Page 22 - Studio International - February 1974

Laocoon. Scheffler perceptively suggested that again and again to recapture the first impression: Munch had seen, and the methods he evolved
the contemporary modernists, by turning the transparent, pale skin. The trembling to achieve this, link Munch closely with
away from the perceptual exercises of the mouth, the shaking hands. I had painted the German romantic painters like Friedrich and
impressionists towards an art of dramatic chair with the glass too exactly. That diverted Runge and emphasise his importance as a
content, were in danger of becoming 'literary' in attention from the head. When I looked at the post-impressionist. Like Van Gogh and
the way Lessing had outlined. A painting, picture I saw only the glass and everything Gauguin, Munch felt the need to paint
thought Lessing, had to depict a dramatic around `living people who breathe and feel, suffer and
moment so that it concentrates into a single Munch's attempts to concentrate a complex love. I want to paint a long series of such
scene a meaning to which the poet might need to of emotions into a single, powerful scene, pictures in front of which people will doff their
devote lengthy scenes.8 parallels in an interesting way the devices of hats as though in church. Basically, art comes
This, as Scheffler claimed, is what Munch's expressionist theatre in which we find not a from one person's need to communicate with
successful paintings do. Munch chose subjects narrative sequence but a dramatic progression another. All means are equally good — in
painting, as in literature, the means are often
confused with the end — Nature is the means,
not the end — if you can achieve something by
changing Nature, then you must do it. At a
moment of intense feeling a landscape will have
a very precise effect on a person — by painting
this landscape you can arrive at a picture of
your own feeling — and the feeling is the vital
thing — Nature is simply the means. How far
the picture reproduces the look of Nature is
entirely unimportant.'12
At the back of this is a belief in the
universality of human experience and in the
ability of painting to communicate specific
feelings in an unspecific, indirect way. Munch
shares with the symbolists a belief that art is the
key to the locked and innermost chambers of the
mind and that is why he admired artists like
Böcklin and Klinger, but what separates
Munch from them is his ability to enter such
chambers without the aid of conventional
symbols or of private allegories. His motifs, the
choice of which was determined by an entirely
personal need, become so universal that they
seem to speak directly to the most secret parts
of our mind. 'That is what makes Munch so
The Sick Child 1896
421x 565 mm of sharply visualized scenes. Thoughts become great', wrote his friend Przybyszewski, 'so
Lithograph events and, like thoughts, the events often significant, that everything which is deep and
remain enigmatic. These scenes are often like dark, all that for which language has not yet
which are evocative of states of mind which, episodes in a dream: they disguise as much as found any words, and which expresses itself
like the episodes in 'Dubliners', Joyce defined as they express and, indeed, their expressive solely as a dark, foreboding, instinct, that all this
`epiphanies' : scenes or incidents which function is identical with their veiling takes on colour through him and enters our
consciousness:13
perfectly sum up a complicated set of function. Munch's images, therefore, for all
relationships or crystallise a subtle mixture of their affinities with the symbolist repertoire,
feelings. Munch saw certain episodes in his life are not symbols in the accepted sense. They are 1 Letter from Munch to his friend Johan Rode in
Copenhagen, 1893. Quoted in the catalogue of the
as epiphanies. The problem was how to recall more like extended metaphors which express Munch graphics and drawings exhibition, Munich,
them in later life in a way which completely without revealing the essence of a hidden 1971, section on the 189os.
recaptured the emotion of the moment of situation. Quoted in Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch:
The Scream, London 1973, p. 24.
revelation. 'One wishes to recall something one When attempting to recreate the
3 Theodor Daubler writing about Munch's Jealousy in
has felt', Munch wrote, 'an erotic moment in emotional power of a remembered scene in a Der Neue Standpunkt, 1919, p. 29.
which one is hot and ardently loving. One has painting Munch searched for fleeting and Munch writing about the connections between his
work and Ibsens's Ghosts, quoted in Munich
discovered a motif in such a moment, but one highly evocative qualities which would do more catalogue, 1971 under catalogue number 199.
cannot depict it as one sees it on another than call forth the visual impression of the scene. 5 Quoted in Heller, p. 87.
occasion, when cold. It is clear that the first He found that colours, like aromas, can call 6 Munich catalogue, entry number 21.
From a fragment of a novel, written in the early
picture one sees seems completely different forth a moment of intense feeling with special 189os, quoted in Munich catalogue under catalogue
from the second'.9 Munch attempted to clarity. In his writings Munch has much to say number 56.
recapture the emotion of the first moment about colour. He notices that the billiard hall, 8 Heller has much to say about Lessing's Laocoon,
Scheffler's review and Munch's 'literary' subject-
almost by trial and error and he makes this clear for example, seems to be filled with red mist matter.
in another passage about The Sick Child. when he raises his eyes from the green baize 9 Munch's unpublished ms. quoted in Gösta
`When I saw the subject for the first time I table. Or, when he emerges from a darkened Svenaeus, Edvard Munch: Im männlichen Gehirn,
received an impression which evaporated while I bedroom in the morning, he sees everything Lund, 1973, p. 49.
10 Quoted in Munich catalogue, entry number 21.
was painting it. I achieved a good, but quite in a shimmering blue light. 'Even the deepest 11 Svenaeus, p. 49.
different picture on the canvas. During the shadows have bright light above them.'11 12 Quoted in Munich catalogue, entry number 70.
course of a year I worked often on the picture — This determination to paint subjects so that 13 Stanislaw Przybyszewski, ed : Das Werk des
Edvard Munch: Vier Beitrage, Berlin, 1894.
scratching it out, letting the colours run, trying they become much more than a record of what FRANK WHITFORD
6o