Page 21 - Studio International - February 1974

(Above)
Dance of Life 1899/1900
125*5x 190*5 cm
National Gallery, Oslo
(Left)
Jealousy 1894/5
67x 100 cm
Rasmus Meyers Collection, Bergen

Even the vampire motif comes not so much
from his mistrust of women in general as from
his longing for his dead mother, a longing
complicated by erotic feelings. What he wrote
in an early biographical sketch seems
especially revealing in this connection: 'He felt
compelled to lay his weary head on the breast of
a soft, tender woman — to inhale her perfume
and to hear the beat of her heart. To feel her
soft round breasts against his cheek. And to
catch her eyes whenever he looked up. And then
he would close his eyes and feel her warm, deep
gaze and her soft, sensual smile. And then she
Munch's imagery can do nothing but emphasize in my Sick Child. There was no influence on it or would run her fingers softly through his hair ...' 7
his originality. For it is Munch's highly on The Spring other than the memory of my `Literary' remains a dirty word in art-writing,
personal use of such themes and devices which parents' house . . . he who had truly known the and Munch's affinities with the symbolists and
makes his work important. Most of the artists circumstances at home would understand his apparent need to write about the subjects he
he admired, and Böcklin and Klinger especially, than any external influence could only have most often painted lay him open to a charge of
worked with a partly personal, partly been a kind of aid at the moment of birth — you being 'literary'. In 1902 Munch showed all 22
conventional set of symbols. Munch enters the might just as well say that the midwife parts of his Frieze of Life at the Berlin
world of intangible feelings without the aid of influences the child. Hardly any of the painters Secession and Karl Scheffler, in his review of the
literary signposts. After admitting that the (of the "pillow period") experienced his subject exhibition, not only praised Munch's work, but
subject of The Sick Child was a cliche he goes on as I did, right through to the last scream of drew attention to the dichotomy between
to say : 'The motif is not the important element pain.' painting and poetry observed by Lessing in the
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