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The proto-Expressionists
The practice of referring to the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch
(born at Loeten on December 12, 1863; died at Ekely, near Oslo,
on January 23, 1944) as either a precursor or one of the most
typical representatives of Expressionism has encouraged the
continued existence of several misunderstandings. In countries
like France and England, whose knowledge of the movement was
belated and superficial, one such misunderstanding surrounds the
movement defined by this name in Germany. In the latter country
it is a movement based in part on national sociological
viewpoints, with a Nordic extension; in the former, in contrast,
only its aesthetic aspect has been retained. Another
misunderstanding has sprung up around the subject of Munch
himself: although his Expressionist paintings are his best-known
works, a major portion of his work lies completely outside this
classification.
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This book is an
attempt to shed some light on the confusion that still surrounds
these questions.
As in the case of Impressionism (exclusive of its revolutionary
technique, however), it is possible to see in Expressionism, on
the one hand, an aesthetic characteristic that is not restricted
to any one period, and on the other, a movement consisting of a
small number of artists and existing within a clearly delimited
period. Awareness of Expressionism has been complicated and made
uncertain by the fact that this aesthetic characteristic, which
(from our point of view) can be found in a certain number of
painters, is not the only one on which the artists in the German
movement based their work.
So true is this that the European Expressionist Exhibition,
organized by and first shown at the Munich Haus der Kunst, and
subsequently shown in 1970 at the Musee National d'Art Moderne
in Paris (like the 1974 Edvard Munch Exhibition, which also
traveled from Munich to Paris), inevitably startled its French
visitors, who were disconcerted to see paintings that in no way
corresponded to their idea of Expressionism: abstract pictures
by Kandinsky, for example, and works by Klee, Macke, Gauguin (as
a precursor of Expressionism), Mondrian, and Pascin.
It is easier, according to our conception, to define the
attitude and the aesthetic system of the Expressionist painter
than to explain why so many artists, novelists, poets, and
dramatists have been included under this single heading. It
would be helpful, then, to more closely define the nature of
this painting, so that we may understand to what extent Edvard
Munch is a part of it.
In its most obvious style of representation, Expressionist
painting is lyric and dramatic. It tends to stretch human
emotions, and in particular the emotions of sorrow and anxiety,
to a point of pronounced tension. It is a style of painting that
captures the sadness, unhappiness, and fear that imprison
humanity, and thus it is first and foremost a drama in which
attention is concentrated on the message communicated to us by
the characters. Pure landscapes may also be called
«Expressionist,» but only when the character conferred upon them
is able to endow them with an expression suggesting or revealing
a human emotion.
Let us immediately consider an example of Munch's work that is
typically representative of Expressionism: the painting entitled
The Scream, the very title of which seems to
summarize all the definitions applicable to this style of
painting. By analogy with the expression of thought, we could
say that the Expressionist style cannot be satisfied with
speech, still less with a murmur; it requires that action by
which the human being liberates himself from an emotional
impulse that originates in a source more instinctive and less
easily analyzed than thought, and which stands outside the logic
of spoken language: shouting. In Munch's painting, the cry
dominates the composition and imposes itself directly upon our
vision by the almost central position in the foreground occupied
by the open mouth of the figure holding its head in its hands.
The person uttering it is walking along a road that disappears
into the distance, and his back is turned to a landscape in
which an expanse of dark blue water contrasts with the red bands
streaking across a yellow sky. The cry uttered by this person in
the grip of an unknown terror would not produce such a powerful
impression upon us were it not for the way in which the painter
has been able to suggest, by using the technique applied in
depicting the landscape, the inner agitations that impart to
this cry its powerful motivation. The entire landscape beyond
the railing appears in a movement of sinuous lines in which the
trails of paint, with their soft and indecisive shapes, are as
it were an image of the uncertainty, instability, and wavering movement
of thought, in which the torment of anxious man originates and
grows with an encroaching, confining power. Munch relates the
origin of this painting in a few lines written on the back of a
lithograph of 1895 in which he repeated this theme.
«I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set, and
the sky turned blood red. I felt a touch of melancholy, and
stopped and leaned against the railing, feeling extremely
fatigued. Blood-red clouds and tongues of fire were floating
above the city and the blue-black fjord. My friends kept on
walking, but I stood still, trembling with anxiety. I felt as if
I were hearing the immense, infinite cry of nature.»
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The Scream
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This separation from his two friends, whose silhouettes we see
in the background, accentuates the feeling of solitude into
which the anxious man has plunged, as if to plumb the depths of
his distress.
The ethical significance and the aesthetic implications of both
figure and landscape are thus combined into a single
«Expressionist» impulse. Later we shall see that on occasion
Munch seems to have felt that landscape alone sufficed him as a
tool for projecting into his painting the movements of an inner
agitation. He was not the first painter to feel this way. His
earliest precursor along this path is undoubtedly the late
sixteenth-century painter El Greco, whose View of Toledo
(Metropolitan Museum, New York) is a powerfully unreal, highly
dramatized landscape in which a terrible storm seems to be
threatening the city. El Greco did not hesitate to modify the
position of the cathedral in relation to the castle, as if to
highlight them better and so single out these two symbols of
power for divine punishment.
Closer to our own time, the Expressionist landscape had its
influential depictor in Van Gogh, whose mortal torments during
the last two years of his life (1889-1890) sucked whirling skies
and convulsed trees into a veritable pictorial delirium, as in
his paintings of The Olive Trees, Starry Night, and
Cornfield
with Crows. But there were few Expressionist landscape painters
during the first decades of the twentieth century; the principal
ones are Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, August Macke, Otto
Dix, Chaim Soutine, and a solitary Frenchman (who, however, was
of Flemish origin), Vlaminck, and not one of them showed an
exclusive preference for the landscape. As for the still life,
which predominated in the works of those painters of reflection,
the Cubists, it is completely absent from Expressionist
painting. Not a single still life by Munch exists.
The precursors of Expressionism in the depiction of the human
figure go back to a more distant past. A search for hints of it
in an excess of expression given to a face leads us to the work
of Hieronymus Bosch, to his Ecce Homo (Philadelphia Museum) and
particularly to his Carrying of the Cross in the Ghent Museum.
However, in fifteenth-century German painting the figures in
this scene were traditionally depicted in carica-tural form, and
we find this done prior to Bosch, in the 1437 Carrying of the
Cross in Hans Multscher's Wurzach altar (Berlin-Dahlem Museum).
But that great lyrical, fundamentally Expressionist, movement
that animates the Crucifixion in Matthias Griinewald's Isenheim
altar (Colmar Museum) is missing from the Wurzach work. The
Spanish school has its El Greco and its Goya, with their
sometimes distorting emphasis placed on facial expression, but
when all is said and done these are only isolated instances in
the history of painting.
Thus, if we assign a place to Munch's work in relation to the
Expressionist «movement,» which as we said is essentially a
German movement, and when we recall that this movement did not
begin until 1910, by which time Munch's Expressionist period was
over, it is logical to regard the Norwegian painter —at least
as regards those works that, like The Scream, were painted in
the closing years of the nineteenth century — as a precursor of
this form of expression, to which he contributed a major
impetus.
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A melancholy adolescence
The Munch family was a typical representative of the most
responsible class of society in nineteenth-century Norway: its
members were clergymen, army officers, teachers, doctors. It
also included a painter (who was, however, a former officer of
the Engineers' Corps), Jacob Munch, who, after taking lessons
with David, became a traditional portraitist; and a dramatist,
Andreas Munch. Christian Munch, Edvard's father, was a doctor in
the Army Medical Corps.
At Christiania (the old Oslo), where his parents settled in
1864, Edvard's childhood was formed by his father's recitals of
tales from the old sagas. Their mystery-laden adventures found
their way into the book Legends of the Gods and Heroes of the
North, by P. A. Munch, the professor-historian uncle whose
works, read aloud during the long evenings of the Nordic winter,
were a subject of family admiration.
Dr. Munch carefully supervised the education of his five
children, Sophie, Edvard, Andreas, Laura, and Inger. But his
financial difficulties, and the despondency caused by his wife's
death from tuberculosis in 1868, when Edvard was five, left the
household under the cloud of a distressing atmosphere. In 1877
Edvard's beloved fifteen-year-old sister Sophie died of the same
disease. Edvard later left a moving souvenir of her in his
painting The Sick Child. Thus there took shape, around and
within him, that universe of sadness of which he was one day to
say that «Illness, madness, and death are the dark angels who
watched over my cradle and have accompanied me throughout my
life.»
Madness? Undoubtedly it was only the edge of madness, if we are
to see in the painter's words an allusion to the dark crisis of
religious obsession that took possession of his father upon his
mother's death. The father spent entire days, sometimes far into
the night, in prayer in his room, something that terrified
Edvard. As so often happens, his own obsessions were to enter
his painting with images that plunge into his past and bring it
back to life. That of his father appeared in 1902, in the
woodcut Old Man Praying.
Other calamities overtook the Munch family, but the deaths of
his mother and his sister Sophie had already had the effect of
indicating to the future painter a special area in which his
desire to express the impressions made upon him by life could be
fulfilled. Thus he notes in his diary for November 8, 1880, «I
am now determined to become a painter.»
His father wanted him to become an engineer, and with this in
mind had registered him in 1879 at the Technical Institute. But
Edvard spent little more than a year there. In 1881 he enrolled
in the State School of Art and Handicraft, where he worked with
Julius Middelthun and in 1882 studied painting under the
direction of Christian Krohg.
Several works dating from this period, drawn with a somewhat
academic diligence and painted with a rather austere palette,
are still extant. They include several interior scenes, a view
of Christiania, and two portraits that already reveal his power
to express the complete character of a face with great sobriety of
means. One of them, Laura, Aged 14, reappears in the foreground
of a landscape of 1888 entitled Evening Hour at Vrengen, while
his Self-Portrait, painted before he was 20, reveals somewhat
stern good looks, which women found extremely attractive,
although his timidity and shyness, and even at this early age a
feeling of distrust that he never completely succeeded in
overcoming, kept him at a distance from them.
These early works are not yet an augury of the path of his true
personality. At most we find in them an undertone of melancholy
in which his work was to find its inspiration. It sets the mood
for portraits like that of his sister Inger, which
marks the end of his naturalistic period.
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Sister Inger
1892
National Gallery, Oslo
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Sister Inger
1884
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Inger Munch
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Los solitarios
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Couple on the
Shore (from the Reinhardt Frieze)
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Rojo y blanco
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La voz
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Moonlight
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Summer Night´s Dream (The Voice)
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Women on the Beach
1898
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Encounted in Space
1899
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Noche en St. Cloud
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Moonlight
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Atardecer. Laura, la hermana del artista
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Noche de verano
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Golgotha
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Madre e hija
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