Page 19 - Studio International - February 1974

EDVARD MUNCH: those I've named.'1 Expressionism from around 1912 they
In view of Munch's place in the history of discerned more intimate affinities between it
SCENE, SYMBOL modernism it is perhaps surprising that his and the work of Böcklin, Klinger and Hodler
private pantheon included artists who are now than anything French, and Munch was almost
AND ALLEGORY thought to have had little or nothing to do with always mentioned in the same company.
`Although art in general is in a pretty bad way modern painting. Munch, after all, belongs with Munch was also seen as being of `germanischer
in Germany, I've got to admit that they do have Gauguin, Van Gogh and Ensor as a precursor of Herkunft' : his art, concerned with the darker
the advantage of having produced a few Expressionism. Central to his achievement was side of life, was thought by German writers to
artists who stand high above the others and out his ability to communicate visually without be the result of the promptings of his Nordic
on their own - Böcklin, for example, whom I relying on a complicated apparatus of symbol or genes.
consider to be almost the greatest painter of our allegory. What, therefore, drew him to the It is indeed true that Munch remains close
age - Max Klinger - Thoma - and, of the nymphs, fauns and centaurs of Böcklin or the to the German Romantic tradition, for all his
musicians, Wagner - of the philosophers, grim imagery of Klinger ? interest in French art during his periods in
Nietzsche. French art is superior to German art Munch was not alone in his preferences. Paris, and it is his attitude to Romanticism
but France possesses no artists greater than When German writers began to anatomise which most simply explains his enthusiasm for
Puberty c. 1893
150 x 112 cm
Munch-Museet, Oslo

The Edvard Munch
exhibition is at the Hayward
Gallery, London, 12 January -
3 March and at the Musée
National d'Art Moderne,
Paris, 22 March - 12 May.
57