fairy tale, but there is no fairy-tale happiness - in every picture there is poorly hidden madness.
Thus, a mentally ill person during periods of remission may look almost normal, only the feverish shine of his eyes and a nervous tic betray his abnormal nature. This nervous tic is present in every painting by Edvard Munch.
Hysteria hidden in salon flirtation is generally characteristic of Scandinavian melodrama - remember Ibsen’s characters. This probably compensates to some extent for the textbook northern slowness: the action develops slowly, but one day there is an explosion.
There is no play in which the pastel colors do not explode into suicide or perjury. But in Munch’s case it’s even more serious. Painting presents us with the novel of life in its entirety at once; there is no prologue or epilogue in the picture, but everything happens at once, in one moment. Both the cloying melodrama and the prickly madness are visible right away, it’s just that these qualities are combined so unusually for the eye that you want to ignore the madness.
So is the artist himself: a person is constantly in hysterics - it’s just a special, northern, cold hysteria; it may not be noticed. In appearance, the master is calm, even prim, his jacket is buttoned up with all the buttons. It is curious that, even when left alone in the wilderness, Munch retained the prim appearance of a northern city dweller - a boring Scandinavian official, a man in a case: a vest, a tie, a starched shirt, and sometimes a bowler hat. But this is the same person who threw unsuccessful canvases out the window: he threw open the window, tore the canvas off the stretcher, crumpled the painting, threw it out onto the street, into a snowdrift - so that the painting lay in the snow for months.
Munch called this reprisal against art “horse treatment”: they say, if the picture does not fall apart from such a procedure, then it is worth something, which means it can be continued. After weeks, the master began to look for the punished canvas - he shoveled away the snow and looked at what was left of the canvas.
Compare this behavior with the gentle tones of twilight landscapes, with the colors of a pale and gentle sunset; How does rage coexist with melancholy? This is not even the so-called explosive temperament that Gauguin possessed. This is not an explosion, but a permanent state of cold, rational hysteria - described in detail in the Scandinavian sagas.
Munch's “Scream” always screams, this scream simultaneously matures within harmoniously composed tones, but also sounds in all its deafening power. All this at once: delicacy - and rudeness, and melodrama - and cruel madness at the same time.
There are such Scandinavian warriors, glorified in the sagas, the most dangerous in battles - frenzied fighters, as if in delirium. They are recklessly brave, do not feel pain, are in ecstatic excitement, but at the same time maintain composure and calculation - they are terrible on the battlefield: such a fighter cannot be hurt, and he himself acts like a wound-up war machine.
Such warriors are called berserkers - berserkers are mad, but this madness does not prevent them from behaving rationally. This is a special, balanced madness.
The state of rational frenzy is very characteristic of northern aesthetics. Melodramatic insensibility, cloying cruelty - coming from Scandinavia (the birthplace of the Art Nouveau style) to Europe, it determined some of the stylistic features of Art Nouveau. Mortal themes, the Egyptian cult of the dead, skulls and drowned people - and at the same time the most delicate tones, broken irises, lace ornaments, exquisite curves of sliding lines.
Smoldering, decay and defiant beauty; the incongruous is woven together on the pediments of Viennese mansions, in the book illustrations of the British Pre-Raphaelites, on the gratings of Parisian subways - and everything came from there, from the Scandinavian saga, where melodrama easily coexists with inhumanity.
A lithographic self-portrait of Edvard Munch is characteristic. Before us is an impeccable and well-groomed bourgeois, he leaned his elbows on the frame from inside the picture, hung his hand in our direction, towards the audience - but this is the hand of a skeleton.
“Human, all too human” (as Nietzsche liked to say) becomes just material for the aesthetic gesture of modernity. Along with the Norwegian sagas and Ibsen, we must also remember Nietzsche. He is not a Scandinavian, although he stubbornly gravitated toward Nordic aesthetics, and the Nordic character of his philosophy is precisely this: this cold-blooded, hysterical philosopher-poet is also a kind of berserk. Having identified Munch as the hero of the Scandinavian saga, we more accurately see his similarities with Gauguin. They are united by an irrational, fabulous sense of existence, which they contrasted with reality. You can use the expression “mystical beginning”, with the caveat that we are talking about the impact of color on the spectator’s psychology.
Munch's northern fairy tales: spreading spruce trees, proud pines, mountain lakes, blue glaciers, purple snowdrifts, gloomy snow caps of peaks - and Gauguin's southern fairy tales: rushing streams, broad-leaved palm trees, vines and baobabs, reed huts - all this, oddly enough, is extremely It looks like both masters.
They intensify mystery, throwing veil after veil over our familiar existence. Color is nothing more than the covering of a canvas that was originally clean. Imagine that the artist throws one colored veil over another, and so many times - this is the characteristic method of painting by Munch and Gauguin.
It’s interesting, for example, how they write the land. What could be more banal and simpler than the image of the soil under your feet? Most artists, and very good ones at that, are content to paint the ground brown. But Gauguin and Munch act differently.
They both paint flat, monochromatic earth as if it were spreading into different colors, or (perhaps more accurately) as if they were throwing colored covers onto a flat surface, one after another. This alternation of colored covers gives rise to a kind of fluidity of the color surface. Lilac replaces scarlet, dark brown alternates with blue. And when it comes to the cover of night, when both paint the twilight and mysterious lights in the night, the similarity of the artists becomes glaring.
"Mother and daughter". Edvard Munch. 1897
Both masters have a similar understanding of the fluidity of the color environment: color flows into the medium of the canvas, and the object flows into the object, the colored surface of the object seems to flow into the space of the picture.
Objects are not separated from space by a contour - and this despite the fact that Gauguin of the Pont-Aven period briefly imitated stained glass technology! – but framed by the fluid color of space. Sometimes the master draws an arbitrary colored line around the object several times, as if painting the air. These colored streams flowing around an object (cf. a sea current flowing around an island) have no relation at all to real objects or to the objects depicted in the picture.
Munch's trees are entangled, braided with a colored line a dozen times, and sometimes a kind of glow appears around the snowy crowns; sometimes northern spruces and pines resemble the pyramidal poplars of Brittany or the exotic trees of Polynesia - they are reminiscent precisely because artists paint them the same way: like magic trees in a magic garden.
Perspective (as we know from the works of the Italians) has its own color - perhaps blue, perhaps green, and the Baroque masters plunged all distant objects into a brownish haze - but the color of the air of Gauguin or Munch is not associated with either perspective or values (then is without taking into account color distortions due to the removal of an object in the air).
They paint over the canvas, obeying some unnatural, unnatural impulse; they apply the color that expresses the mystical state of the soul - you can paint the night sky pale pink, the day sky dark purple, and this will be true to the picture, to the design, and what does nature and perspective have to do with it?
This is how icons were painted - and the flat space of the paintings of Munch and Gauguin resembles icon-painting space; color is applied without taking into account values; These are evenly and flatly painted canvases. The combination of the flatness, almost poster-like quality of the painting and the flowing flows of color moving into the depths results in a contradictory effect.
Munch's paintings call into the distance and at the same time retain a fabulous, iconographic poster quality. Look at Munch’s classic “Bridges” (in addition to the famous “Scream”, the artist painted a dozen paintings with the same bridge extending into space).
The “bridge” object is interesting because its parallel boards lead the viewer’s eye into the depths, like directional arrows, but at the same time the artist paints the boards as streams of color, like magical flows of color, and this color has nothing to do with perspective.
"Evening on Karl Johan Street." Edvard Munch. 1892
The artist also likes to paint a street stretching into the distance (“Evening on Karl Johan Street”, 1892) – the lines of the road, leading the viewer deeper into the picture, contrast with the flat color. Compare with these paintings similar landscapes by Gauguin - for example, Alley Alyscamps, painted in 1888 in Arles. The same effect of a strange perspective, devoid of perspective; the effect of close distance, stopped running of space.
We recognize Munch's colors not because these colors are similar to Norway - in the painting "The Scream" the artist uses a spectrum equally suitable for the Italian palette - but because the arbitrary color of Munch's space is inherent only in his space, curved, without depth, but at the same time calling into the depths; these are the colors of magic, the colors of transformation.
Gauguin's line is undoubtedly related to the aesthetics of Art Nouveau - so is Munch's line; For both masters, the lines are equally fluid and appear as if by themselves, regardless of the properties of the depicted object.
The Art Nouveau style poisoned the plastic arts of the late 19th century. Everyone from Alphonse Mucha to Burne-Jones drew a smooth, flexible and sluggish line at the same time. The lines flow not at the whim of the creator of the picture, but obeying the magical spirit of nature - lakes, streams, trees. There is little feeling in this kind of drawing, it is exclusively indifferent drawing; it was necessary to go very far from Europe, like Gauguin, to climb into deep forests and swamps, like Munch, in order to teach this empty line to feel.
Munch filled this line of the Art Nouveau era (generally speaking, inherent not only to him, but to many masters of that time, this flowing line is a kind of technique of those years) with his special trembling madness, supplied him with a nervous tic of his hands.
Tracing the object depicted dozens of times - this is most noticeable in his etchings and lithographs, where the master’s needle and pencil follow the same path ten times - Munch, like many unbalanced people, seems to be trying to control himself, as if he was deliberately repeats the same thing, knowing that he has a dangerous passion to explode and sweep away everything around him.
This monotony - he returns to the same motive time after time, he repeats the same line over and over again - is a kind of conspiracy, a kind of spell. Among other things, it is necessary to take into account the fact that Munch valued his spells extremely highly - he believed (wrongly or not - for posterity to judge) that he expressed the essence of the quest of those years, namely, he revived the ancient sagas, making the legend relevant.
"Motherhood". Paul Gauguin. 1899
It is easy to compare this intention with the pathos of Gauguin in Polynesia. It is curious, but even the external appearance of the artists, that is, the image in which they presented themselves to the viewer, is the same - both were prone to meaningful poses, they felt like storytellers, chroniclers, geniuses of their time.
The craving for ostentatious significance does not in the least detract from their real significance, but they expressed their chosenness naively. Both were loners, they did not train their intellect in conversations and reading: they imagined that thoughtfulness was expressed in a frowning brow. Both Gauguin and Munch tend to depict people immersed in melancholic, painful thoughts, and the heroes of the paintings indulge in melancholy so picturesquely, so meaningfully that the quality of the reflections is in doubt.
Both masters like a romantic pose: a hand resting on the chin - both painted a great many of these figures, providing the paintings with captions certifying that they are talking about reflection, sometimes about grief. Their self-portraits are often full of pompous grandeur, but this is only the other (inevitable) side of loneliness.
Both artists were escapists, with Munch's reclusiveness aggravated by alcoholism; both artists were prone to mysticism - and each of them interpreted Christian symbolism with the involvement of pagan principles.
Southern mythology and northern mythology are equally pagan; their fusion with Christianity (and what is painting if not an invariant of Christian theology?) is equally problematic. Munch combined mythology with Christian symbolism no less openly than Gauguin - his famous “Dance of Life” (languid couples of Nordic peasants on the shore of a lake) is extremely similar to Gauguin’s Tahitian pastorals.
"Loss of Innocence" Paul Gauguin. 1891
The mystical perception of the feminine gave almost every scene a ritual, if not sexual, character. Compare Munch’s painting “The Age of Transition” and Gauguin’s painting “The Loss of Virginity”: the viewer is present at a ritual ceremony, and it is impossible to identify whether it is a Christian wedding celebration or a pagan initiation of deflowering.
When both artists paint naiads (they paint precisely pagan naiads - although Gauguin gave the naiads the appearance of Polynesian girls, and the Norwegian Munch painted Nordic beauties), then both admire the wave of flowing hair, the bend of the neck, and revel in the way the body flows with its forms into the foamy lines of the surf , that is, they perform a classic pagan ritual of deification of nature.
"Puberty." Edvard Munch. 1895
Paradoxically, masters who are far from each other create related images - frozen between paganism and Christianity, in that naive (it can be regarded as pure) state of medieval faith, which does not need to interpret Scripture, but perceives Scripture rather sensually, paganly tactilely.
The character of the picture - the hero who came to this colored world - is in the power of the color elements, in the power of the primary elements.
The flow of color often brings the character to the periphery of the canvas: it is not the hero himself that is important, but the flow that carries him. Both artists are characterized by figures that seem to “fall out” of the composition (the effect of a photograph, which Edgar Degas, the most authoritative for Gauguin, resorted to).
The compositions of the paintings really resemble a random shot by an incompetent photographer, as if he failed to point the camera at the scene he was filming; as if the photographer had mistakenly cut off half the figure, so that the empty room was in the center of the composition, and those being photographed were on the periphery of the photograph.
Such are, say, a portrait of Van Gogh painting sunflowers, a painting in which the hero “falls out” of the space of Gauguin’s canvas, and even Gauguin’s self-portrait against the background of the painting “Yellow Christ” - the artist himself is, as it were, squeezed out of the picture. The same effect - the effect of an outside witness to the mystery, not particularly needed in the picture - is what Munch achieves in almost every one of his works.
Streams of color carry the heroes of the story to the very edges of the picture, the characters are pushed out of the frame by a stream of color; what happens in the picture - colorful, magical, ritual - is more significant than their fate.
"The Four Sons of Doctor Linde." Edvard Munch. 1903
“The Four Sons of Doctor Linde” by Munch (1903) and “The Schuffenecker Family” (1889) by Gauguin; Gauguin's “Women on the Seashore. Motherhood" (1899) and "Mother and Daughter" (1897) by Munch are similar to such an extent in all respects that we have the right to talk about a single aesthetic, regardless of North and South. It is tempting to attribute stylistic commonplaces to the influence of Art Nouveau, but here we are witnessing the overcoming of Art Nouveau.
We are talking about a medieval mystery played out by artists on the threshold of the twentieth century.
The images they created were created according to the recipes of the Romanesque masters - the fact that their attention was focused on cathedrals (in the case of Gauguin this is especially noticeable, he often copied the compositions of the tympanums of cathedrals) - the Art Nouveau style is partly to blame for this. However, medieval reminiscences do not cancel, but rather prepare, the finale.
"The Schuffenecker Family" Paul Gauguin. 1889
Edvard Munch lived long enough to see the full-fledged return of the Middle Ages to Europe. Munch survived the First World War and lived until the Second. His craving for significance served him badly - in 1926 he wrote several things of a Nietzschean nature, but seasoned with mysticism.
So, he depicted himself as a sphinx with large female breasts (located in the Munch Museum in Oslo). Edvard Munch developed the theme of the Sphinx a long time ago. See the painting “Woman in Three Ages (Sphinx)” (1894, private collection), where the naked woman is called the Sphinx. The artist in this painting argues that the feminine principle reveals its powerful essence during the period of maturity: the painting depicts a fragile young lady in white and a sad old woman in black, and between them a naked and mysterious lady at the time of her sexual prime.
With her legs spread wide, a naked Nordic lady stands on the shore of a lake, her hair caught in the north wind. However, the same Nordic beauty with flowing hair was once called “Madonna” (1894, private collection). Munch’s characteristic mixture of pagan mythology and Christian symbolism had an effect.
And so in 1926, the artist depicted himself as a sphinx, giving himself some feminine features (in addition to the chest, there are also flowing curls, although Munch always had his hair cut short). It should be noted that such a mixture of principles, a completely eclectic mixture of the feminine, pagan, quasi-religious, was characteristic of many visionaries of the 30s.
In the Nordic mysticism of Nazism (see the table conversations of Hitler, the dramas of the early Goebbels or the early works of Ibsen, whom Hitler revered) this eclecticism is present with imperiousness. Probably, Gauguin avoided this melodramatic construction (there is no melodrama in Gauguin’s art at all) due to the fact that he did not feel awe of the feminine principle.
He also painted the painting “Mountain of Humanity”: naked, muscular young men climb on each other’s shoulders, creating a meaningful pyramid similar to those that athletes Rodchenko or Leni Riefenstahl built from their bodies. These are extremely vulgar works - and the resemblance to the magician missionary Gauguin is not visible in these paintings.
In 1932, the Zurich Museum held an extensive exhibition of Edvard Munch (on the threshold of the master's 70th birthday), displaying a huge number of works by the Norwegian along with Paul Gauguin's panel “Who are we?” Where are we from? Where are we going?". It seems that this was the first and, perhaps, the only statement about the similarity of the masters.
Subsequent events took Munch's biography into a completely different story.
Edvard Munch's long life led him further and further along the path of mysticism and greatness. The influence of Swedenborg was gradually reduced by the concept of superman, to which Gauguin was in principle alien, and the Polynesian distances saved him from the latest theories.
The Nordic dream of accomplishment arose organically in Munch - perhaps from the characteristics of Nordic mythology. For the Tahitian paradise of equality, glorified by Gauguin, these Junger-Nietzschean motifs sound completely stupid.
Playing modern and the “new Middle Ages” is good until the game turns into reality.
The combination of pagan principles and flirting with paganism in the spirit of Nietzsche turned into European fascism. Munch managed to live until Goebbels sent him a telegram congratulating “the best artist of the Third Reich.”
The telegram arrived in his remote workshop, in the wilderness, where he felt protected from the temptations of the world - he was generally afraid of temptations.
To Munch’s credit, it will be said that he did not accept Nazism, and Goebbels’ telegram stunned the artist - he could not even imagine that he was paving the way for the myths of Nazism, he himself did not look like a superman - he was shy and quiet. To what extent the retro-Middle Ages allows the autonomous individual to maintain freedom and to what extent religious mysticism provokes the arrival of real villains is unknown.
The southern and northern schools of mysticism give rise to comparisons and fantasies.
The artist’s last self-portrait, “Self-Portrait between a Clock and a Sofa,” tells the viewer how a superman turns to dust.
He can barely stand, a frail, broken old man, and the clock next to him is ticking inexorably, counting down the last minutes of the northern saga.
photo: WORLD HISTORY ARHIVE/EAST NEWS; LEGION-MEDIA; BRIDGEMAN/FOTODOM; AKG/EAST NEWS; FAI/LEGION-MEDIA
Biography and work of Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944)
Edvard Munch's work was influenced by childhood illnesses and the loss of loved ones. The future artist was especially shocked by the death of his fifteen-year-old sister Sophia, only a year older than him.
Sister Inger. 1884. Oil on canvas, 97 x 67. National Gallery, Oslo
As a five-year-old child, he lost his mother to consumption, then his father died in 1889. The artist later said that he considered these factors very important for his personal and artistic development: “Without fear and illness, my life would be a boat without a rudder.”
Sick girl. 1885 - 1886. Oil on canvas, 119.5 x 118.5. National Gallery, Oslo
It is not surprising that Munch’s very important, earliest work, The Sick Girl, is associated with the theme of illness. In 1930, Munch wrote to the director of the National Gallery in Oslo: “As for the painting The Sick Girl, it was painted in the period that I call the “age of the pillow.” Many artists then depicted sick children lying on high pillows.”
In 1887, Munch painted the painting “Jurisprudence”: three law students sit at a round table, surrounded by books. The painting was exhibited at the autumn exhibition in 1887 as one of six works and was met with ironic disdain from critics.
The year 1889 was decisive for Munch. He began with a serious illness, and during his recovery the artist wrote “Spring,” where an autobiographical note clearly sounds: a combination of memories of his sister’s death and his own recovery.
Spring. 1889. Oil on canvas, 169 x 263.5. National Gallery, Oslo
Basically, the painting “Spring” is almost academic in its interpretation. However, the canvas “Summer Night”, painted in the same summer, indicates that the artist established himself in the new European art of the late 19th century and took a step into the 20th century.
Summer night (Inger on the shore). 1889. Oil on canvas, 126.5 x 162. Collection of Rasmus Meyer, Bergen
While both the press and audience stubbornly rejected Munch's work, the artist went to Paris, where he began to get acquainted with the new French art. He attended drawing classes at the Leon Bonn art school and learned about the paintings of Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Pizarro, Manet and Whistler at art exhibitions. It is possible that the canvas “Night in Saint-Cloud” was written under the influence of Whistler’s “Nocturnes”.
Night in Saint-Cloud. 1890. Oil on canvas, 64.5 x 54. National Gallery, Oslo
Two works that appeared in the wake of Night at Saint-Cloud show Munch's work in a different light. A Spring Day at Karl Johannes Gate, painted in 1890 during a short stay in Norway, certainly speaks to the influence of the Impressionists, as does Rue Lafayette, created after returning to Paris.
Spring day at Karl Johannes Gate. 1890. Oil on canvas, 80 x 100. Picture gallery, Bergen
Lafayette Street. 1891. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73. National Gallery, Oslo
Munch spent June, September 1895 and spring 1896 in Paris, making sketches in oil paints. Three canvases with Parisian models indicate that the artist worked in line with the work of such masters as Pierre Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Parisian model. 1896. Oil on canvas, 80.5 x 60.5. National Gallery, Oslo
Model. 1896. Oil on wood, 65 x 49.5. Rasmus Meyer Collection, Bergen
"Frieze of Life:
a poem of life, love and death"
Munch's main work is a work that incorporates all aspects of human existence: in other words, the “Frieze of Life.”
Madonna. 1894 - 1895. Oil on canvas, 91 x 70.5. National Gallery, Oslo
In December 1893, Munch exhibited a new series of paintings in Berlin. The painting "The Voice" was the first in a cycle of six paintings. Later, under the name Love, this cycle became the central section of the Frieze of Life.
“Moonlight” is another painting from this cycle, painted in 1895. The artist's attention is focused on the lunar path on the water. A psychologist would say that the moon pillar represents the masculine principle, and water represents the feminine.
Moonlight.1895. Oil on canvas, 31 x 110. National Gallery, Oslo
The public treated Munch as a crazy madman and considered it a challenge to society when the themes of his works went beyond the boundaries of good taste and morality.
The painting "Maturity", completed in 1894, was not exhibited. But this painting was undoubtedly the predecessor of the “Birth of Love” series.
Maturation.1894. Oil on canvas, 151.5 x 110. National Gallery, Oslo
In Man and Woman, painted in Bergen in 1898, Munch conveys the fatal attraction of the sexes and the threat posed by sexuality.
Man and woman. 1898. Oil on canvas, 60.2 x 100. Collection of Rasmus Meyer, Bergen
The painting with the eloquent title “The Next Day” was painted in 1886 and then was destroyed.
The next day.1894 - 1895. Oil on canvas, 115 x 152. National Gallery, Oslo
The painting "The Kiss", painted in 1897, presents a frank, naked composition. Based on reality, it is a scene of a biographical nature: the room where a man kisses a woman is reminiscent of Munch in Saint-Cloud.
Kiss.1897. Oil on canvas, 99 x 81. Munch Museum, Oslo
At the exhibition in Leipzig, one of the most mysterious in the Frieze of Life cycle was the painting “Ashes”. The dominant of the composition is a woman, she looks directly at us. However, the main attention is focused on the log lying horizontally in the foreground. The log seems to have already turned to ashes.
Ashes.1894. Oil on canvas, 120.5 x 141. National Gallery, Oslo
"The Three Ages of a Woman" (circa 1894) was first exhibited in 1895 in Stockholm under the title "Sphinx" at an exhibition of Munch's works on the theme of love.
Three ages of a woman. Around 1894. Oil on canvas, 164 x 250. Collection of Rasmus Meyer, Bergen
In the famous painting “The Scream” - after 1893 the artist painted 50 more versions of it - we feel the fear and powerlessness of Man in the face of Nature. In his diary, Munch wrote: “I was walking with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I stopped, feeling exhausted, and leaned against the fence - blood and flames shot up over the black and blue fjord and the city - friends continued on their way, and I froze in place, trembling with fear - and felt an endless cry emanating from Nature."