Legacy 19- Munch

Munch without Screaming

Jul 27, '12 6:45 AM for everyone

I thought I had better catch the Tate Modern’s Edvard Munch show before London goes into lockdown for anybody who isn’t going to the Olympics.  

It’s a slightly odd affair, and not just because it almost ostentatiously does not include any of the versions of the Norwegian’s one genuinely iconic work.  It is an exhibition with a mission and a message.   The overt message is summarised in the exhibition sub-title “The Modern Eye”.   Munch died in 1944 but he’s regularly typecast as a late 19^th Century Expressionist, as if he never put brush to canvas after the nervous breakdown which consigned him to a sanatorium in 1908.   In fact (this argument goes), he was prolifically productive for the rest of his life.   Even though he did go back over familiar themes and rework them, he was not creatively played out but remained open to the influence of new artistic movements (Cubism and Futurism get name checked) as well as the new technologies of photography and film.  The mission therefore is to make us look at Munch’s later work with a new eye.

There also seems to be a more subtle underlying message which one finds articulated in the catalogue, not least by the curator of the Munch museum in Oslo which now oversees the massive collection of some 24,000 pieces which he willed to the city.   This suggests that the common stereotype of Munch as a gloomy misogynistic Nordic neurotic who never really got over his alcohol-fuelled mental collapse and increasingly sank into reclusive isolation in his suburban Oslo home, ignored by the Norwegian cultural and artistic world, is somewhat wide of the mark.    Munch, we are told, loved the movies (Charlie Chaplin being particular favourite) and dabbled in amateur film making himself.   He was entertaining company.   Far from being a reclusive misanthrope, he contributed generously to assisting German artists facing financial ruin in the 1922 Great Inflation.  He took a lively interest in world events.   Rather than being marginalised in his homeland, as early as 1908 the newly independent Norwegian state saw fit to honour him with the Order of St Olav and his work was more appreciated in Norway in the 1910’s and 20’s than ever with prestige commissions from public bodies like the University of Oslo coming his way.   The only point at which this reclusive image reflected reality, it was for reasons which were very much to Munch’s credit.  During the German occupation of Norway he avoided all contact with the occupation authorities and their Norwegian collaborators, effectively scuppering plans for a major retrospective show of his art to mark his 80^th birthday in 1943 (itself an ironic project under the circumstances since Munch’s works had been expelled from German collections in the 1930’s as part of the Nazi drive against “degenerate” art- a reminder that German military occupation authorities rarely chose to impose Nazi cultural policies in their bailiwicks).  The choice of one of Munch’s most tranquil and summery images for the exhibition publicity poster (see above) perhaps plays to this agenda.

I have to say I’m only half persuaded by this attempt to show that Munch was really a regular guy.  I don’t have any trouble accepting that what one might call the standard view of Munch is something of a caricature- albeit one to which he himself contributed mightily.   It is not entirely surprising that a slightly sinister reputation surrounds a man who blew part of a finger off in a suicide attempt when his girlfriend dumped him and who threatened friends with a rifle when they came visiting to try to make up after a drink-fuelled fight.   He chose to blame his mental troubles on “artistic persecution” as much as booze even though all the indications are that, certain negative reviews in Norwegian newspapers apart, his work was generally well received- particularly in Germany, which was his second home for most of the 1890’s and 1900’s. 

His cinema going is well enough documented- one of Norway’s early cinema owners and film producers, Halfdan Nobel Roede, was a major patron of Munch’s art, giving the term “Picture house” a new dimension by putting an art gallery of Munch’s works in one of his cinemas.   It was however somewhat eccentric.  Munch always went with his dog (he was a doggy type, with a procession of shaggy mutts at his heels).   If the dog barked, Munch would conclude that he or she was bored and leave the cinema forthwith- which must have endeared him to other patrons.    I’m not sure, however, that being a voracious newspaper reader entirely contradicts the view that he was somewhat detached from day to day life.   The images which filter through from the newspapers into his art seem to have been weighted towards scenes of violence- executions during the Finnish Civil War which followed the Russian Revolution, for instance- merely reinforcing the undertow of violence to be found in quite a lot of Munch’s art.  Paintings of workers engaged clearing  snow are read as evidence for socialist sympathies- well, maybe, but even to the extent that they can be taken as representing the dignity of labour or implicit criticism of social injustice the message is pretty diluted and the depictions don’t suggest much real commitment to any cause designed to better their lot.  The most visible example of engagement with current events cited is his fondness for rushing off to fires (very common in what was still a largely wooden built environment in early 20^th Century Norway) and sketching the efforts of the fire fighters.    Even if the story that he once tried to direct their efforts to get a better aesthetic effect is almost certainly apocryphal, there is a certain degree of relish in his depictions of fire scenes.   Read against the grain, a lot of the material designed to de- exoticise Munch simply confirms the traditional view that he was a rather strange and difficult man with more than his fair share of demons to deal with.  Above all, his paintings tend to confirm the traditional view.

What about the more overt claims to re-invent Munch as a Modernist?   Again these are only partially persuasive.  Admittedly the argument is not helped by the way the show is organised.  Each gallery focuses on a different aspect of Munch’s work, without much overt chronological cohesion.  The result is a bit like a visual version of a published set of the papers presented at a conference on a given theme; slightly bitty and fragmented.   Some of the galleries have a tight thematic and chronological focus.  One covers with material produced during the period when Munch was closely involved in collaborations with the theatre director Max Reinhardt in staging Ibsen’s “Ghosts” in Munich. It’s interesting that, at least on the current show’s evidence, Munch seems to have engaged much more obviously with writers, dramatists like Ibsen and Strindberg and theatre folk than with other painters- the catalogue’s attempts to trace linkages and influences from the work of other painters is riddled with tell-tale phrases like “must have seen”.  In theatrical terms Reinhardt was undoubtedly a modernist- but the art Munch produced during and immediately after their collaboration (which in any event predated the 1908 breakdown) was thoroughly claustrophobic and angst ridden in atmosphere and expressionist in sentiment.  Another focuses on Munch’s response to what must have been a  terrifying experience in the 1930’s when he suffered from a blood clot in his stronger right eye and must have feared that he would go blind.   It is rather impressive and even moving to see the artist coping with this event and even using it as a springboard for experiment as he painted the world as it appeared through his damaged eye.   This links well with one of the wider themes in the exhibition- Munch’s fascination with self-portraiture- but its links to the modernism agenda are less immediately apparent.

Munch’s engagement with photography and amateur film making gets a substantial role.   Munch owned a series of cameras and even taught one of his sisters the mysteries of photography (sadly none of her efforts are in the show).  Though this isn’t exactly foregrounded, it also looks as if photography was an episodic interest rather than a long term passion- his own view of photography was that it would never replace painting until it was possible to take photos in Heaven or Hell.   Munch’s photographs are certainly intriguing- lots of self portraits and, in a slightly disconcerting mirroring process, lots of pictures of his own paintings.   These are often taken from self-consciously “odd” angles which accentuate the off-key perspective in the paintings- or possibly simply accept the severe shortcomings of the rather basic camera he was using, which notoriously applied wide angle lens effects to just about everything.  He also played around with focus and exposure times fro artistic effect.    Whether this is quite as unique as the exhibition (particularly the catalogue) wants to suggest is less clear.  Munch was hardly the only late 19^th/early 20^th century artist to be a keen photographer and even if many of his peers used their camera mostly to take family snapshots (the catalogue suggests, perhaps tongue in cheek, that Munch’s pictures of his own paintings counted as family shots in his case) others did experiment with the possibilities of the medium.   Munch’s dabbling with amateur film making is even harder to judge.  It again seems to have been rather short lived.   Judging from information in the catalogue, film cameras were being marketed as middle class consumer items in the 1920’s with instruction manuals which wildly understated the complexity and limitations of the kit on offer (there must have been an awful lot of dissatisfied customers…..).   It’s very hard to judge whether the oddities of Munch’s films (jumpy images, focus problems, chopping the head off a statue) are conscious artistic choices or simple incompetence- I have the heretical suspicion that it might have been the latter.

None of which necessarily invalidates the general proposition that Munch’s painted works show the influence of photography and early cinema- the former through the deliberate use of “faulty” perspectives encountered in photographs taken by enthusiastic amateurs, the latter by adapting various techniques characteristic of early commercial films (people or animals coming straight at the camera lens, for instance).   It isn’t at all difficult to find paintings which exploit the unsettling impact of a high perspective, couple with a figure apparently rushing straight at the viewer, to great effect.    “Red Virginia Creeper” positively invites speculation on what horrors may have been perpetrated within the blood red walls of the house in the background and other paintings on show evoke the same effects in a slightly less overtly melodramatic way.  

 Elsewhere a runaway horse comes galloping out of the canvass and a slightly ominous crowd of workers troop a\way from the factory, possibly to go home, possibly setting off on a demonstration.  

A general air of mobility- but also of unease- hangs over this art.   While one can find purely “artistic” sources for the approaches Munch adopts (the high plunging perspective can be found in Japanese art, itself fashionable in advanced European artistic circles when Munch was learning his trade) it would be risky to deny the influence of the new technologies of the 1890’s, whether taken on directly or absorbed via awareness of movements like Futurism and its predecessors (I was surprised that the picture of factory workers didn’t prompt a name check for Pellizza da Volpedo’s massive “Fourth Estate”, even if only as a contrast between the Italian artist’s heroic idealisation of the workers and Munch’s much more downbeat depiction).   Whether it’s altogether flattering to Munch to think in this way is another matter.  His experiments in movement are pretty tame by comparison with Balla or Boccioni, for instance, but their works- and indeed early films – rarely manage to distil the barely veiled menace and sense of alienation evoked by Munch’s work at its best.

The exhibition makes quite a bit of Munch’s habit of returning again and again to themes which he had painted before.   While it appears that Munch did face criticism in some quarters during his own lifetime for this practice, the presentation is oddly defensive- as Munch himself quite fairly observed, nobody seems to hold the repeated depiction of the same scenes against artists like Monet or Cezanne or regard it as proof of deficient artistic inspiration.    In Munch’s case there were a lot of practical reasons for self-repetition.   Munch hated to sell his work but was open to accepting commissions to come up with a second version if a patron was taken by a particular work.  Because he hated to sell his works, he also relied heavily on the takings from touring exhibitions of his paintings; if he did yield to pressure and sell a high profile piece, he was apt to replace it with something on a similar theme in order to meet customer expectations (a practice which got him into some problems over reproduction rights).    In any case, we are told, he never quite painted the same scene twice but rather reworked it in different ways over time (indeed in some cases the re-workings are structurally and formally so different as to be variations on a theme rather than repetitions).   All of which is reasonable enough.  It is however rather revealing that the scenes which, for whatever reasons, he kept returning to are those which fit best with the rather negative stereotype of his personality- kisses which turn into vampire attacks, sick (probably dying) little girls, couples with their back to the viewer, wrapped in isolation and alienation or threatening, out of control, female figures.  It may be worth adding that, whatever may have changed, the later versions retain the full impact of the originals.   Munch is rarely a comfortable painter.    Perhaps that was what his public wanted and expected (which may throw an interesting light on them) but his constant repetition of these themes does suggest that this was more than just a matter of commercial convenience.

One subject constantly repeated in Munch’s work was himself.   He was an inveterate self-portraitist from the start of his artistic life to its very end.   It’s tempting to see this as an expression of egotism and self-obsession.  There is probably something in that but it isn’t the whole story.   Whatever else he may have done, Munch did not flatter himself; as he great older and frailer he depicted his physical decline with a grim honesty.  There is something rather touching in watching the decline from the rather rakish young Bohemian of his early self portraits to the haggard sick old man waiting for death between the clock which ticked his remaining life away and the bed he expected to die in (see below for the latter)- and something rather impressive about the latter, facing extinction with a grim resolve to experience the event to the full.  This genre was covered by an exhibition at the Royal Academy a few years back so there were few real surprises here but it remained one of the most impressive parts of the show.