Page 20 - Studio International - February 1974

(Above)
Scream 5893
91 x 73*5 cm
National Gallery, Oslo
(Right)
Anxiety 1894
94 X 74 cm
Munch-Museet, Oslo

Böcklin and Klinger who revived so many
Romantic ideas. 'Close your physical eyes so
that you see your picture first with your
spiritual eye. Then bring forth what you saw
inside you so that it works on others from the
exterior to their spirit.' Munch might have said
this. It was, in fact, written by Caspar David
Friedrich.2
It is not difficult to see why Munch was held
in such high esteem in Germany and why so
many expressionists regarded him as their
immediate predecessor. There does seem to be
something inescapably northern about his
work. The silent, brooding people sitting in the
same room but inhabiting different mental
worlds; the single figures surrounded by sea, concludes that he does not know why Miss never been able to triumph over the miseries
rocks and sky, a part of the landscape and yet Julie acts the way she does. Munch's people, there. It has also been crucial for my art .
alienated from it; the sick, the spiritually like Strindberg's characters, are proof of the On one of the red stripes of The Scream Munch
disturbed, the perennial victims : these ultimate imponderability of human behaviour, pencilled the words : 'Only someone insane
protagonists in a drama which is always set in even, perhaps, of its roots in brutish instinct. could paint this !'5
Winter and never in Spring are as Scandinavian `The animal breaks out in Munch', wrote the Yet the more one contrasts Munch's work
as Ibsen, Strindberg and Kierkegaard, are as German critic Theodor Däubler, 'the animal with that of those contemporaries he singles out
conditioned by climate and geography. and the complete expression of its entire, for praise the more his subjects seem to relate
Munch's art is inevitably discussed by many uncompromised being. The impressionists to the symbolist repertoire. Loneliness,
writers in relation to the dramas of Ibsen and hardly th how to cope with this. Now we woman as predator, disease, death, mistrust of
e
Strindberg, and there are of course many links, are on the track of animality . . . the return to the self, all these concerned artists as dissimilar
both personal and artistic, between the three. the animal through art is what makes us as Rops, Khnopff, Klinger, Franz von Stuck,
Many of Munch's paintings are like key expressionists.' 3 Toorop, Redon and Beardsley, and Munch
scenes from plays by Ibsen: the action seems to Munch's narrow range of subject-matter is drew inspiration from them and even from
be determined by past events which have yet obviously highly personal. His motifs are most William Blake, from whose illustrations he
to be revealed. The motivation of the easily explained in terms of his biography, in the seems to have taken certain kinds of decorative
characters can never be explained by light of his obsessions and most private feelings; borders. When he wrote about The Sick Child
conventional logic; people act for reasons which obviously works like The Sick Child, The Dance Munch admitted that there was nothing new
are not clear even to themselves. In his of Life and The Scream relate to his family about the subject: 'Many painters painted sick
Preface to Miss Julie Strindberg asks why his circumstances, to the deaths of his mother and children propped up on a pillow', so many,
heroine goes mad. He essays a number of sister and to his sexual experiences. Munch indeed, that Munch refers to Norwegian realist
reasons, any one of which might have been confirmed this often: 'Sickness and death painting of the 1880s as the 'pillow period.'6
exploited by a conventional dramatist, but then dwelt in my parents' house. Certainly I have But attempts to establish the source of
58