Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, Tate Modern, review
A new exhibition of Edvard Munch's paintings at Tate Modern asks us to see
beyond The Scream, says Richard Dorment
Painted in 1907, the Tate gallery’s version of Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child
is one of the Norwegian’s most emotionally charged images. In it, a pale
and feverish little girl turns towards a woman in black grasping her tiny
hand. As the child rises from her pillow as if to look death in the
face,
her nurse or mother drops her head to her breast, bowed down in grief. All
hope is lost.
As Oscar Wilde said of the death of Little Nell, it would take a heart of
stone not to laugh. Painted at a time when pictures of sick children were
very popular on the continent, the best that can be said of The Sick Child
is that it shares some of the delicate sentimentality you find in Picasso’s
blue and rose periods.
But you aren’t supposed to say that about Munch. Our response to this work
has been profoundly affected by the knowledge that it was inspired by actual
experience –in this case by the early death of the artist’s older sister
Sophie in 1877. Talk about loading the dice. How can you look at a picture
like The Sick Child objectively when Munch had this to say about his art?
“I was born dying. Sickness, insanity and death were the dark angels
standing guard at my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.”
Yes, yes, I know. His childhood was dreadful and his life lurid enough, but
does that really mean that the act of painting was for him a way of
revisiting painful memories dredged from the deepest recesses of the soul?
This is the question at the heart of
Tate
Modern’s wonderfully revisionist Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye. In it,
the 1907 version of The Sick Child hangs opposite a more freely painted
replica of the same picture painted eighteen years later. Both pictures
duplicate the original image, which Munch painted as early as 1885. Since
Sophie’s death took place eight years earlier, and since the kid in the
picture looks nothing like his sister by any stretch of the imagination can
any of these versions be described as an expressionist struggle to describe
subjective truth or to capture the immediacy of a personal tragedy?
When it comes to Munch, we’ve become lazy. Because he often used violent
colour and linear distortion he has come to be seen as a proto
–expressionist, a forerunner of Kokoschka, say, or Otto Dix. But Munch
always had more to do with the controlled sensuality you find in a Post
Impressionism or Symbolism than anything else, and any idea that The Sick
Child represents a morbidly expressionist cry of anguish is dispelled by the
very existence of the numerous replicas Munch was willing to paint to order
or knew he could sell.
What is more, Munch’s style of painting changed with the times – or as a cynic
might say, with fashion. The agitation of the brushwork in The Sick Child
tends to increase with each version, for Munch clearly understood that the
apparent urgency of the painting technique is one reason why the image tugs
at the heartstrings.
To look at Munch again, this time asking whether the emotional and
psychological interpretations with which his paintings are routinely
burdened are fully justified, liberates his work from the stranglehold of
psychodrama. As a result he looks to me like a far greater artist - a man
of his own time working in a way that his contemporaries would have
recognized as modern.
Born in 1863 (the same year as Toulouse-Lautrec) Munch did not die until 1944.
Set aside the Nordic gloom and place him side by side with artists whose
work he actually knew, and look what happens. Because The Scream is so
famous whenever Munch places a human figure close to the foreground of a
picture or exaggerates spatial recession, there is an unexamined assumption
that such expressive devices are freighted with psychological meaning. But
Munch spent the winter of 1897 in Paris and returned in the two following
years. He must have known the plunging perspectives in the works of
contemporaries like Gustave Caillebotte and Edgar Degas and like them been
aware of the perspectival tricks employed by the great Japanese print
makers. I’m not saying there isn’t disquiet in a picture like Red Virginia
Creeperof 1898-1900, but I am arguing that in works such as these Munch is
bringing his own sensibility to pictorial devices that were fairly
ubiquitous in the late 19th century.
Often I think he uses these expressive devices to create visual excitement in
pictures where it might otherwise have been lacking. The cartoon –like
face drawn with a few swift strokes of the brush in the foreground of Murder
in the Road and the dark smudge in the middle distance that we read as a
corpse, are used to animate a dull view of a road receding into the distance
and leading to nowhere.
Such melodrama is one characteristic of Munch’s art that sets it apart from
that of contemporaries such as Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Whether in
the lurid symbolism of Ashesand Vampire or the more nuanced psychological
relationship he explores in Two Human Beings(Lonely Ones), a story or
narrative is almost always implied in Munch’s work.
But it would be a mistake to assume that these stories necessarily have to do
with the events in Munch’s life, however dramatic or damaging they may have
been. Though the early death of his mother who died when he was four, the
religious mania of his father who raised him, the death of one sister,
madness of another and his own fraught relationships with women are all well
documented, so too is his close involvement with the theatre, and
particularly with the Berlin theatre director Max Reinhardt’s productions
of Ibsen. Artists before Munch had designed stage sets and programmes for
the theatre, but he is the first to be used as an artistic adviser
responsible for using colour and space to establish the atmosphere in plays
such as Ghosts. Munch’s design for Reinhardt’s 1906 production of the play
featured a huge black armchair that was turned away from the stage.
Unmentioned by Ibsen, the chair becomes a menacing presence on stage, a
dread symbol of approaching death.
In pictures like Jealousy or Death of the Bohemianwe could be looking at
actors on stage, where every detail – the furniture and its placement, the
wallpaper, the lighting - are placed precisely to create the maximum
theatrical effect. Just in case we are tempted to interpret canvases like
Galloping Horse (1910) as a symbol of unbridled passion, or Workers on
Their Way Home as evidence of his sympathy with the revolutionary left,clips
from silent films screened in Norway in these years convincingly suggest
that Munch was simply painting what he saw at the cinema.
I’m not of course saying that Munch didn’t suffer. . He became a heavy drinker
who in 1899 and again in 1908 spent long periods is sanatoriums. But Munch
is no different from any other artist in the way he draws on his own
experience in his art. We need to take his life story into account when we
look at his work, just as we do Gauguin’s or Van Gogh’s – but to remember
that he was also a working artist who engaged with the world around him as
well as with the art of his own time. In a way it is part of that message
that the works in this large show are uneven in quality and that although
Munch took photographs and made films these are of little aesthetic
importance. Somehow the real man who emerges from it is ten times more
interesting than the suffering loner we thought we knew.
The Telegraph
