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Expressionism
By- Thakur Dhirendranath
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the
beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely
from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in
order to evoke moods or ideas.[1][2] Expressionist artists sought to
express meaning[3] or emotional experience rather
than physical reality.[3][4]
Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style
before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,[1] particularly in Berlin. The
style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist
architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.
The
term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed
expressionist, though in practice the term is applied mainly to 20th-century
works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been
characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such
as Naturalism and Impressionism.[5]
Origin of the term
While the word expressionist was used in the
modern sense as early as 1850, its origin is sometimes traced to paintings
exhibited in 1901 in Paris by an obscure artist Julien-Auguste Hervé, which he
called Expressionismes. [6] Though an alternate view is that
the term was coined by the Czech art historian Antonin Matějček in 1910, as the
opposite of impressionism: "An Expressionist wishes, above
all, to express himself... (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and
builds on more complex psychic structures...
Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through
a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear
essence [...and] are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into
types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and
symbols." [7]
Important
precursors of Expressionism were: the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900),
especially his philosophical novel Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883-92); the later plays of the
Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849-1912), including the
trilogy To Damascus 1898-1901, A Dream Play (1902), The
Ghost Sonata (1907); Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), especially the
"Lulu" plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) (1895)
and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) (1904); the
American poet Walt Whitman (1819-92): Leaves of
Grass (1855-91); the Russian novelistFyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81); Norwegian
painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944); Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-90);
Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1949); [8] Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).
In
1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner,
formed Die Brücke (the Bridge) in the city of Dresden.
This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement,
though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded
group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The
name came from Wassily Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903.
Among their members were Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Auguste Macke. However, the term Expressionism did
not firmly establish itself until 1913. [9] Though initially mainly a German
artistic movement, [10] most predominant in painting,
poetry and the theatre between 1910-30, most precursors of the movement were
not German. Furthermore there have been expressionist writers of prose fiction,
as well as non-German speaking expressionist writers, and, while the movement
had declined in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were
subsequent expressionist works.
Expressionism
is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with
other major 'isms' of the modernist period: with Futurism, Vorticism,Cubism, Surrealism and Dada." [11] Richard Murphy also comments:
"the search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent
that the most challenging expressionists such as Kafka, Gottfried Benn and Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous
"anti-expressionists." [12]
What,
however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early
twentieth-century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of
industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central
means by which expressionism identifies itself as an avant-gardemovement, and by
which it marks its distance to traditions and the cultural institution as a
whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of
representation." [13] More explicitly: that the
expressionists rejected the ideology of realism. [14]
"View of Toledo" by El Greco, 1595/1610 has been indicated to have
a particularly striking resemblance to 20th-century expressionism. Historically
however it is an example of Mannerism.[citation needed]
The term refers to an "artistic style in
which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the
subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a
person." [15] It is arguable that all artists
are expressive but there are many examples of art production in Europe from the
15th century onward which emphasize extreme emotion. Such art often occurs
during times of social upheaval, such as theProtestant
Reformation, German Peasants' War, Eight Years'
War, and Spanish Occupation of the Netherlands, when the rape, pillage and disaster associated with
periods of chaos and oppression are presented in the documents of the
printmaker. Often the work is unimpressive aesthetically,[citation needed]yet has the
capacity to cause the viewer to experience extreme emotions with the drama and
often horror of the scenes depicted.
Expressionism has been likened to Baroque by critics such as art
historian Michel Ragon [16] and German philosopher Walter Benjamin.[17] According to Alberto Arbasino, a difference
between the two is that "Expressionism doesn't shun the violently
unpleasant effect, while Baroque does. Expressionism throws some terrific 'fuck
yous', Baroque doesn't. Baroque is well-mannered."[18]
The style originated
principally in Germany and Austria. There were a number of groups of
Expressionist painters, including Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke. Der
Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, named for a magazine) was based in
Munich and Die Brücke was based originally in Dresden (although some members later
relocated to Berlin). Die Brücke was active for
a longer period than Der Blaue Reiter, which was only together for
a year (1912). The Expressionists had many influences, among them Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and African art.[20] They were also aware of the work
being done by the Fauves in Paris, who influenced Expressionism's
tendency toward arbitrary colours and jarring compositions. In reaction and
opposition to French Impressionism, which emphasized the rendering of the
visual appearance of objects, Expressionist artists sought to portray emotions
and subjective interpretations. It was not important to reproduce an
aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter, they felt,
but rather to represent vivid emotional reactions by powerful colours and
dynamic compositions. Kandinsky, the main artist of Der Blaue
Reiter group, believed that with simple colours and shapes the
spectator could perceive the moods and feelings in the paintings, a theory that
encouraged him towards increased abstraction.
T he ideas of German expressionism
influenced the work of American artist Marsden Hartley, who met Kandinsky in Germany in
1913.[21] In late 1939, at the beginning
of World War II, New York received a great number of major
European artists. After the war, Expressionism influenced many young American
artists. Norris Embry (1921–1981) studied with Oskar Kokoschka in 1947 and
during the next 43 years produced a large body of work in the Expressionist
tradition. Norris Embry has been termed "the first American German
Expressionist". Other American artists of the late 20th and early 21st
century have developed distinct styles that may be considered part of
Expressionism. Another prominent artist who came from the German Expressionist
"school" was Bremen-born Wolfgang Degenhardt. After working
as a commercial artist in Bremen, he migrated to Australia in 1954 and became
quite well known in the Hunter Valley region.
American
Expressionism[22] and American Figurative Expressionism, particularly
the Boston figurative expressionism,[23] were an integral part of American modernism around
the Second World War.Major figurative Boston
Expressionists included: Karl Zerbe, Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, David Aronson. The Boston figurative Expressionists
post World War II were increasingly marginalized by the development of abstract
expressionism centered in New York City. After World War
II, figurative expressionism influenced worldwide a large number of artists and
styles. Thomas B. Hess wrote that "the ‘New figurative painting’ which
some have been expecting as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism was
implicit in it at the start, and is one of its most lineal continuities."[24]
Emil Nolde
By- Thakur
Dhirendranath
Emil Nolde (7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great oil painting and watercolour painters of the 20th century. He is
known for his vigorous brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden
yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality
to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes
and brilliant florals.
Nolde's intense preoccupation with the
subject of flowers reflect his continuing interest in the art of Vincent van Gogh.
Biography
Emil Nolde was born as Emil Hansen near the
village of Nolde (since 1920 part of the municipality of Burkal in Southern Jutland, Denmark), in thePrussian Duchy of Schleswig. He grew up on a farm; his parents, devout
Protestants, were Frisian and Danish peasants. Between 1884 and
1888, he trained as a craftsman and worked in woodcarving, and worked in
furniture factories as a young adult. In 1889, he gained entrance into the
School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe before becoming a drawing-instructor
in Switzerland from 1892 to 1898, eventually leaving this job to finally pursue
his dream of becoming an independent artist. As a child he had loved to paint
and draw, but he was already 31 by the time he pursued a career as an artist.
When he was rejected by the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1898, he spent the
next three years taking private painting classes, visiting Paris, and becoming
familiar with the contemporary impressionist scene that was popular at this
time. He married Danish actress Ada Vilstrup in 1902 and moved to Berlin, where
he would meet collector Gustav Schiefler and artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, both of whom would advocate his work later
in life. He spent a brief time between 1906-1907 as a member of the
revolutionary expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge), and as a
member of the Berlin Secession in 1908-1910, but he eventually left
or was expelled from both of these groups – foreshadowing of the difficulty
Nolde had maintaining relationships with the organizations to which he
belonged. He had achieved some fame by this time and exhibited with Kandinsky’s Der Blaue Reitergroup in 1912, supporting himself through his
art.[1] From 1902 he called himself after his
birthplace.
He realized his unsuitability for farm
life and that he and his three brothers were not at all alike. Between 1884 and
1891, he studied to become acarver and illustrator in Flensburg. He spent his years of travel in Munich, Karlsruhe and Berlin.
Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party from the early 1920s, having become a
member of its Danish section. He expressed negative opinions about Jewish
artists, and considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style.
This view was shared by some other members of the Nazi party, notably Joseph Goebbels and Fritz Hippler.
However Hitler rejected all forms of modernism as
"degenerate art", and the Nazi regime officially
condemned Nolde's work. Until that time he had been held in great prestige in
Germany. 1052 of his works were removed from museums, more than those of any
other artist.[2] Some were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, despite his
protests, including (later) a personal appeal to Nazi gauleiter Baldur von Schirach in Vienna. He was not allowed to
paint—even in private—after 1941. Nevertheless, during this period he created
hundreds of watercolors, which he hid. He called them the "Unpainted
Pictures".
In 1942 Nolde wrote:
There is silver blue, sky blue and
thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or
repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him,
colours are colours, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for
the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.[3]
After World War II, Nolde was once again honoured, receiving the German Order of Merit, West Germany's highest civilian decoration.
He died inSeebüll (now part of Neukirchen).
Apart from paintings, Nolde's work
includes many prints, often in color and watercolor paintings of various sizes, including
landscapes, religious images, flowers, stormy seas and scenes from Berlin nightlife. A famous series of
paintings covers the German New Guinea Expedition, visiting theSouth Seas, Moscow, Siberia, Korea, Japan, and China. The Schiefler Catalogue raisonné of his prints describes 231 etchings, 197 woodcuts, 83lithographs, and 4 hectographs.
Nolde's work is exhibited at major
museums around the world, including Portrait
of a Young Woman and a Child, Portrait
of a Man ca. 1926, andPortrait
of a Young Girl 1913-1914 at
the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia; and Prophet, 1921 and Young Couple 1913 at Museum of Modern
Art, New York City. His
most important print, The
Prophet (1912), is an icon of
20th-century art. Unfortunately, the full power of this print comes out only in
impressions printed on Japanese paper, which are extremely rare.[citation needed]
No less a virtuoso in oils, he
executed Lesende junge Frau (1906), Blumengarten (ohne Figur) (1908) and Blumen und Wolken (1933) which are iconic works in their
own right.[4]
Emil Nolde's work has become the focus
of renewed attention after a painting entitled Blumengarten (Utenwarf)[5] from 1917, which now hangs in the art
museum Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden and has been valued at US$4,000,000, was
discovered to have been looted from Otto Nathan Deutsch, a German-Jewish
refugee whose heirs, including a Holocaust survivor, are asking for its return.
The Swedish government decided in 2007 that the museum must settle with the
heirs.[6] Deutsch was forced to flee Germany
before World War II and left for Amsterdam in late 1938 or early 1939. The
painting was sold to the Swedish museum at an auction in Switzerland, where it had resurfaced in 1967.[7] Other important works:
Edvard Munch
By- Thakur Dhirendranath
Edvard Munch 12
December 1863 – 23 January 1944 was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of
psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced GermanExpressionism in the early 20th century. One of his
most well-known works is The Scream of 1893.
Childhood
Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, to Laura Catherine Bjølstad and Christian Munch, the son
of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura, a
woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie, and
three younger siblings: Peter Andreas, Laura Catherine, and Inger Marie. Both
Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherited their artistic talent from their
mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch and historian Peter Andreas Munch.[1]
The family moved to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1864 when Christian Munch was
appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard's mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite
sister Johanne Sophie in 1877.[2] After their mother's death, the Munch
siblings were raised by their father and by their aunt Karen. Often ill for
much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard would draw to keep himself
occupied, and received tutoring from his school mates and his aunt. Christian
Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained the
children with vivid ghost-stories and tales of Edgar Allan Poe.[3]
Christian's positive behavior toward his children was overshadowed
by his morbid pietism. Munch wrote, "My father was
temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of
psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear,
sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born."[4] Christian reprimanded his children by
telling them that their mother was looking down from heaven and grieving over
their misbehavior. The oppressive religious milieu, plus Edvard's poor health
and the vivid ghost stories, helped inspire macabre visions and nightmares in
Edvard, who felt death constantly advancing on him.[5] One of Munch's younger sisters was
diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Of the five siblings, only
Andreas married, but he died a few months after the wedding. Munch would later
write, "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies—the heritage
of consumption and insanity."[6]
Christian Munch's military pay was very low, and his attempts at
developing a private side practice failed, keeping his family in perennial
poverty.[2] They moved frequently from one sordid
flat to another. Munch's early drawings and watercolors depicted these
interiors, and the individual objects, such as medicine bottles and drawing
implements, plus some landscapes. By his teens, art dominated Munch's
interests.[7] At thirteen, Munch had his first
exposure to other artists at the newly formed Art Association, where he admired
the work of the Norwegian landscape school. He returned to copy the paintings,
and soon he began to paint in oils.[8]
Studies and influences
In 1879, Munch enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, where he
excelled in physics, chemistry, and math. He learned scaled and perspective drawing,
but frequent illnesses interrupted his studies.[9] The following year, much to his
father's disappointment, Munch left the college determined to become a painter.
His father viewed art as an "unholy trade", and his neighbors reacted
bitterly and sent him anonymous letters.[10] In contrast to his father's rabid
pietism, Munch adopted an undogmatic stance toward art, writing in his diary
his simple goal: "in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to
myself."[9]
In 1881, Munch enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of
Christiania, one of whose founders was his distant relative Jacob Munch. His
teachers were sculptor Julius Middelthun and the naturalistic painter Christian Krohg.[11] That year, Munch demonstrated his
quick absorption of his figure training at the Academy in his first portraits,
including one of his father and his first self-portrait. In 1883, Munch took
part in his first public exhibition and shared a studio with other students.[12] His full-length portrait of Karl
Jensen-Hjell, a notorious bohemian-about-town, earned a critic's dismissive
response: "It is impressionism carried to the extreme. It is a travesty of
art."[13] Munch's nude paintings from this
period survive only in sketches, except for Standing
Nude (1887), perhaps
confiscated by his father.[14]
During these early years in his career, Munch experimented with
many styles, including Naturalism and Impressionism. Some early works are reminiscent of Manet. Many of these attempts brought him unfavorable criticism from
the press and garnered him constant rebukes by his father, who nonetheless
provided him with small sums for living expenses.[13] At one point, however, Munch's father,
perhaps swayed by the negative opinion of Munch's cousin Edvard Diriks (an
established, traditional painter), destroyed at least one painting (likely a
nude) and refused to advance any more money for art supplies.[15]
Munch also received his father's ire for his relationship with Hans Jæger, the local nihilist who lived by the code
"a passion to destroy is also a creative passion" and who advocated
suicide as the ultimate way to freedom.[16] Munch came under his malevolent,
anti-establishment spell. "My ideas developed under the influence of the bohemians or rather under Hans Jæger. Many
people have mistakenly claimed that my ideas were formed under the influence of Strindberg and the Germans…but that is wrong.
They had already been formed by then."[17] At that time, contrary to many of the
other bohemians, Munch was still respectful of women, as well as reserved and
well-mannered, but he began to give in to the binge drinking and brawling of
his circle. He was unsettled by the sexual revolution going on at the time and
by the independent women around him. He later turned cynical concerning sexual
matters, expressed not only in his behavior and his art, but in his writings as
well, an example being a long poem calledThe City of Free Love.[18] Still dependent on his family for many
of his meals, Munch's relationship with his father remained tense over concerns
about his bohemian life.
After numerous experiments, Munch concluded that the Impressionist
idiom did not allow sufficient expression. He found it superficial and too akin
to scientific experimentation. He felt a need to go deeper and explore
situations brimming with emotional content and expressive energy. Under Jæger's
commandment that Munch should "write his life", meaning that Munch
should explore his own emotional and psychological state, Munch began a period
of reflection and self-examination, recording his thoughts in his "soul's
diary".[19] This deeper perspective helped move
him to a new view of his art. He wrote that his painting The Sick Child (1886), based on his sister's death,
was his first "soul painting", his first break from Impressionism.
The painting received a negative response from critics and from his family, and
caused another "violent outburst of moral indignation" from the
community.[20] Only his friend Christian Krohg
defended him:
He paints, or rather regards, things
in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the
essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints. For this reason Munch's pictures
are as a rule "not complete", as people are so delighted to discover
for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is
complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and
this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other
generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has
gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.[21]
Munch continued to employ a variety of brushstroke technique and
color palettes throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, as he struggled to define
his style.[22] His idiom continued to veer betweennaturalistic, as seen in Portrait
of Hans Jæger, and impressionistic, as in Rue
Lafayette. His Inger On
the Beach (1889), which
caused another storm of confusion and controversy, hints at the simplified
forms, heavy outlines, sharp contrasts, and emotional content of his mature
style to come.[23] He began to carefully calculate his
compositions to create tension and emotion. While stylistically influenced by
the Post-Impressionists, what evolved was a subject matter which was symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind
rather than an external reality. In 1889, Munch presented his first one-man show
of nearly all his works to date. The recognition it received led to a two-year
state scholarship to study in Paris under French painter Léon Bonnat.[24]
Paris
Munch arrived in Paris during the
festivities of the Exposition
Universelle (1889) and roomed with two fellow Norwegian artists.
His picture, Morning (1884), was displayed at the Norwegian
pavilion.[25] He spent his mornings at Bonnat's busy
studio (which included live female models) and afternoons at the exhibition,
galleries, and museums (where students were to make copies).[26]Munch recorded little enthusiasm for Bonnat's
drawing lessons—"It tires and bores me—it's numbing"—but enjoyed the
master's commentary during museum trips.[27][28]
Munch was enthralled by the vast
display of modern European art, including the works of three artists who would
prove influential: Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec—all
notable for how they used color to convey emotion.[28] Munch was particularly inspired by
Gauguin's "reaction against realism" and his credo that "art was
human work and not an imitation of Nature", a belief earlier stated by Whistler.[29] As one of his Berlin friends stated
later about Munch, "he need not make his way to Tahiti to see and
experience the primitive in human nature. He carries his own Tahiti within
him."[30]
That December, his father died,
leaving Munch's family destitute. He returned home and arranged a large loan
from a wealthy Norwegian collector when wealthy relatives failed to help, and
assumed financial responsibility for his family from then on.[31] Christian's death depressed him and he
was plagued by suicidal thoughts: "I live with the dead—my mother, my
sister, my grandfather, my father…Kill yourself and then it's over. Why
live?"[32] Munch's paintings of the following
year included sketchy tavern scenes and a series of bright cityscapes in which
he experimented with the pointillist style of Georges Seurat.[33]
Berlin
By 1892, Munch formulated his
characteristic, and original, Synthetist aesthetic, as seen in Melancholy (1891), in which color is the
symbol-laden element. Considered by the artist and journalist Christian Krohg as the first Symbolist painting by a Norwegian artist, Melancholy was exhibited in 1891 at the Autumn
Exhibition in Oslo.[34] In 1892, Adelsteen Normann, on behalf of the Union of Berlin Artists,
invited Munch to exhibit at its November exhibition,[35] the society's first one-man
exhibition. However, his paintings evoked bitter controversy (dubbed "The
Munch Affair") and after one week the exhibition closed.[35] Munch was pleased with the "great
commotion", and wrote in a letter: "Never have I had such an amusing time—it's
incredible that something as innocent as painting should have created such a
stir."[36]
In Berlin, Munch involved himself in
an international circle of writers, artists and critics, including the Swedish
dramatist and leading intellectual August Strindberg, whom he painted in 1892. During his four
years in Berlin, Munch sketched out most of the ideas that would comprise his
major work, The Frieze of Life,
first designed for book illustration but later expressed in paintings.[37] He sold little, but made some income
from charging entrance fees to view his controversial paintings.[38] Already, Munch was showing a
The Scream exists in four versions: two pastels
(1893 and 1895) and two paintings (1893 and 1910). There are also several
lithographs of The Scream(1895
and later).
The 1895 pastel sold at auction on 2 May 2012 for US$119,922,500,
including commission.it is the most colorful of the versions[42] and is distinctive for the
downward-looking stance of one of its background figures. It is also the only
version not part of the collection of a Norwegian museum.The 1893 version
(shown here) was stolen and recovered from the National Gallery in Oslo in
1994. The 1910 painting was stolen in 2004 from The Munch Museum in Oslo, but
recovered in 2006 with limited damage.
The Scream is Munch's most famous work and one of
the most recognizable paintings in all art. It has been widely interpreted as
representing the universal anxiety of modern man.[40] Painted with broad bands of garish
color and highly simplified forms, and employing a high viewpoint, the agonized
figure is reduced to a garbed skull in the throes of an emotional crisis.
With this painting, Munch met his
stated goal of "the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own
self".[43] Munch wrote of how the painting came
to be: "I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set;
suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the
fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the
bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind,
shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature."[44] He later described the personal
anguish behind the painting, "for several years I was almost mad… You know
my picture, 'The Scream?' I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in
my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again."[45]
In summing up the painting's impact,
author Martha Tedeschi has stated: "Whistler's Mother, Wood's American Gothic, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisaand Edvard Munch's The Scream have all achieved something that most
paintings—regardless of their art historical importance, beauty, or monetary
value—have not: they communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to
almost every viewer. These few works have successfully made the transition from
the elite realm of the museum visitor to the enormous venue of popular
culture."[46]
In December 1893, Unter den Linden in Berlin held an exhibition of
Munch's work, showing, among other pieces, six paintings entitled Study for a Series: Love. This began a cycle he later called the Frieze of Life—A Poem about Life,
Love and Death. "Frieze
of Life" motifs such as The
Storm and Moonlight are steeped in atmosphere. Other
motifs illuminate the nocturnal side of love, such as Rose and Amelie and Vampire.
In Death in the Sickroom,
the subject is the death of his sister Sophie, which he re-did in many future
variations. The dramatic focus of the painting, portraying his entire family,
is dispersed in a series of separate and disconnected figures of sorrow. In
1894, he enlarged the spectrum of motifs by adding Anxiety, Ashes, Madonna and Women
in Three Stages (from
innocence to old age).[47]
Around the start of the 20th century,
Munch worked to finish the "Frieze". He painted a number of pictures,
several of them in larger format and to some extent featuring the Art Nouveau aesthetics of the time. He made a
wooden frame with carved reliefs for the large painting Metabolism (1898), initially called Adam and Eve. This work reveals
Munch's preoccupation with the "fall of man" and his pessimistic
philosophy of love. Motifs such as The
Empty Cross and Golgotha (both c. 1900) reflect a metaphysical
orientation, and also echo Munch's pietistic upbringing. The entire Friezeshowed for the first time
at the secessionist exhibition in Berlin in 1902.[48]
"The Frieze of Life" themes recur throughout Munch's work
but find their strongest outpouring in the mid-1890s. In sketches, paintings,
pastels and prints, he taps the depths of his feelings to examine his major
motifs: the stages of life, the femme fatale, the hopelessness of love,
anxiety, infidelity, jealousy, sexual humiliation, and separation in life and
death.[49] These themes find expression in
paintings such as The Sick Child (1885), Love and Pain (1893–94), Ashes (1894), and The Bridge. The latter shows
limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over which loom the threatening
shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses. Munch portrayed women either as
frail, innocent sufferers (see Puberty and Love
and Pain) or as the cause of great longing, jealousy and despair (see Separation, Jealousy and Ashes).
Munch often uses shadows and rings of
color around his figures to emphasize an aura of fear, menace, anxiety, or
sexual intensity.[50] These paintings have been interpreted
as reflections of the artist's sexual anxieties, though it could also be argued
that they are a better representation of his turbulent relationship with love
itself and his general pessimism regarding human existence.[51]Many of these sketches and paintings were done
in several versions, such as Madonna, Hands and Puberty,
and also transcribed as wood-block prints and lithographs. Munch hated to part
with his paintings because he thought of his work as a single body of
expression. So to capitalize on his production and make some income, he turned
to graphic arts to reproduce many of his most famous paintings, including those
in this series.[52] Munch admitted to the personal goals
of his work but he also offered his art to a wider purpose, "My art is
really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my
relationship with life—it is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am
constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity."[53]
Still attracting strongly negative
reactions, in the 1890s Munch did begin to receive some understanding of his
artistic goals, as one critic wrote, "With ruthless contempt for form,
clarity, elegance, wholeness, and realism, he paints with intuitive strength of
talent the most subtle visions of the soul."[54] One of his great supporters in Berlin
was Walther Rathenau, later the German foreign minister, who greatly contributed to his success.
The Sick Child (1907)
In 1896, Munch moved to Paris, where he
focused on graphic representations of his "Frieze of Life" themes. He
further developed his woodcut and lithographic technique. Munch's Self-Portrait With Skeleton Arm (1895) is done with an etching
needle-and-ink method also used by Paul Klee.[55]Munch also produced multi-colored versions of
"The Sick Child" which sold well, as well as several nudes and multiple
versions of Kiss (1892)[55] Many of the Parisian critics still
considered Munch's work "violent and brutal" but his exhibitions
received serious attention and good attendance.[56] His financial situation improved
considerably and in 1897, Munch bought himself a summer house, a small
fisherman's cabin built in the late 18th century, in the small town of Åsgårdstrand in Norway. He dubbed this home the
"Happy House" and returned here almost every summer for the next 20
years.[57]
Munch in 1933
The
outbreak of World War I found Munch with divided loyalties, as he stated,
"All my friends are German but it is France that I love."[75] In the 1930s, his German patrons, many Jewish, lost their fortunes
and some their lives during the rise of the Nazi movement.[76] Munch found Norwegian printers to substitute for the Germans who
had been printing his graphic work.[77] Given his poor health history, during 1918 Munch felt himself
lucky to have survived a bout of the Spanish Flu,
the worldwide pandemic of that year.
Later years
Munch spent most of his last two
decades in solitude at his nearly self-sufficient estate in Ekely, at Skøyen, Oslo.[79] Many of his late paintings celebrate
farm life, including many where he used his work horse "Rousseau" as
a model.[80] Without any effort, Munch had a steady
stream of female models, some of whom he may have had sexual relations with,
and who were the subjects of numerous nude paintings.[81] Munch occasionally left his home to
paint murals on commission, including those done for the Freia chocolate factory.[82]
To the end of his life, Munch
continued to paint unsparing self-portraits, adding to his self-searching cycle
of his life and his unflinching series of snapshots of his emotional and
physical states. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labeled Munch's work "degenerate art" (along with Picasso, Paul Klee, Matisse, Gauguin and many other modern artists) and
removed his 82 works from German museums.[83] Adolf Hitler announced in 1937, "For all we care,
those prehistoric Stone Age culture barbarians and art-stutterers can return to
the caves of their ancestors and there can apply their primitive international
scratching."[84]
In 1940, the Germans invaded
Norway and the Nazi party took over the government.
Munch was seventy-six years old. With nearly an entire collection of his art in
the second floor of his house, Munch lived in fear of a Nazi confiscation.
Seventy-one of the paintings previously taken by the Nazis had found their way
back to Norway through purchase by collectors (the other eleven were never recovered),
including The Scream and The
Sick Child, and they too were hidden from the Nazis.[85]
Munch died in his house at Ekely near
Oslo on 23 January 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. His
Nazi-orchestrated funeral left the impression with Norwegians that he was a
Nazi sympathizer.[86] The city of Oslo bought the Ekely
estate from his heirs in 1946 and demolished his house in May 1960.
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