The landscape painter

The aesthetic characteristics of most of the pictures from this period contain a very personal echo, stripped of any baroque convulsion, of the «stylization» in vogue among the painters who were propagating the arabesques of Art Nouveau — Maurice Denis, Serusier, Ranson, Vallotton, and others. Its manifestations are less exuberant in Munch's work, but his forms have become rounded, almost soft, and the lines are flexuous, with the colors arranged in simplified masses.
He painted his best landscapes in this stylistic conception — White Night, The Island (private collection), and Train Smoke (Munch Museet, Oslo) — around 1900. In these canvases, too, Munch displays his most interesting personality as a colorist. A single dominant tone, sometimes a very beautiful blue, places his landscapes beyond realism. Yet they impose themselves upon our gaze with such great power of evocation, and bring to us with such intensity the feeling of a special time of day — one of those spellbinding moments of the northern twilight, for instance, when the unusual clarity of the sky is fixed as if in a refusal to give way before the nocturnal shadows — that a profound current of poetic emotion, felt only through the contemplation of nature, is established between it and us.

White Night
1901

Winter Landscape Near Krageroe
1925

Lubeck Harbor with the Holstentor

The Wave
1921

Noche de verano en Aasgaardstrand

Old Trees

Claro de luna

Moreover, it is strange to note that the almost oneiric impression that emanates from the groups revolving in The Dance of Life reappears in groups of trees in his landscapes, which are stamped with a similar melancholy. Perhaps the spectator must himself have daydreamed for many an hour on the shores and in the immense forests of Norway (as I have done during her pink and green nights) to be aware of the extent to which a fir tree can suddenly appear to be on the verge of escaping from its sylvan shape, ready to spring to life in a human metamorphosis. This is what makes Munch's landscapes so disturbing: a silent thought seems to be thinking itself in a secret, inner plant life.
Among the themes he treated in a number of versions, that of Girls on the Jetty provided the occasion for a series of paintings between 1894 and 1903, all of them in the same style (that of The Dance of Life and the landscapes) and in a similar decor, but with a change of figures or a difference in their positions. The three girls are first seen from behind, leaning on the railing and looking into the water, in which the green mass of a large tree is reflected. One is blond, another a brunette, and the third a redhead, as if Munch wished to synthesize all the natures of woman. (Later we shall see the importance Munch attached to women's hair.) In a 1900 version (Kunsthalle, Hamburg), one of the girls has turned around. Women on the Jetty (Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm) shows us a group of women in the middle of the bridge. All these canvases were painted in Aasgaardstrand, a coastal village on the Oslo fjord, which Munch visited for the first time in 1889, and to which he often returned to work. The bridge theme was to return more than once, even after 1930, in a total of about a dozen painted and engraved works on the subject.

Girls on the Jetty
1901

Girls on a Bridge
1899-1900

Mujeres sobre el puente

Girls on the Jetty

This style, however, with its simplified forms and rather pale colors, apparently did not suit Munch for all the subjects he painted. He had tried to apply it to a not very successful canvas, The Dead Mother (between 1896 and 1899). He repeated the subject around 1900 (Kunsthalle, Bremen), under the same title but in a more realistic style, and here he achieved a great dramatic intensity by depicting the terrified little girl with her back to the bed on which her mother lies and holding her hands to her ears (in a gesture similar to that of the person in The Scream as if death is for her a funereal music that she cannot bear to hear).
Similarly, when he paints a portrait (and throughout his life he was an excellent portrait painter), Munch forgets this symbolizing tendency, in which each form contributes its share of movement to the general arabesque of the painting, in order to concentrate all his attention on the expression of a face. His aesthetic system had nevertheless evolved since the austere portraits of his sisters Laura and Inger, painted between 1881 and 1884.

The Dead Mother

The Dead Mother

The Dead Mother

Inheritance

Junto al lecho de muerte

Junges Madchen am Strande

Munch's favorite model, the one to which he always returned, was himself, and he left innumerable self-portraits. He seems to question this face more intensely in each one, as if hoping to discover in it something new about his own tormented nature.
He had begun painting his own portrait in 1880, during his first year of art studies. The second self-portrait dates from 1881-1882, when Munch was not yet twenty. In it he is handsome Edvard, with features full of a romantic melancholy to which the severe'style of the picture is well suited. By 1886 the treatment had become much more free, almost that of a sketch, except for the essential features of the face — the eyes, nose, and mouth — which he worked out more thoroughly. In 1895 a different man appears in the very beautiful Self-Portrait with Cigarette. Maturity has changed the features; the lips are shadowed by a small moustache, and Munch's gaze has acquired a rather peculiar look that is emphasized by the somewhat eerie lighting of the face. This portrait can be regarded as a prefiguration of the self-portrait In Hell (Oslo, Kommunes Kunstsamlinger), which we have already discussed.
At this time Munch was preoccupied with the tragic side of life. For him, the true meaning of life was understood only in its orientation toward death. A lithograph Self-Portrait of 1895 has a black background and the skeleton of an arm at the bottom of the picture. Perhaps he had seen the 1889 engraving by James Ensor in which the Belgian painter had depicted himself in the form of a skeleton. In any event, the strange thing is that Munch conceived this skeleton depiction of his own hand seven years prior to the day on which he actually lost a finger joint from his left hand during a violent argument to which we shall refer later. (This almost premonitory event can be compared with the case of Victor Brauner, who in 1938 lost his left eye, under similar circumstances, six years after painting a Self-Portrait with Missing Eye and a complete series of pictures composed around the theme of ocular mutilation.)

Self-Portrait with Cigarette
1895

Philosophy, literature, and Symbolist poetry all play an important role in Munch's painting. He saw himself as the poet of the great poem of life, and as such he depicts himself in Self-Portrait with Lyre, a very beautiful drawing of 1897-1898. For several years, especially after 1893, he had been dreaming of a large fresco on a theme dear to his heart, that of Love and Death, for which he made numerous sketches. In 1902 a composition took shape that was to become The Frieze of Life, and on which he was to spend many years working. The composition, divided into four parts — Birth of Love, Bloom and Decay of Love, Fear of Life, and Death — summarizes in one vast synthesis all the ideas and torments that dominated his entire life. As we have seen, many of his pictures are tentative approaches to or echoes of this theme. Moreover, he established a link binding together all his pictures, saying that in order to fully understand his work it was helpful to look at several pictures in juxtaposition, since their significance was better revealed by simultaneous study of the group.
However, the desire to achieve a major ideological work often led Munch to concentrate his attention on the symbolic content of this work, to the detriment of its pictorial expression. We prefer the less ambitious canvases, born of his passionate observation of the simple scenes of intimate life, and which, unbeknownst to him, are in their own way the isolated fragments of a more interesting « frieze of life.»
This is the case with a canvas of 1890, in its 1894-1895 version (the original was destroyed by fire): The Day After. In the image of this woman stretched out on her bed, her unbound hair falling toward the floor, with glasses and bottles on a table in the foreground, there is none of the anecdotal realism that such a subject might imply. The impression of an unbalanced life and thinking deranged by drunkenness emanates with spellbinding power from the simple linear schema on which the painting is built: a surging movement of curves and oblique lines in which the eye searches in vain for a straight line on which to rest.