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"I think people aren’t nearly as cool as they pretend to be at naked parties, but whatever, I’m a pessimist."
-- Birk Oxholm, The Naked Truth
Edvard's Angst
Susanna Berger
Edvard Munch:
The Modern Life of the Soul
The Museum of Modern Art
February 19 through May 8, 2006
Munch's paintings and works on paper capture his own take on the alienation and psychological turmoil of modernity in fin de siècle Northern Europe. We sense that each individual is frantically struggling to maintain an autonomous identity in a rapidly urbanizing society: bodies become undifferentiated masses of color, often merging into other bodies, or disintegrating into the work's background. As these melting figures desperately attempt to hold onto their identities, they confront the viewer with glaring, wide-open eyes that searchingly communicate with the spectator. Many of these works encourage the viewer to empathize with, even step into the shoes of, the human subject in the painting. By painting figures that at once both stare imploringly out at the viewer and also invite the viewer to imaginatively embody their own positions, Munch suggests that the modern viewer is just as alienated as the figures in his paintings. To understand Munch's fixation on alienation and psychological despair, one might consider the negative impacts of urbanization. Patricia G. Berman notes the drastic speed of rising population in the instructive exhibition catalogue, writing that "At the time of Munch's birth in 1863, fifteen percent of Norwegians lived in large towns and cities, and by 1891, nearly one out of five [or twenty percent of] Norwegians lived in cities."1 Munch also spent a good amount of time in post-Haussmann Paris with its new, wide avenues and boulevards, and in Berlin, which Berman tells us "was assailed [during this time]... as an unstable morphology, a monstrosity of materialism and eclecticism."2 In his 1903 essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," Georg Simmel, a sociologist of modernist Europe, describes the struggle of the individual against fast-paced urban change. He writes, "The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."3 Munch shows modern figures engaged in exactly this struggle "to preserve autonomy and individuality" in a rapidly changing world.
The Dance of Life (1899-1900), oil on canvas.
The first room of the exhibit presents the earliest works of Munch's career in which he experimented with different painterly techniques, particularly Norwegian Naturalism and French Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. Munch's 1891 oil painting Rue Lafayette depicts one of Paris's premier commercial roads in bright daylight. A man dressed in an elegant top hat and long coat, the characteristic outfit of a flâneur, or gentlemen dandy, leans over a balcony to observe the bustling boulevard below him. Rue Lafayette can easily be compared to both Claude Monet's 1873 Boulevard des Capucines and Gustave Caillebotte's 1880 Un Balcon: Boulevard Haussmann. In both of these Impressionist works we see a similar flâneur looming over the city from a balcony. Not only does the subject matter of the painting belie Munch's affinity for Impressionist subject matter—particularly given the fact that Munch may have executed this work from Caillebotte's apartment—but the free brushstrokes also indicate his affinity for Impressionism's stylistic advances.4
In Rue Lafayette Munch's flâneur is neither merged into his surroundings nor staring directly at the viewer, yet one can find in this early work a reflection of the loss of individuality that is symptomatic of life in the metropolis. Art historian James H. Rubin writes:
The eye, it could be said, was at the centre of 'I'- the self; the flâneur's sharp insights reaffirmed individuality in a context where it was under siege. In addition, the rapid pace of the urban experience made forms of contact other than the visual virtually impossible and made guesswork about the lives of others both a necessity and a fascinating adventure."5
Thus, we can understand the flâneur's interest in watching the metropolis from his balcony as indicative of a struggle to reassert himself, his "I." His position on this balcony also allows him to see everything and turns him into a powerful, almost omniscient, figure. In this painting, vision, the sense that so many of Munch's characters seem to call upon to form a bond with the viewer, becomes the most effective means by which the flâneur can set himself apart from those around him: he asserts his individuality by standing above the crowds and looking down at them. Significantly, the flâneur's face is represented as an indistinct mass of paint, which suggests that the viewer can imagine anyone standing there; the flâneur acts as a placeholder for both the artist and the spectator.
In contrast with the flâneur's indistinct face in Rue Lafayette, Munch's face is well-defined face and his piercing gaze confronts the viewer disconcertingly in the 1881-1882 Self Portrait, also displayed in the first room. His expression is dramatically critical: his brow is furrowed and the left side of his face is obscured by a shadow, which serves to augment his tense stare. As many as seventeen self-portraits are interspersed throughout the exhibition and although Munch's body and surroundings change, his unflinching, sinister eyes consistently remain an integral part of each image. Usually Munch's head faces the viewer directly, as in his 1895 lithograph Self-Portrait (with Skeleton Arm), where it seems impossible for the spectator to escape his stare. He shows himself as a disembodied head underscored by a white skeleton arm, which is curiously positioned at the bottom of this work and establishes Munch's battle with his own mortality. His eyes stare at us assertively even as his body has died away.
Munch's other figures possess similarly striking gazes. For instance, in his 1889 oil painting entitled Portrait of the Author Hans Jaeger, the philosopher and novelist looks out at us from under his hat with acute intensity. His eyes, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, loom even as he disappears before our eyes—the blue of Jaeger's coat fuses with the blue couch he is resting on and he drowns in his environment. In Angst, a harrowing oil painting from 1894, Munch depicts a crowd of figures walking towards the viewer. Describing the subject of this work, Munch wrote, "I saw all the people behind their masks—smiling, phlegmatic—composed faces—I saw through them and there was suffering—in them all—pale corpses who without rest ran around—along a twisted road—at the end of which was the grave."6 The figures' dark coats merge together to form a shadowy mass of black and blue, and members of the crowd seem to be crying out for help, confronting the viewer directly with vacant yet poignant stares that suggest the verge of hysteria. Munch notes: "when seen as a whole, art derives from a person's desire to communicate with another. All means are equally good."7 His characters, peering out of the canvas, attempt to communicate with the viewer with such urgency that they are blind to those around them. The fact that his figures assert themselves similarly, through beady eyes looking for outside attention, makes their quest for individuality seem all the more tragic and hopeless. The figures crowding in Angst reach out to us desperately dissolving into one another, as we are unable to heed their pleading gazes.
The exhibition comes together in the second room, which features Munch's 1892 oil painting Despair, in which Munch represents himself under a fiery sky. Although no one meets our gaze, the painting nevertheless captures the moment in which Munch realizes the extent of his own alienation. His pose is stooped as he stares into the distance, poetically evoking the dread of loss that we see in the eyes of so many of Munch's figures. In this painting, an early version of his renowned Scream, Munch aimed to capture a psychological drama that he had experienced a few years earlier. In a diary entry he writes: "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."8 Munch depicts himself as a flâneur standing on a bridge, which serves as a liminal space between two worlds: the past world of contact with other autonomous individuals and the future world of isolation, alienation, and despair. His clothing and the landscape surrounding him are painted in similar blue-black hues. The wide beige brushstrokes of his face obscure his features; even in this autobiographical framework, Munch allows the viewer to imagine himself as the represented figure. The blood red sky emphasizes the intensity of Munch's psychological despair as he experiences his tragic epiphany and hears that "loud, unending scream piercing nature."
Though the exhibition includes two 1895 lithographs of Scream, one heightened with watercolor, the most famous version of the painting is not part of the show. However, these two versions of Scream are compelling in that they both depict with expressionist anguish Munch's moment of existential despair. Munch faces the viewer head-on with wide-open eyes and a gaping, oval mouth. The figure's hands frame his skull-like head and thereby emphasize the intensity of his shock.
One gruesome painting turns the emphasis from psychological to physical suffering in the third and final room of the exhibition. In his 1902-1903 oil painting On the Operating Table, Munch paints himself lying in a hospital bed on a blood-stained sheet, being inspected by a crowd of doctors and medical students. The painting shows the aftermath of Munch's quarrel with his estranged fiancée Tulla Larsen in 1902, when he shot his hand by accident as both were fighting for his gun. Another painting showing Munch in physical pain is his 1930 oil canvas Self-Portrait During the Eye Disease I, in which the artist is standing in his bedroom in Ekely, Norway. In May 1930, Munch went almost completely blind after a blood vessel burst in his right eye. With his painterly, swirling brushstrokes and bright red pigment, both Munch's body and the room disintegrate into a churning pool of blood. The threat of blindness not only jeopardized his identity and individuality, but also his very position as an artist. Munch had learned earlier that one must suffer for one's art. Forty years before painting Self-Portrait During the Eye Disease I, Munch declared: "All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart's blood. Art is your heart's blood."9 It almost seems as though the heavens were mocking him by turning this metaphorical statement into a tragic reality. Yet from his earliest years, Munch's life was nothing short of tragic: his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, his older sister Sophie died of the same illness eight years later, and he himself suffered from bullet wounds and blindness. MoMA's masterful exhibition presents us with the trajectory of this tormented yet remarkable artist. From early stylistic experimentations, to studies of psychological effects, to blood-saturated explorations of physical pain, Munch's works deal with the turmoil of the individual struggling to maintain an identity in a modern world.
1 Patricia G. Berman, "Edvard Munch's 'Modern Life of the Soul,'" Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 42.
2 Berman, 43.
3 The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, Ed. by Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M, Przyblynski, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51.
4 Jane Panetta and Claire Gilman, "Catalogue of Plates," Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 203.
5 James H. Rubin, Impressionism, (New York: Phaidon, 1999), 30.
6 Jane Panetta and Claire Gilman, 210.
7 Quoted in Reinhold Heller, "'Could Only Have Been Painted by a Madman'—Or Could It?" Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 24.
8 Jane Panetta and Claire Gilman, "Catalogue of Plates," Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 211.
9 Quoted in Tina Yarborough, "Public Confrontations and Shifting Allegiances: Edvard Munch and the Art of Exhibition," Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 65.
SUSANNA BERGER is a junior majoring in Philosophy and concentrating in Art History. She is the Arts and Literary Editor of The Current.