The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch is one of the best known and most obscure of modern artists. Thanks to recent thefts and retrievals, T-shirts, inflatables, and current auction prices, the traumatized, androgynous creature who dominates The Scream has become, like Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers or Pablo Picasso’s fused profile and full-face views, one of modernism’s instantly identifiable icons. And in addition to this readily parodied, shorthand signifier of anxiety, many of Munch’s other supercharged images have entered the collective consciousness of the art public. Just about anyone with a casual interest in nineteenth-century modernism can call up those deathbed scenes with the pallid, doomed child and the mourning mother, the predatory female nudes with the coiling hair, the despairing man with his head in his hands, the phallic reflected moonlight, or the terrified naked adolescent on the edge of her bed. These signature works amply support Munch’s being classified as a quirky late nineteeth-century Northern painter: a symbolist or a cranky proto-expressionist. These stylized psychodramas and sinuous, Art Nouveau–inflected landscapes make clear, too, that they are set apart by their intensity and heavy breathing from the cooler-headed, Post-Impressionst experiments of even the most passionate of such near-contemporaries as Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Or something like that.
Yet this expedient, familiar view of the artist turns out to be far from accurate.
Yet this expedient, familiar view of the artist turns out to be far from accurate. The label “late nineteenth-century symbolist or proto-expressionist” depends almost exclusively on Munch’s paintings and prints of the 1880s and 1890s, a body of work made when the intense young artist, born in 1863, was in his twenties and thirties—like the bodies of work for which Van Gogh and Lautrec are known. But unlike Van Gogh and Lautrec, both of whom died at thirty-six (in 1890 and 1901, respectively), Munch lived through most of the first half of the twentieth century, continuing to make art until he died in 1944, during the German occupation of Norway, aged eighty and full of honors. Despite this long career, however, the efforts of his last forty-odd years are seldom shown and remain little known. In the same way, pigeonholing Munch as an idiosyncratic Norwegian, a little out of the mainstream, proves to be equally inadequate. I’ll grant the idiosyncrasy, but during the first half of his working life, he spent extended periods in Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, and Weimar, sojourns that crucially shaped his art during his formative years. As a mature artist, too, far from being provincial, he traveled frequently in Europe and exhibited regularly in Germany. In fact, before the rise of National Socialism, Munch was so well known as a progressive painter that after the Nazis took power, his work figured prominently in their notorious “degenerate” art exhibition.
In 2006, “Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul,” a large exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, expanded our conception of the artist by tracing his gradual evolution from competent Scandinavian realist to the author of the emotionally charged works that came to define him. The show charted how the adventurous art and new ideas that the young Munch encountered abroad provoked him to shift from representing what he saw naturalistically to evoking deep feeling. The exhibition allowed us to watch him flirting with Impressionism, making his touch more expressive, intensifying his color, and—most importantly—probing his own darkest experiences as sources for his imagery. (He fueled this psychic research, it seems, with extravagant amounts of alcohol throughout much of his life, but that’s another matter.) It wasn’t exactly news that Munch’s recurring deathbed tableaux had their origins in the death of his mother when he was five, and the loss of his favorite younger sister to tuberculosis when he was fourteen, or that the anguished encounters between bare-breasted sirens and their male victims were apparently inspired by his own tempestuous relationships with women. But it was informative to see how these graphic, economical works evolved out of Munch’s early, straightforward, perceptually based approach.
The selection of later, less familiar works at MOMA also suggested that after 1900 Munch’s work lost much of its edge; he seemed to back away from the emotional revelations of the 1880s and ’90s in favor of more conventional subject matter—street scenes, portraits, and the occasional foray into melodrama—and more conventional space, even though he continued to employ the heightened color and urgent brushwork that distinguishes his most celebrated paintings. The best of the later works were creditable enough—a group of subtly characterized portraits of Munch’s notable friends, the writers Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe (an early fan who contributed to the first monograph on the artist, published in 1894), plus a few unsentimental self-portraits—but the show also included some startling late potboilers. The unavoidable conclusion was that there were excellent reasons why Munch’s reputation rested on the work of his youth.
Now, “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye,” organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou and on view at Tate Modern through October 14, 2012, offers a survey of the artist’s later work that plainly aspires to alter that perception. The selection is remarkably different from the 2006 show, although, of necessity, it also draws heavily upon the vast holdings of the Munch-museet, Oslo, which houses thousands of the artist’s works and the archive that he bequeathed to a grateful city at his death. The exhibition obviously intends to locate Munch definitively in the twentieth century (hence its being seen at Tate Modern) by focusing on how the political events, social upheavals, and technological innovations of the modern world captured his attention and reverberated in his art during the second half of his life. (There’s plenty of evidence, as well, that he never lost his fascination with either his most potent memories or his own image.) Whether the portrait of the artist that emerges is more accurate or less accurate than that drawn by the 2006 show remains open to debate, but the cumulative effect of “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye” is to enlarge conspicuously our understanding of the trajectory of his preoccupations and the character of the work triggered by those preoccupations.
The problem is that, while there are many unfamiliar works on view clearly chosen to support the show’s thesis, we are also often reminded, once again, why Munch’s claim to a place in the history of modernism rests with his confrontational, fraught works of the 1880s and 1890s. There are some provocative and admirable canvases, and relatively few potboilers, but there are no unexpected masterworks to be discovered at the Tate, no revelations that could challenge the usual assessment of when the artist made his most original and powerful works. In fact, “The Modern Eye” suggests that Munch himself shared this view. Early on, we encounter a large gallery demonstrating his long practice of reprising his best known, most sought after images in various media, returning over and over again, across decades, to the deathbed scenes, the dying child, the vampire woman, and more. A possible explanation, we learn, is that Munch held exhibitions, for which he charged admission, and that the repetitions served to replace popular works sold from these shows. But there is also evidence, from the painter’s own comments, that he returned to his early, loaded themes, sometimes isolating and resituating particular motifs, in an effort to recapture the intensity of feeling that drove the first versions of these disturbing images, as if trying to achieve once again what he had achieved early on.
The installation opposes pre- and post-1900 versions of an assortment of these signature works, revealing that the later iterations were often larger in scale, their paint-handling thinner and brushier, sometimes to the point of dissolving into a web of ribbony strokes, and their color more complex and brilliant than the “originals.” The saturated, strongly contrasting chroma of the later reworkings reminds us that Munch must have been well acquainted with Fauvist innovations, while the transparent, sketchy paint application suggests that he was particularly aware of Henri Matisse’s daringly simplified canvases of the period, especially those made after his 1912–13 stay in Morocco. Munch never achieved the radical economy of contour of his French colleague, but in the woodland settings of some of his strongest paintings, tree forms reduced to economical, biomorphic shapes recall Matisse’s landscapes. Since Munch visited Paris with some regularity, both before and after he returned to live permanently in Norway in 1909, and since Paul Cassirer showed Matisse in Germany, where Munch spent long periods, he almost certainly had first-hand experience of the French master’s work. (It’s tantalizing to think that the large Scandinavian contingent among the students enrolled in Matisse’s short-lived school could have provided a link, but Munch, older than both students and teacher, does not appear to have been part of this circle.)
Munch’s self-absorption was not, however, restricted to photography.
“The Modern Eye” includes a good deal of surprising, often informative, material, much of it selected not only to provide a context for Munch’s work, but also to assert his appetite for the latest technology of his times—a key point in the curators’ assertion of the painter’s “modernity.” We learn, for example, that he was a devoted fan of early cinema (occasionally attending showings accompanied by his dog), and, at times, an enthusiastic amateur photographer—the wall text describes him as “keen but intermittent.” Munch acquired an early pocket Kodak in 1902 and used it frequently until about 1910, then purchased another camera in 1926, which he adopted through 1932. The exhibition’s large galleries of paintings, prints, and occasional works on paper are punctuated by more intimate, smaller spaces devoted to (mostly vintage) prints of Munch’s small photographs of landscapes, interiors, and figures; most astonishing is the sheer number of self-aggrandizing photos that the artist took of himself, both close-up heads and longer, full-length shots of him standing in front of his paintings, rather ostentatiously positioned to show his own best angle rather than to reveal the canvases around him. Almost one-third of Munch’s surviving photographs, we learn, are self-portraits, ranging from three-quarter head-shots with a heroic jutting jaw, apparently done with the help of a mirror, to full-length views of the artist in the nude, including a strange image of him painting on the beach, wearing only a rather unconvincing “diaper,” and another unclothed male not far away. (It suddenly reminded me of a truly silly painting of bathers at a nudist beach in MOMA’s show.)
Munch’s self-absorption was not, however, restricted to photography; “The Modern Eye” begins with a group of self-portraits in varied media spanning almost five decades, including a suavely handled painting of a self-possessed youth, made in 1882, and some rather fierce prints made in 1895 and 1912, plus a photograph from about 1930 in which Munch manages to look worn and arrogant at the same time. The exhibition ends, as it begins, with the artist’s engagement with his own image—here a group of self-portrait canvases made between 1905 and 1943, the last year of his life. The paintings—from controlled, solidly constructed evocations of a clearly recognizable individual to sketchy, schematic suggestions of rather generic, aged bald males—document Munch seeming to explore his appearance in different physical states: recovering from a serious illness, suffering from insomnia, or confronting his own mortality, for example. He shows himself looking confrontational, frightened, exhausted, ill, disapproving, even slightly impenetrable, against settings ranging from an expansive cityscape to disorienting interiors.
Sometimes he stares straight out at us; other times he leans in from the side, but none of the painted self-portraits have the bravado of the close-up photographs Munch took of himself, holding the camera at arm’s length, according to the wall texts, and “producing an effect that uncannily anticipates the way people photograph themselves with a camera phone.” Almost none of the compositions of the paintings imply any reliance on those photos. By contrast, the show includes an entire series of paintings, drawings, and prints (plus one rather lumpen sculpture), made between about 1906 and 1909, showing a “weeping nude,” head bowed, standing in front of a bed in a room with busy wallpaper; the obsessively repeated, readjusted image seems to have been based on Munch’s photograph of a nude model, although there also seem to be overtones of Pierre Bonnard’s and Edouard Vuillard’s richly patterned interiors of their early Nabi period. Elsewhere, photographs with double exposures or unfocused images, perhaps made unintentionally, are suggested as precedents for a few late paintings with similar overlaps, blurs, and transparencies—or what the curators call “dematerialization.” But such direct connections are exceptional, even though the curators stress the importance of photographic and cinematic effects on the way Munch structured his work. In support of the idea, newspaper photos and cinema clips of crowd scenes shot from a high angle and horses galloping towards the camera are paired with paintings with shooting perspective or tipped space, often with large figures intruding from the bottom of the canvas or filled with tilted masses of frontal figures.
Such relationships can’t be ignored, but they seem more plausibly interpreted not as deliberate efforts to assimilate new visual possibilities suggested by new technology, but rather as the unwilled responses of a visually alert observer to things he was exposed to, casually, as part of his everyday experience. And it’s important to remember that this kind of theatricality, frontality, and tipping is already present in Munch’s work of the 1880s and ’90s, just as it is in Van Gogh’s most dramatic pictures. The additional influence of modern live theater on Munch is signaled by a section devoted to works made in connection to his collaboration on a 1906 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts directed by a friend. Surprisingly, Munch was not asked to design sets or costumes, but instead to make images of crucial moments in the action to assist the actors in establishing the right mood; these, in turn, led to a series of oblique narrative paintings. To underscore Munch’s engagement with the cinematic, the show includes clips from four short films he made with a handheld Pathé-Baby amateur camera acquired in Paris in 1927. The wall text tells us he ignored the instructions that advised keeping the camera in one place and focused; instead he followed his subjects with his lens, sometimes with wild swings and jerks. For the curators, this is proof of Munch’s independent, experimental mind. Maybe. The clips are unwatchable. It’s impossible to focus on anything amid the visual chaos. The kindest interpretation is that the technology was primitive and the film antiquated, but it’s impossible not to suspect sheer lack of ability on the part of the filmmaker.
Another kind of optical chaos is documented in a small gallery devoted to works that Munch made in 1930, after suffering a hemorrhage in his right eye—the “good” eye that he used for painting, he said—that severely compromised his sight for several months and prevented him from working. As his vision returned, the anxious artist, terrified that he would never see properly again, made watercolors and drawings of what he was able to perceive: mostly centralized images of circular forms, many interrupted by dark spots that he turned into threatening birds. While it’s interesting to watch Munch investigating the nature of sight itself (with the results undoubtedly charged by his fear of losing his sight entirely), most of the works are not very compelling. Only one— unusually large, graphic, boldly colored, and essentially abstract—rewards our attention for its own merits, rather than as an illustration of pathology. Narrative and meaning otherwise take precedence over aesthetics.
Narrative and meaning otherwise take precedence over aesthetics.
In a sense, that phrase sums up the effect of “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye.” An idea about the artist seems to have dominated the selection of works, rather than their qualities as works of art. Knowing that Munch explored newly available technology—taking photographs, going to the movies, and making films (however inept)—is undoubtedly of interest and certainly adds something to how we consider his works, but it doesn’t make the problematic paintings any better. And while there are some extremely engaging, unusual works, such as a few all-over “snow scenes” in which dense swipes of white paint isolate intensely colored lines and small patches of brilliant hues that suggest fragmented figures and settings, there are a great many problematic or less-than-wonderful works in the show. It’s easy to understand, however, why this exhibition would be done now. One of the most striking aspects of Munch’s late work is its diversity. He had many different ways of putting on paint, from palimpsests of thin, scribbled strokes to detached patches of dense pigment. His imagery ranged from relatively straightforward portraits and self-portraits to not-quite-decipherable narratives, while his compositions varied from panoramic, acutely tilted expanses to insistent, layered, frontal assemblies, constructed with elements that could be monumental in relation to the entire field or oddly small and scattered. This kind of variety and multiplicity is now more acceptable to the art world than it was in the days of the “signature image”—which is how Munch’s readily recognizable works of the 1880s and ’90s can be described. And, of course, nothing is more fashionable, these days, than revealing the dependency of an artist known as a painter and printmaker on the mechanical medium of photography. Still, “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye” makes its case convincingly enough and, as I said earlier, it vastly enlarges our understanding of the artist’s concerns and his evolution over a long and distinguished career—something much needed, given the general obscurity of what the artist did in the second half of his life. What the show doesn’t do, however, is make us forget the works that established Munch’s reputation in the first place. They remain truly memorable.
