Edvard Munch`s Dramatic Images 1892-1909

Transcription

Edvard Munch's Dramatic Images 1892-1909
Author(s): Carla Lathe
Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 46 (1983), pp. 191-206
Published by: The Warburg Institute
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EDVARD MUNCH'S DRAMATIC IMAGES
1892-1909
Carla Lathe
I
FRESHINSIGHT into the art of Edvard Munch comes from recognizing the significance
of drama for his imagery. He was interested in the art of drama and distinguished
himself in the early years of his career by his sensitive and original rendering of
people's faces and gestures. He distanced himself from conventional reproductions of
people's physiognomy, and tried instead to express their psyche and personality, sometimes exaggerating in order to stress important features. In the early I89os, Munch
frequently stated 'I paint not what I see- but what I saw'.' It appears that drama was an
important influence on his presentation of memories.
People in performance were a lasting stimulus to Munch's art. He enjoyed watching
performances in a concert, theatre or circus, and the outdoor performance of street
musicians. He himself enjoyed singing, and when he went to Paris to study pictures in
1885 his first outing was not to an art gallery but to the Gaietitheatre to hear the operetta
star AnneJudic sing.2 When he returned to Paris in 1889for another study session, he was
again attracted to halls of entertainment. The inspiration for his most famous resolution
to create a series of pictures showing 'living people, who breathe and feel, sufferand love'
came to him while listening to Rumanians singing in a St Cloud dance hall.3
Munch's interest in the art of performance may provide a key to explaining the
discrepancy between the positive way his friends described him and the more negative
interpretations of his life and work by people who did not know him. Many of his friends
remarked on his sense of humour. How can the currently prevailing image of Munch as
the mournful figure of alienation be reconciled with the tale of the fine time he had with
Knut Hamsun in I900 at the Tivoli circus, where they disconcerted the clowns by
shouting to them from their box? According to Christian Gierloff, Munch and Hamsun's
shouts of encouragement also drove the circus horses and their riders to excel themselves
in their performance through hoops and wreaths of fire.4 Munch's pleasure in performance went hand in hand with his pleasure in portraying himself and other people in
different guises and changes of mood.
In his personal life Munch responded to talented people, and many of his friends were
connected with the performing arts. They included good musicians, dramatists and
actors.5sMunch came from an imaginative family and appreciatedliteraturefrom an early
1
Livsfrisens tilblivelse (The Creation of the Frieze of
Life), Oslo, c. 1925, p. i, 'Jeg maler ikke det jeg ser men det jeg sa'. In this pamphlet Munch published
reflections and recollections he had written many years
before.
2 See Edvard Munchs brev, Familien, selected by Inger
Munch, Oslo: Munch museetsskrifter,I, 1949, 46 (5 May
1885).
3E. Munch, Livsfrisenstilblivelse,p. 7, 'Det skulde vxere
levende mennesker som puster og foler, lider og elsker'.
4 'Litt fra Skrubben og Ekely', EdvardMunch,Mennesket
og kunstneren,Oslo 1946, p. 74.
5 See the catalogue to the exhibition 'Frederick Delius
og Edvard Munch', Munch Museum, Oslo 1979
(Norwegian and English text).
'9'
Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld Institutes, Volume 46, 1983
192
CARLA LATHE
age. Like his father, he was a lively story teller, and could visualize the scenes he read in
books. He not only responded to modern literature but was a creative writer himself. In
the early I890s he wrote prose poems, in I904-08 he wrote a play. In later life he appears
to have been attracted to the cinema, and in 1913 he took some guests, together with his
dog, to see a Chaplin film.6 The art of dramatic performance,as well as the visual arts,
played a part in his life, right from the I880s when he began his career. His close friend in
the 188os, Kalle Lochen, changed his career from painting to acting, and Munch said that
he was a genius at both.7 According to another friend, Munch took the attractive Miss
Drewsen to the Christiania Theatre to see a performance of Ibsen's The Vikingsat
Helgeland.8In the late I880s Munch did a portraitofHjalmer Borgstromposing as Osvald
in Ibsen's Ghosts.
For the development of Munch's images in the period 1892-1909,
it is important to
take into account his choice of writers, actors and musicians as friends and rivals. His
statements about the writers whom he admired suggest that he wished to emulate their
exposure of hidden recesses in the mind. Munch made a point of comparing himself with
Ibsen, and his treatment of figure composition was stimulated by Strindberg's psychological dramas. Documentary evidence confirms that in his years abroad Munch's
affiliations were with the international exponents of 'intimism', particularly in the
theatre. An investigation into his response to Scandinavian dramatists reveals him as a
calculated draughtsman who became an intermediary between painting and drama.
Munch's understanding of the theatre developed while he was in contact with
Strindberg, Ibsen and other writers in the I89os. The gestures, posing, emotive colouring
in his pictures compare with scenes created by his friends, and Munch himself acknowledged the parallels between his art and their drama. He wrote that afterhe had explained
his paintings to Ibsen in an exhibition of 1895, he and his imagery reappeared in Ibsen's
play Whenwe deadawakenof 1899.9 He also thought of himself as Strindberg's ally and
rival. When Gordon Craig in 19o6 told Munch that he thought that Strindberg was the
best of the bad Scandinavian painters, Munch replied, 'pleased to hear it. Because if
Strindberg is our best painter, that makes me our best writer'.10
Munch, who lived 1863-1944, was thirty-five years younger than Ibsen and fourteen
years younger than Strindberg. He met them both in the early I890s and was proud that
they came to some of his controversial exhibitions. The similarity between his imagery
and theirs was obvious not only to them but also to their translators and producers. For
6 See
Hugo Perls, Warumist Kamilla schon?, Munich
1962, p. 22.
7 See Birgit Prestoe, 'Smitrekk om Edvard Munch',
EdvardMunch,Mennesketog kunstneren,p. 138.
8 See C. Gierloff, EdvardMunchselv, Oslo 1953, p. 66.
Gierloff dates this visit to the theatre as 1889, and
Munch did a portrait of Miss Drewsen in that year. The
producer Bjorn Bjornson's journal of the performances
at the Christiania Theatre, now in the Oslo Theatre
Museum, shows that The Vikingsat Helgeland was not
performed in 1889, however, but in September I890
while Munch was in Norway. The Ibsen plays he could
have seen in 1889 were The Ladyfrom the Sea and The
Leagueof Youth.
9 Letter from Munch to Karl Scheffler, Ii February
1924, printed in Werk, xII, 1943, p. 369. See also
Munch's pamphlet Livsfrisens tilblivelse pp. 13-17.
Munch's references to Ibsen are available in Pal
Hougen's catalogue to the Munch-Ibsen exhibitions at
the Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Bergen (MayJune I975) and at the Kunsthaus Zurich (FebruaryApril, 1976). Munch's interpretation of Ibsen's plays
was also discussed by Peter Krieger in his catalogue to
the exhibition 'Edvard Munch, Der Lebensfries fiir
Max Reinhardts Kammerspiele', Nationalgalerie, Berlin 1978, and in my catalogue to the exhibition 'Edvard
Munch and his literary associates', Library Concourse,
University of East Anglia 1979.
10 Quoted by A. Kahane, 'Edvard Munch', Berliner
Tageblatt,509, 28 October I926, 'Das freut mich. Denn
wenn Strindberg ist unser bester Maler, dann werde ich
sein unser bester Dichter'.
MUNCH'S DRAMATIC IMAGES
193
del'(Euvrein Paris, met Munch at the home
example Lugne-Poei,the director of the Thedtre
of Ibsen's French translator, and invited the painter to design the programmes for the
French premieres of PeerGyntin 1896 (P1.23b) and JohnGabrielBorkmanin I897. In 1898
Emil Schering, Strindberg's German translator, asked Munch to provide illustrations for
a joint Strindberg-Munch issue of the Quickborn
journal, which was published in January
1899. Despite the considerable difference in age, Munch was thereforelinked with Ibsen
and Strindberg abroad and he benefited from the popularity of their drama.
Strindberg and Munch were regular drinking companions in Berlin from November
1892 until April 1893. They met again between March and July 1896 in Paris, where
Munch portrayed Strindberg in a lithograph (P1.23d) and Strindbergpublished a review
of Munch's paintings in June 1896 in La revueblanche.Munch acquired the original
manuscript of Strindberg's Leplaidoyerd'unfou,which he kept among his papers until his
death.
Ibsen and Munch first met briefly in the Oslo Caf6 Grand in 1891, and when Munch
happened to cross Ibsen's path in the following years they would stop to talk. In the years
between 1896 and his death in 1944, Munch illustrated scenes from ThePretenders,
Peer
Gynt,John GabrielBorkmanand Whenwe deadawaken.In I906-07 he fulfilled his most
exacting literary commission, which was to design sets for the productions of Ghosts
Work on these projects
(P1. 24a) and HeddaGablerat Max Reinhardt's Kammerspieltheater.
enlarged his understanding of the theatre and influenced his dramatic pictures.
Recognition of Munch's lifelong interest in Ibsen's plays and his close association with
Strindberg in the Berlin and Paris of the 189os is important because it throws into
question the psychotic labels bestowed on him by fashionable critics. If he seriously
wished to equal his literary friends, his images were calculated to draw from the spectator
an appreciation of his treatment of human experience rather than of his competence as a
painter. The chronology of his images of private stress indicates that they increased
during and after periods of close association with writers, and that they decreased when
Munch in later life withdrew from the literary scene that stimulated him on the continent.
It was a phase in Munch's art which critics and art historians at the time considered to be
detrimental to his development, and he was advised against literary and metaphysical
tendencies." Nevertheless, Munch was attracted to literature and was out of sympathy
with the ideals of many contemporary artists. From investigating his friendship with
Strindberg's circle of writers in Berlin in the I89os and his sets for the Ghostsperformance
at the Berlin Kammerspieltheater
in 19o6, it appears that he developed images of psychological tension and atmospheric vibration in order to express the levels of intuition he admired
in his friends' writing.
II
Germany, according to Munch, was the country where his major work, 'The Frieze of
Life', was understood first and most fully.12 Although he encountered considerable
11 See for
example Thadee Natanson, 'Correspondance
de Kristiania', La revueblanche,59, November 1895.
12 'I anledning kritikken', Livs-Frisen, I918, p. 6. This
article by Munch was available with the catalogue of the
1918 exhibition of his later 'Frieze of Life' at Blomqvist's
art gallery in Kristiania, and was published in Tidens
Tegn, 15 October I918. Jens Thiis dated the pamphlet
Livs-Frisenas 1925 when he quoted from it in 1927 in the
catalogue for Munch's exhibition in Oslo Nasjonalgalleriet, p. 27. He may have mistaken its date for that of
Munch's other undated pamphlet with reflections and
memories, Livsfrisenstilblivelse.
194
CARLA LATHE
hostility to his art in Germany in the i89os, he also found enthusiastic response. He went
to Berlin in October 1892 and made it his base until 1895. It was in Berlin that he began to
fulfil the resolution he had made in a St Cloud dance hall to create a series of paintings
about the psychological experience of modern people. Munch developed this series after
he had been rebuffed by the VereinBerlinerKiinstlerin 1892. The Vereinin 1892 had a new
exhibition committee consisting of younger members who were eager to show modern
international art, and they invited Munch to bring an exhibition which had been well
received when it was shown in Oslo (then called Kristiania). Their invitation challenged
the policy adopted by senior members of the association. The painter Anton von Werner,
director of the VereinBerliner Kiinstler, tried to implement the nationalist aspirations of
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was patron of the Vereinand known to dislike impressionism.
When Munch's exhibition opened in November 1892, von Werner's supporters were
shocked to find that they hosted a display of pictures in an untraditional, foreign and in
their opinion outrageously ugly style. They put forward a motion to close the exhibition at
once, and by a narrow majority their motion was carried at a stormy meeting of the Verein.
This form of censorship and treatment of a foreign guest so angered about eighty members
of the Verein, that they walked out and formed an opposition group called the 'freie
Kiinstlervereinigung'. They organized a rival exhibition to that of the Academy in June
1893 and eventually established the Berlin Secession in 1898. At the time, Munch's
exhibition was recognized as a test case in the division among the artists, and the critic of
the FreisinnigeZeitung wrote on 13 November 1892: 'the conflict about impressionism and
the painter Munch has demonstrated the fundamental antagonism between the old ones
and the young ones in the Berlin Artists' Association.'13 Munch took advantage of the
controversy and continued to exhibit independently or with dealers like Eduard Schulte
in Berlin and other German cities. His exhibitions from 1892 onwards, and his prints,
established him as a pioneer of modernism and an important influence on German
expressionist art. His profound dramatic images emerged long before Die Briickeand Der
Blaue Reitergroups of painters began to exhibit in the early years of the twentieth century.
TheScream,first known under the title 'Verzweiflung' (Despair), was exhibited in Berlin in
December 1893 (P1. 23a).
Several modernist Scandinavian writers and painters initially found more response in
Germany than in their own countries. Ibsen's phenomenal popularity on the Berlin stage
had attracted Strindberg, who experienced a rejuvenation in the winter of 1892-93 in
Berlin. He established himself in the tavern 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel', which became a
meeting place for avant-garde writers, painters, connoisseurs, doctors, students, critics,
theatre managers and agents. The group was international, Germans and Poles mixing
with members of the Scandinavian colony in Berlin. Strindberg and his friends went to
Munch's first exhibition in Berlin in November 1892 and Munch soon joined their circle.
While Strindberg dominated the group 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel', he stimulated the
others' interest in modern drama. Munch later wrote of his vivid impressions of the
premieres of Strindberg's plays and was evidently impressed by Strindberg's dramatic
skill.14 The plays which were first performed in Berlin while Munch was there were The
13 'Der Streit
um den Impressionismus und den Maler
Munch hat den grundsiitzlichen Antagonismus zwischen Alten und Jungen im Berliner Kiinstlerverein
klargelegt'. See also Dr Relling, 'Der Fall Munch', Die
KunstfiirAlle, viII, I January 1893, pp. 102-03.
14
Munch's writing on Strindberg probably dates from
when he heard of Strindberg's death. It was
published by PAl Hougen, 'Farge pa trykk', Munch
Museum catalogue 5, 1968, p. 6, and in my catalogue
n. 9 above, p. 28.
1912,
195
in
in
Death
and
Fire
The
and
with
First
Creditors,
Before
Warning
January 1893,
Playing
December 1893. Munch even opened an exhibition of his paintings on 3 December, the
same day that the Lessingtheaterstaged a performance of Playing with Fire. Munch was
drawn into the theatre milieu by his friends; he was for example invited to a Scandinavian
soiree by Rosa Bertens, the leading lady in The Creditorsat the Residenztheaterin January
1893. Strindberg in 1893 busied himself with plans for a theatre of his own and urged the
writers who gathered at the tavern 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel' to write short one-act plays as
he had done in the I88os. His instructions were, 'decorations are not needed; only a
room'.15
Berlin offered Munch a stimulating range of dramatic and musical entertainment.
Among the writers with whom he associated was Holger Drachmann, a pioneer of the
cabaret and Tingel-Tangel movement. That Munch saw such performances is evident
from his lithograph Tingel-Tangel, in which he projected the movement of the dancer's
right leg in a manner which anticipates later modernists (P1. 22a). Another of his close
friends in Berlin was DagnyJuel, a Norwegian girl who was a good pianist. She married
the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who impressed Munch above all by his
trance-like performance of Chopin's music.16 Music and dancing were the standard
entertainment in their home, where Munch was a regular visitor. The dancing ranged
from slow, graceful steps to the can-can. Munch, who liked sketching people's movements
and the changes in atmosphere, could use his impressions of these performances.
Many painters, including the majority of the Verein Berliner Kiinstler, expressed
contempt for Munch's pictures. It was not until I902 that he could report that Max
Liebermann approved of his painting Girls on theJetty.17 In contrast to this neglect by
painters, a number of writers tried to analyse his achievement. One of them was Max
Dauthendey, who saw Munch's exhibitions when he spent the winter of 1892-93 in
Berlin, where he hoped to find a suitable stage for an 'intimate' theatre which would
perform his plays. In 1893 Dauthendey wrote an aesthetic manifesto, Weltall.Die Kunst des
Intimen,die Kunst des Erhabenen.Dauthendey drew attention to the function of memory and
sense impressions in the creation of art and argued that there was a need for a new concept
of beauty and an abrupt technique with which to express it. He praised Munch as a
pioneer of an art which recreated 'intimate' impressions from nature.
After Munch had exhibited his new work in December 1893, Stanislaw Przybyszewski
interpreted it as the expression of the unconscious psyche. Przbyszewski in 1894 edited the
first book on Munch, Das Werkdes EdvardMunch, which was an anthology of four essays.
One of the essays was by Julius Meier-Graefe, who had never published any art criticism
before.18 A year later, in June 1895, Meier-Graefe wrote a longer essay to accompany his
15 Strindberg, Brev. IX, 2552
(12 June 1893) 'Dekorationer beh6fvas ej; bara ett rum!'.
16 E. Munch, 'Mein Freund
Przybyszewski', Pologne
Littiraire, 15 December 1928.
17 Letter from Munch to A. Aubert,
7 February 1902,
Oslo University Library MS Brevs. 32.
18 Julius Meier-Graefe, who was three and a half years
younger than Munch, had come to Berlin in I890 to
study engineering. He started writing in Berlin and in
1893 published a first-person novel, Nach Norden,which
shows an enthusiasm for Norway and Scandinavian
literature. Kenworth Moffett writes in his book MeierGraefe as art critic, Munich 1973, p. 10, that Meier-
Graefe's essay on Munch in 1894 was his first piece of art
criticism and that it 'shows little interest, even contempt
for the medium of painting, combined with a bias
toward profundity and "thought"'. Although MeierGraefe was interested enough in art to become the first
editor for the art section of Pan in May 1894, none of the
active founder members of the journal were professional
art critics or historians: Bierbaum, Dehmel and von
Bodenhausen had studied law, Meier-Graefe some
engineering. To attract subscribers, they enlisted the
support of museum directors who eventually took over
the journal in September I895 and made it more
specifically concerned with art than literature.
196
CARLA LATHE
publication of an album with eight of Munch's first engravings. Meier-Graefe, Przybyszewski and Dauthendey were creative writers who were all new to art criticism, and their
essays showed the influence of Nietzsche. They wrote in the spirit of inter-arts enterprise,
which was so strong among Munch's friends in Berlin that a number of them succeeded in
producing the journal Pan. Pan was noted for its high aesthetic standard of presentation
and for the breadth of its contributions on contemporaryliterature, fine art and music.
To deduce from Munch's fictional writing and imagery like TheScreamthat he suffered
from agoraphobia and nerve crises in the early I89os is to ignore the evidence for his social
well-being and friendship with writers. Authors, actors, critics, translators of Scandinavian literature sought his company. On 20 January 1893 Munch wrote home of his busy
social life, saying that he was constantly together with Strindberg, Heiberg, Drachmann
and Adolf Paul.19His unpublished correspondenceincludes invitations from the Swedish
writer Ola Hansson, from Ibsen's German translator Julius Elias and from the critic
Richard Mengelberg, among others. On 8 January Munch was a guest at the feast given
by the publisher Felix Lehmann to celebrate the premiereof Hermann Sudermann's play
Heimat. Sudermann, when he was toasted by Holger Drachmann, replied, 'our light
comes from the North',20 an indication of the German esteem for Scandinavians at the
time. Munch met German writers and painters in Walter Leistikow's studio, but he was
identified more with the Scandinavian writers and their admirers in Berlin, thriving in
their company. He wrote home on 17 November 1892, 'you ask if I am nervous -
I have
put on six pounds and have never felt so well'.21He was able to arrangefor the exhibition
which had caused the split in the VereinBerlinerKiinstlerto tour Diisseldorf, Cologne,
Berlin, Copenhagen, Breslau, Dresden and Munich in the winter and spring of 1892-93.
A sign of his good spirits is that he ordered a large Norwegian flag to be sent to him in
Berlin and specified that it should be a flag without the Swedish markof union. He hung it
from the second floor of his exhibition premises and rememberedwith pride, 'it was so big
that it almost brushed the top hats of the Berlin gentlemen'.22Even if he sufferedpoverty,
his letters and portraits of his friends revealed that this was one of the most congenial and
productive periods of his life.
III
The illusion that Munch produced his images in anguished isolation is dispelled by
recognizing his friendship with writers who urged him to develop his studies of love and
death. From 1893 onwards he gradually assembled a large frieze of paintings showing
scenes of tension between people. The coastal background becomes a backcloth to the
men and women who appear in this series, which Munch exhibited with the titles 'Love',
'Motifs from the life of the modern soul', and later 'The Frieze of Life'.
19 EdvardMunch, n. 2 above,
133.
20 See Adolf Paul, Min
Stockholm 1930,
Strindbergsbok,
p. 75, 'Vom Norden her kommt uns das Licht', and
August Strindberg, Brev, ed. T. Eklund, Ix, Stockholm
1965, 2460 (26January 1893).
21 EdvardMunch,n. 2 above, 129, 'Du sporger om jeg er
nerves - jeg har lagt pa mig 6 pund og har aldrig
befundet mig sa vel -'.
22 Undated letter from Munch
toJens Thiis, c. 1933, in
Munch Museum archive, 'det var sa stort at det nesten
streifet Berliner herrernes floshatte'. See also Gierloff,
n. 8 above, p. 89.
197
The nucleus of 'The Frieze of Life' was a group of six pictures which Munch exhibited
in December 1893 as 'Studie zu einer Serie "Die Liebe"'. They are known under the titles
The Voice,TheKiss, Vampire,Madonna,Melancholy,TheScream.Some of these pictures were
based on earlier compositions, but after Munch's association with the writers in Berlin in
the winter of 1892-93, he altered them to make them more vivid and dramatic. For
example, there was a radical development in Munch's famous painting TheScreamfrom
the original painting of a sunset, without a figure. Munch created a parallel picture of a
sunset and a brooding man in profile, but it was the sunset alone which he exhibited in
November and December 1892 in Berlin with the title 'Sonnenuntergang' in the catalogue. He discussed it with Ola Hansson, who described it as 'an absurdity, consisting of
two blotches, one blackish blue and one beef-coloured red, but which presumably was
supposed to represent a sunset'.23Munch's friendJens Thiis wrote that the painting of the
sunset, the preliminary for TheScream,was sold to a Viennese collector.24In 1893 Munch
created a new version and inserted a shriekingfigure in the centre foreground. It provided
a dramatic conclusion to his series of studies on love.
The changes in composition and the formationof his studies as a dramatic sequence in
1893 reflect Munch's wish to reciprocate with Strindberg, Heiberg, Przybyszewski and
other literary friends who explored the subject of sexual attraction and disillusionment.
While Munch in 1893 developed his series on love, Heiberg wrote Balkonen(The Balcony),
and Richard Dehmel the cycle of poems Die
Przybyszewski published his Totenmesse
which
he
derVenus,
incorporated in his volume AberdieLiebe.
Verwandlungen
indicate
that Munch took a lively interest in the work of
Letters and cross-references
his literary friends. On i6January 1893, Munch heard Heiberg read the end of the second
act of his play Kunstnere(The Artists) at a Scandinavian evening held by the Freie
LiterarischeGesellschaft.When Munch first exhibited one of the drafts for Womanat
Stockholm in 1894, he made in his catalogue an allusion to another play by Heiberg. He
added to the title the quotation '"all the others are one. You are a thousand". (Gunnar
Heiberg: The Balcony)'. He took this line from TheBalcony,which Heiberg wrote in Berlin
when he belonged to Strindberg'sgroup 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel' and was in close contact
with Munch . The line Munch quoted in his catalogue was taken from Act im, in which
Heiberg suggested that a man who theorized on the soul was bound to lose his beloved to a
23 O0. Hansson, 'Vom kiinstlerischen Schaffen', Die
Zukunfl, III, 1893, p. 321, 'ein Unding, das aus zwei
Klecksen, einem schwarzblauen und einem rindfleischrothem, bestand, aber sonst wohl einen Sonnenuntergang vorstellen sollte'. I first referred to this version
of the painting in a script on Munch's work and
reception in Berlin for the BBC Open University 3rd
level Arts Course A315.
24J. Thiis, Edvard Munch og hans samtid, Oslo I933,
p. 218, 'Den blodig bolgende aftenstemning er forst malt
i Nizza 91, uten den skrikende person i forgrunnen.
Dette forste billede blev kjopt av en wiener kunstsamler.
En pastell fra 92 eier Munch selv. Komposisjonen med
den skrikende figur er forst utformet i 93'. (The gory,
undulating evening mood was first painted in Nice '91,
without the screaming person in the foreground. This
first picture was bought by a Viennese art collector.
Munch himself owns a pastel from '92. The composition
with the screaming figure was first formulated in
'93.)
Thiis wrote in Zeitschriftfiir bildendeKunst, vI, 19o8,
p. 134, that he was there at Munch's first exhibition in
Berlin in 1892, and the fact that he met Strindberg
confirms that he was in Berlin that winter. The painting
'Sonnenuntergang' of the violently coloured sky,
without a figure, described by Thiis and by Hansson
(n.23 above), appears to be lost or may have been
overpainted. It is not illustrated or mentioned by R.
Heller in his book Munch, The Scream,Art in Context
series, London 1973. The picture 'Verzweiflung' (The
Scream) was described by a correspondent in
Morgenbladet, 7 December 1893, and by S. Przybyszewski in his article 'Psychischer Naturalismus', Die
neue deutsche Rundschau, v, February I894. It was
exhibited at Stockholm in October 1894 as 'Skrik' and at
Berlin in 1895 as 'Geschrei'.
CARLALATHE
198
less analytical man of action. The character Abel comes home and hears his wife's lover
call to her in her bedroom, 'just remain standing like that with your arm raised up high.
Keep standing there. Everything about you is new. Yes, smile! All the others are one. You
are a thousand.'25Abel could have shot his rival, but he threw away the pistol instead and
said that holiness was to be found in contemplating nature more easily than in the waiting
of one soul for another: physical embrace was regressive and retarded the individual's
potential for growth. Munch's Womanconveys a similar situation. The man in the
painting, head bowed, turns away from the woman as the character Abel in the play
withdrew, preferring contemplation to confrontation. Munch's painting Jealousyof 1895
shows another stage of the same problem presented in the play (P1.22c).
Munch's sequence of paintings on love was new in that it emphasized states of mind
and unconscious experience compellingly and subjectively. His provocative, primitive
approach is close to the writers who brokewith convention in order to convey the feeling of
mental imbalance and of nervous disorder. The impact of change and destruction which
they made was deliberate, because they were amateur psychologists who drew on
neurologists' theories concerning cerebral instability. Among the most popular sources
were Ribot's Les maladiesde la volonti(1883) and Les maladiesde la personnalit6(1885),
Bernheim's De la suggestion(1886) and Max Nordau's Paradoxe(I885). These doctors
presented the human complex as an irrational conglomeration of fragments which
vacillated with the nerves' reactions to memories, associations, environment, suggestion,
unconscious urges. The literature which adapted their ideas chose to illustrate nervous,
withdrawn characters, remarkable for their excessive susceptibility to suggestion.
Munch's friends, Strindberg, Hansson and Przybyszewski kept abreast of neurological
research and found it necessary to study case histories of disturbed people to authenticate
their work. Moreover, Strindberg began to note down his dreams in 1893, two years
before Freud. Munch, too, who read German and French as well as Scandinavian
literature, was familiar with books which developed psychological theory. He read for
example Geschlechtund Charakterby the Viennese author Otto Weininger.26 Though
probably unaware of Freud, Munch became one of the late nineteenth-century amateur
psychologists to expose tensions in human behaviour. His own lifelong interest in
medicine was stimulated both by his friends and by his father and brother, who were
doctors.
The forms of medical inquiry Munch's friends wished to pursue were the investigation
into the unconscious, into the control of nerve fluid and nerve vibrations associated with
the theories of the Austrian doctor Anton Mesmer. The ideas Mesmer had made popular
a hundred years before were given clinical authority when Jean Charcot persuaded the
Paris Academy to accept hypnosis officially in I882. Mesmerism, however, continued to
stimulate occult sects like the theosophists and spiritualists.
In Strindberg's circle in Berlin it was usual to compare an author or painter's effect on
his public with that of a medium or hypnotist. Ola Hansson maintained that Strindberg
25
G. Heiberg, Balkonen,
Copenhagen 1894,p. 61, 'bliv erindringer om Edvard Munch', Edvard Munch som vi
staende siledes. Med armen haevet hojt. Bliv staende.
Alt er nyt ved dig. Ja smil! Alle de andre er in. Du er
tusen'.
26 Johs. Roede wrote that when he first visited Munch
in the summer of I904 a copy of Weininger's book was
lying on the table (together with a revolver), 'Spredte
Oslo 1946, p. 40. C. Gierloff,
kjenteham. Venneneforteller,
n. 8 above, p. 149, also found Munch reading Weininger's Geschlechtund Charakter. Weininger committed
suicide in 1903, the year after the publication of his
book, and his work at first received more publicity than
Freud's.
199
conveyed his impressions through the written word 'just as the hypnotist transfers his
conscious awareness onto the medium'.27 Max Dauthendey compared an artist's command of synaesthesia with a hypnotist's manipulation of suggestibility and psychical
experience. He believed that modern artists derived pleasure fromobserving how cerebral
motion passed into the passive brains around him.28 Lidforss, who was thinking of
becoming a writer, was told by Strindberg to 'take the plunge and feel the power when by
your pen you stir people's brains into molecular activity'.29By comparing the role of the
creative artist with that of the hypnotist, writers indicated their wish to express unknown
forces instead of describing more traditionally acceptable modes of behaviour. When
Munch held an exhibition in 1895, he showed that in his early Berlin years, he had
concentrated on images suggesting mesmerism.
Munch's later remarks confirm that it was above all Strindberg's belief in psychical
phenomena that had impressed him. He said, 'there must be some truth in what
Strindberg said about waves which surround and influence us. Perhaps we have a sort of
radio receiver in the brain? I often turn round when I am walking along the-street; I feel
that if I continue, I will meet someone whom I dislike'.30Munch applied the imagery of
atmospheric waves in the frame around his lithograph of Strindbergin 1896 (P1. 23d), and
he appears to have shared Strindberg's conviction that the air was not inert but alive to
the receptive investigator. Their acceptance of the state of flux was stimulated not by
Henri Bergson, but by literary evaluations of psychological analysis and by Nietzsche.
Munch in 1906 gladly accepted a commission to paint a posthumous portrait of
Nietzsche, and wrote two years later that he was thinking of painting Ibsen, Bjorn
Bjornson, Strindberg and Drachmann in the same decorative manner as Nietzsche,
namely not as photographic pictures, like the portraits by most painters.31Apparently
with this aim in mind he drafted a painting of a group of figures, with an aura of genii
(P1. 23c). This draft appears to be a continuation of the symbolic composition Munch had
designed as an advertisement for PeerGyntin 1896, and suggests that he appreciated in
Ibsen and Nietzsche, as in Strindberg, their psychical perception. Munch's wish to
reciprocate by projecting his own psychical perceptiveness is evident in his portraits, for
example in the frame around the Strindberg lithograph, and in his groups of paintings
illustrating mutations in love.
Notions of psychic mobility helped Munch to define his artistic approach to his
subjects. In the mysterious undulating lines with which he surrounded figures like
27 Det unga Skandinavien
(189i), Samlade skrifter, xI,
Stockholm 1921, p. 92, 'sisom hypnotis6ren 6verf6r sitt
medvetenhetsinnehill pa mediet'.
28 Verdensaltet,Det
nye sublime i Kunsten, Oversaettelse,
Copenhagen 1893, p. 12. Dauthendey's text, Weltall,Die
Kunst des Intimen,Die Kunstdes Erhabenen,was translated
into Swedish by Gustav Uddgren. A Danish publisher
they knew printed it in his Danish translation with the
title Verdensaltet.Dauthendey subsequently lost the
German manuscript, so it is known only in its
Scandinavian version.
29 Strindberg, Brev, IX, 2730 (27 January 1894), 'tag
spranget och kinn magten nir Du sitter andras hjernor
i molekularr6relse med pennan'.
30 Quoted by Rolf Stenersen, EdvardMunch,Niarbildav
ett geni, translated from the author's Norwegian
manuscript by Thure Nyman, Stockholm 1944, p. 40,
'Det maste ligga nagonting i vad Strindberg sa om
vigor, som omger och paverkar oss. Kanske har vi en
slags radio i hjirnan?Jag vinder ofta om nir jag gir pa
gatan. Jag kinner att om jag fortsitter nu, sa moter jag
nagon som jag inte tycker om'.
31 Munch's letter, 21I June 1908, was published by
Gierloff, n. 8 above, p. 279.
CARLA LATHE
Madonnahe gave the impression that the subject was insubstantial, accessible only
through the medium of the artist's senses. Apart from their use in evoking sensations of
atmospheric vibration, Munch relied on the lines to simplify the structure of his pictures.
He therefore accepted and exploited the artistic potential in the contemporaryinterest in
psychical powers. His projection of the simultaneous vacillations in perception anticipates more modern developments like Marinetti's 'wireless imagination', Kandinsky's
theosophy, the Surrealists' automatic writing. In the 189os Munch found among his
literary associates, particularly in the drama of Strindberg, the major impetus to
demonstrate the breakdown of stability and to suggest the relevance of psychical
phenomena to physiological and artistic perception.
200
IV
Strindberg's significance for Munch's development in the 1890s lay in the emphasis on
simplicity in the dramatist's projections of psychological movement. Strindberg hoped
that his experimental plays would be performed by Antoine's ThedtreLibrein Paris.
of a
Amateur actors in this theatre performed short one-act plays called quarts-d'heure
One
of
the
had
to
be
fast.
action
The
nature.
and
sensational
violent
naturally
frequently
attractions for Strindberg in the one-act play was that he could dispense with an interval
and thereforekeep the audience in a mood of suspense.
In order to authenticate his presentation of psychic tension, Strindberghad borrowed
images from Max Nordau, who in his Paradoxedescribed the will as a sort of electric
battery and the impulse to movement as being transmitted to the muscles by a kind of
electric current. He strengthened his argument by applying the theories on suggestion
and the popular belief in nerve-currents, nerve-power and nerve-fluid. Strindberg used
these concepts to demonstrate the psychological and mechanical impact of suggestion and
the exchange between people is at a nervous
the state of trance. In his play TheCreditors,
level, a series of impulses and reflexes; one character tells another that he had been 'the
mesmerist who spread his nerve power over your weak muscles, charged your empty
brains with new electricity'.32
Strindberg's presentation of involuntary movement and mesmeric powers on the stage
is implicit in Munch's series of paintings which demonstrate the attraction and separation
of lovers. Munch knew that Strindberg wished to accelerate the exposure of inner life and
make it more obvious than in Ibsen's plays. Strindberg thought that there had been too
was
much romanticism and scenery in his own play MissJulie, and believed TheCreditors
of
the
theatre
his
to
reform
His
a
better
and
modern
day
attempts
play.33
thoroughly
coincided with Munch's artistic attempts to experiment with psychological tension and
elimination of static detail. The rhythmic sky in TheScreamis a concentrated image for the
rhythms passing through the brain which Strindberg tried to project in his plays.
Among the theatrical innovations Strindberg recommended for the production of his
plays were more natural make-up, speech, lighting, scenery and especially a small,
32 A. Strindberg, Samladeskrifter,xxIII, Stockholm 1914,
p. 244, 'magnetis6ren, som str6k sin nervkraft 6ver i
dina slappa muskler, laddade din tomma hjirna med ny
elektricitet'.
33 Strindberg, Brev, vii, no. 1663 (16 October 1888).
201
intimate theatre for a receptive audience. His one-act drama aimed to replace the
prevailing romantic conventions and historicism with a contemporary sense of urgency
and integration. In 1888 he wrote that he wished that actors would work together to
produce a simultaneous, natural performance. He observed in his preface to MissJulie,
'that I shall see an actor's back throughout a vital scene is beyond my dreams, but I do
wish that crucial scenes could be played, not in front of the prompter's box, like duets
seeking applause, but in the place required by the action'.
Strindberg's attempts to reform the theatre made an impact in German drama circles
was chosen to
where, apart from his premieres in Berlin, his one-act play The Creditors
an
in
in
Max
'intimate
theatre'
Munich
who
acted in the
Halbe,
open
society
April 1895.
described
the
in
and
the
of
the
'intimate
an
in Pan,
aims
theatre'
article
play,
performance
He
wrote
that
the
a
had
of
two
a
consisted
small
few
chairs,
table,
scenery
I895.
lamps
which gave subdued light. The invited audience of about forty people and the three actors
were on the same level and close together. The prompter sat in an adjoining room in
candlelight. According to Halbe the purpose of the 'intimate theatre' was to stimulate the
imagination and to rely on simplicity and originality rather than on expensive props and
d6cor. Halbe wrote that the naturalism which was so dominant in the contemporary
theatre should be directed away from external scenery and back to the internal performance of the actors. In future, the intimate theatre society might hold its performancesin a
variety of differentsettings, such as a room, garden or park, which would help to stimulate
the imagination. Among the plays he listed for future performances was Gunnar
Heiberg's Balkonen(The Balcony).
The 'intimate' theatre's objective of suggesting states of mind as simply and directly as
possible was very close to Munch's interest in creating dramatic images. Before he and
Strindberg met, they had both used figures primarily as intermediaries for conveying
psychological experience. In Berlin they helped each other to make the transition from
naturalism to a more open justification of psychical phenomena and dream sequences.
The nerve currents Strindberg had tried to rationalize in his earlier dramas are accepted
in his later plays as manifestations of irrational forces in a surreal environment.
Strindberg's paintings, which were mainly recognizable seascapes before the I89os,
became more abstract, his Wonderland
for example, which he described in his article 'Des
arts nouveau! ou Le hasard dans la production artistique' in Revuedesrevues,November
I894. Munch meanwhile concentrated on the expression of intuition, observing the
approach of 'intimate' theatre; early in I894 he considered illustrating Maeterlinck's
Pellias et Melisande.
In the plays by Ibsen, the spectator also glimpses a scene by looking past or with
intermediary figures, perceiving only part of the situation because the figures are not
objective, but nervous and emotional. Temperament obtrudes and blocks the illusion of
physiological accuracy. Munch developed this approach in his years of contact with the
modern theatre. His undulating lines and interacting figures express temperament like
the actors who turn away from the audience towards each other. This is the view he gives
in his Attraction,TheLonelyOnes,To theWood.
Munch's concentrated, evocative images were as deliberate as the dramatists' sparing
use of scenery and props for visual suggestion about their characters' imagination. The
film of pulsating lines, the averted faces, ambiguous backgrounds in his pictures convey
the vulnerability of his figures. They hover among shadows and vacillating spaces,
remaining over-susceptible to others, indefinite in their identity. The spectator, in being
14
202
CARLALATHE
denied a full clear view, is in the same position as in Strindbergand Ibsen's plays, where
he discerns behind screens and blinds, attics and cupboards, the raw feeling in the home.
The suppressed, submerged atmosphere helps to focus attention on the latent mental and
sexual tension. In some of Munch's scenes, such as Jealousy,a figure confronts the viewer
directly, and this frontal position compares with the perspective of a fictional ego in the
monologues written by Munch's other literary friends, Knut Hamsun's Sult (Hunger,
(1893).34 Attention is focused
189o), for example, or Stanislaw Przybyszewski's Totenmesse
on the agitation of the central figure, and the backgroundfigures and surroundingsshown
are those which reveal more about the subject's state of mind. This concern with
psychological movement distinguished Munch from his colleagues who wanted to present
a painter's painting. He had no wish whatever to paint still-lifes. In his thematic groups of
pictures of love and death he followed Ibsen and Strindbergin presenting the tensions in
people's unconscious life.
V
Strindberg's wish to mesmerize his audience impressed Max Reinhardt, who in Berlin
converted a ballroom into a theatre in order to stage chamber plays. The Kammerspieltheaterwas small, with the stage barely separated from the auditorium. It held about three
hundred people. Reinhardt asked Munch to decorate an upstairs reception room with a
frieze and to design sets for the performance of Ibsen's Ghosts,with which the theatre
opened in 1906. Reinhardt's emphasis on the psychologically convincing mood won the
approval of Strindberg, who opened his own intimate theatre in Stockholm in 1907. The
Berlin Kammerspieltheater,
after opening with Ghosts,continued to give three hundred and
six evenings of Ibsen's plays and four hundred and ninety-one evenings of Strindberg's
plays. Other modern dramatists on the repertoire included Maeterlinck, Shaw,
Wedekind, Hauptmann and Schnitzler. The frieze of Munch's paintings decorated a
reception room, but it was badly sited and so the paintings were eventually divided up and
sold. Eight of them are now in the Berlin National Gallery.
Munch found Reinhardt's commissions among his most exacting tasks. Requests for
del(Euvreallowed him freer
book illustrations and for programmes such as for Le Thedtre
that
Reinhardt required for the
of
material
interpretation the literary
(P1.23b). Believing
Ghostssets illustrations of an old-fashioned Norwegian home, Munch was so uneasy about
his lack of historical accuracy that he asked his relation Ravensberg in Norway to help by
sending a picture of an interior which would suit the large room, chairs, tables and
furnishings on the stage of Ghosts.35Ravensberg should consult theatre people if
necessary, Munch urged. The material Munch collected in this way was useful to him
when he designed sets for HeddaGabler,which Reinhardt planned to stage in January
1907. Hermann Bahr took over the production of HeddaGablerand fewer of Munch's sets
have survived.
In spite of Munch's diffidence, Reinhardt was enthusiastic about the painter's
contribution to the performance of Ghosts.It was not a hard, external naturalism or
34 See my article, 'Edvard Munch and the concept of
"psychic naturalism"', Gazette des Beaux Arts, xcIII,
'979.
35 Letter published by Gierloff, n. 8 above, p. 282.
203
historicism that he had in mind for his intimate theatre, but just the emphasis on mood
and suggestion that Munch had long shown himself able to create. Apart from designing
sets, Munch sketched scenes in which he let the figures' different positions express what
was happening in the plays. These sketches were greatly appreciated by the actors, who
studied them carefully. Ludvig Ravensberg, who attended the first rehearsal of Ghosts
with Munch, commented on 23 October 19o6 that Munch had now become an instructor
too.36 There is later confirmation for this in a letter Munch received in February 1907
from the actress who played the leading role in HeddaGabler,because she sought his
guidance in the interpretation of Ibsen's play.37
Reinhardt found Munch's suggestions about colours and light effects very helpful.
When Ernst Stern, a set designer, saw one of Munch's oil paintings at an early stage, he
remarked that it was not detailed enough. Reinhardt replied, 'perhaps so ... But the easy
chair tells you everything! Its blackness gives you the whole atmosphere of the drama!
And the sitting room walls in Munch's picture! . . . The colour is like a pair of diseased
gums. We must try to find wallpaper with this colour. It will put the actors in the right
mood'.38
Munch's earlier association with Strindberg had fostered such emphasis or omission
of detail in evocations of disturbed states of mind. The sketches for Ghostssatisfy Ibsen's
directions but accentuate the importance of the armchair and add a grandfather clock
(P1. 24a, b). The chair is large, black and positioned in the centre foregroundwith its back
to the audience. It serves to create the illusion of a fourth wall between the stage and
audience, which is strengthened by the movements of the actors, who mostly turn away
from the audience. Munch's setting shows an integration of figures and scenery in which
not only the actors but also the chair face each other ratherthan the audience. To see what
is happening, the audience must look past the chair in which Osvald will collapse. That
Munch made the furniture close in on the figures is appropriate for Osvald's insecurity;
Osvald asks for the doors to be closed in the final act, and even locks the door so that no
one can enter. The spectator perceives the situation by subtle means, by the shapes and
colour of the props and lighting as well as by the pose of the figures. The enclosed space on
the stage demonstrates a confined state of mind.
Munch's work on Reinhardt's commissions stretched from the autumn of 19o6 until
December i907, when his frieze for the reception room was finished. During 1907 he
created a series of pictures which show the influence of the dramatic atmosphere which
the intimate theatre aimed to produce. Munch painted scenes of agitation in ugly rooms
with disquieting wallpaper: paintings of brothel scenes 'Zum siissen Maidel', the Green
Roomseries, new versions of TheDeathofMaratand ofJealousy,which he now set in a room
instead of in the symbolist scene with tree and plant, as in the earlier painting (Pls 25b,
22c). Strindberg had written of his one-act psychological murder plays that he could
dispense with d cor, needed only a room. Munch's paintings of 1907 appear to produce
such a tense atmosphere in just a room. As in Strindberg's plays and in the final scene of
36 See letter from Ravensberg, published by Gierloff,
op. cit., p. 189.
37Letter from Gertrud Eysoldt, quoted by Peter
Krieger, catalogue n. 9 above, pp. 27-28.
38Quoted by Pal Hougen, catalogue n. 9 above,
Kunsthaus Zurich, 1976, p. I2, 'Mag sein,... aber der
Lehnstuhl sagt alles! Sein Schwarz gibt die ganze
Stimmung des Dramas restlos wieder! Und dann die
Winde der Stube auf Munchs Bild! ... Sie haben die
Farbe von krankem Zahnfleisch. Wir miissen uns
bemiihen, eine Tapete dieses Tons zu finden. Sie wird
die Schauspieler in die richtige Stimmung versetzen!'.
CARLA LATHE
204
Ghosts,Munch evoked a sense of insecurity, and when he did show an open door, as in his
Jealousy,it offered no release.
Through his work for Reinhardt's theatre Munch broadened his insight into
stagecraft. In the winter of 19o6-o7 he lived intermittently among the actors and theatre
staff and had the opportunity of meeting other people involved with dramatic art. When
he attended the party to celebrate the opening night of Ghostson 8 November 1906, he sat
opposite the English stage designer and wood engraver Gordon Craig. As Peter Krieger
has pointed out, Munch may also have met FrankWedekind.39Between the two plays by
Ibsen, Reinhardt produced Wedekind's FriihlingsErwachenon 20 November 1906, in
which the author played the part of the masked gentleman.
Munch's experience at the Kammerspieltheater
may have stimulated him to develop
further his own play, Fra denfri KjerlighedsBy (From the Town of Free Love), 1904-o8.
Munch wrote it in prose and rhymed verse and set it in five acts, but did not publish it. It
was a satire on his formerfiancee and her friends. He cast himself in the main role as a type
of bard or minstrel who comes into conflict with the people he meets in the 'town of free
love'. He undergoes a number of grotesque trials, is trapped in the town and forced into
marriage. It has affinities with an operetta, and there is an analogy with Ibsen's poetic
drama PeerGynt,particularly when Munch's singer is enticed by the Dollar Princess, in
the same way as Peer by the Dovre king's daughter in the kingdom of the trolls. The singer
cries out, 'O, free me from this town of freedom', but is executed by the inhabitants.40
That Munch cast himself in the role of a wandering minstrel in his play is another sign
that he associated himself with the performingarts. His illustrations for his play resemble
a series of drawings which he showed to Gustav Schiefler in Warnemiinde in 1908, and
which he adapted for the print portfolio Alpha and Omega,published together with a
satirical text in I908-09.41 Neither the play nor the satirical drawings with aphorisms and
other texts are of high artistic calibre, but they convey Munch's wish to provoke. He was
by then used to constant publicity and was certain that he could exhibit his work, so that
he could calculate the effect he wanted his pictures to make. He sent his print series Alpha
andOmegato the Berlin Secession
in 1909 and wrote while it was on exhibition, 'the twenty
sheets are sufficient to set minds in motion down there'.42Like his first literary friends in
Berlin, Munch in the images of his fantasy tried to rouse a response from his viewers.
VI
Of all the dramatists whom Munch knew, Ibsen appears to have impressed him most, and
he continued to illustrate the
long after his work on the sets for the Kammerspieltheater
themes of Ghostsfor his own pleasure. In 1920 he repeated two of his paintings in
lithographs. His painting and lithograph of Osvald's collapse (P1.25a) intensified the
39 Krieger, catalogue n. 9 above, p. 28.
40 Quoted by Trine
Ness, 'Edvard Munch og "den fri
Kjarligheds By"', Kunstog Kultur, LVI,1973, P. 150, 'O
fri mig for denne Frihedens by!'. See also Arne Eggum,
'The Green Room', catalogue to Edvard Munch
exhibition, Liljevalchs and Kulturhuset, Stockholm
1977; Gerd Woll, 'The Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil', catalogue to Edvard Munch exhibition, National
Gallery of Art, Washington 1978, p. 232; and the
exhibition catalogue 'Edvard Munch, Alpha and
Omega', Munch Museum 1981, in which the play is
published in an English translation.
41 Gustav Schiefler, EdvardMunch. Das graphischeWerk
19o6-1926, Berlin 1928, p. 18.
42 Letter to Sigurd Host, 24 May Igog, quoted by Pola
Gauguin, EdvardMunchsomvi kjenteham. Venneneforteller,
p. 155, 'De tyve Blade er nok til at sette Sind i Bevaegelse
dernede'.
205
drama between invalid and mother which he had depicted in The Sick Child, of which he
made replicas in 1907. The chair is different, but the tragic juxtaposition similar. Munch
found his and Ibsen's scenes interchangeable.
Ibsen's Ghosts had been published in I881, when Munch at the age of seventeen had
just started his career as a painter. Munch's subsequent images were so similar to Ibsen's
creative work that they fused together in his memory. In the recollections he wrote when
approaching his seventieth birthday, he described the 'Osvald mood' of his 'Frieze of Life'
paintings and linked Osvald's craving for the sun with similar scenes in his own work. He
wrote that the painting Spring:
was the craving of a mortally ill person for light and warmth, for life. The sun in the Aula was in
'Spring' the sunshine in the window. It was Osvald's sun ... From my mother on, I and all my dear
ones have sat winter after winter, longing for the sun, in the same chair in which I painted the
invalid - until death took them. From my father on, I and all my dear ones paced up and down in
the room, filled with the fear of life and madness.43
Munch's reveries about the 'Osvald mood' of his 'Frieze of Life' paintings are typical of
his tendency in the late 1920osand 1930osto dwell less on individual initiative than on the
afflictions of his youth. Though wishing his work to be compared with Ibsen's dramatic
achievement, it is clear that he identified with Ibsen's ailing characters. Interpretations of
Munch's early pictures which rely on these late reveries, however, ignore the time-lag of
some thirty years, as well as much of the original context in which the images had been
created. The 'Frieze of Life' series of paintings had expressed a broad contemporary
interest in unconscious behaviour, and literary friends like Strindberg had stimulated
Munch to project sensations of hypnosis and mental stress. One may well ask if Munch
would have produced his 'Frieze of Life' at all without the literary stimulus.44
Another factor to Munch's reveries and identification with Osvald was his ingrained
inclination to dramatize his life. He saw himself in many roles, of which Osvald was one.
Other roles were that of Peer Gynt, Rubek, Solness, Hamlet, Marat, an anatomist, a poet,
a minstrel, a monk, John the Baptist, Christ. While he associated with writers, he
repeatedly expressed heightened dramatic moments of human experience, as in The
Screamand Jealousy, and in Ibsen's plays he could find metaphors for private ordeals.
Munch's adaptation of his images to illustrate Ibsen's plays could be light-hearted as
well as serious. For example, his sketch Woman(Peer Gynt Paraphrase) of 1895 is a lively
variation of his painting Woman(Pls 22d, b), and appears to refer to Peer's encounter with
the upland herd-girls. This drawing, too, conveys his pleasure in suggesting the actors'
performance.
43 Draft letter in Munch Museum archive, quoted by
PAl Hougen, n. 14 above, p. 26, "'Var" var den
dodssyges lengten mot lys og varme, mod livet. Solen i
Aulaen var i "Var" solskinnet i vinduet. Det var
Osvalds sol ... I samme stol somjeg malte den syge har
jeg og alle mine kjaerefra min mor afsat vintre pa vintre,
sat og lengtet mot sol - til doden har tat dem. Jeg og
alle mine kjaerehar fra min far gat op og ned af gulvet i
livsangst, galskab'.
44 Munch first used the title 'Frieze of Life' in
I918
when he exhibited a later variation of the series. See
n. 12 above, and Arne Eggum, 'Munch's late Frieze of
Life', published together with an English translation of
Munch's pamphlet Livs-Frisen in the catalogue to
Edvard Munch exhibition, Liljevalchs and Kulturhuset, Stockholm 1977. Before 1918 the series had
been exhibited as studies on the theme of love (1893-95)
and as motifs from the life cycle (1902-05). Much of the
information about Munch's intentions for his frieze
derived from pamphlets he published in later life, in
Livs-Frisen (1918) and in Livsfrisenstilblivelse (c. 1925).
Munch wrote that he considered the series would
remain unfinished until such time as it could be
assembled permanently in one place.
206
CARLA LATHE
Because of his wish to provoke and suggest situations, Munch's supposedly autobiographical pictures cannot be considered reliable, literal records of his life. Even his
lithograph Death in the Sick Room (P1. 25c), which apparently referred to the death of his
sister, shows that he presented the experience in a dramatic way. The floor in the
lithograph slopes upwards and resembles the boards of a stage. Whereas the Munch
family's living quarters were cramped, the sick room in the lithograph looks empty and
large. The sister in the chair died in 1877, when the other children ranged in age between
nine and thirteen, but Munch shows them as adults. His presentation of this memory is
therefore larger than life. As in the intimate theatre, he made a dramatic spectacle from
his revelation of private experience.
VII
If assessments of Munch take into account his association with Scandinavian and
continental authors, he no longer appears an isolated psychotic but an accomplished and
imaginative draughtsman. Some of his more startling images were clearly motivated by
his interest in suggesting vivid and dramatic moments. The technicalities of suggesting
vacillating states of mind invited experiment, in which Munch excelled. In spite of the
appearance of spontaneity, he repeated and re-worked his images over a long period of
time, and in his prints created brilliant new versions of his thematic groups like 'The
Frieze of Life'. He was reluctant to sell individual paintings of his series, and made
replicas rather than lose motifs from his groups. Although the prints of the same motifs
were often more accessible than the paintings, they lost some of their coherence by being
separated from the original thematic group. When hung together, the pictures illustrate
his dramatic sense in suggesting the tensions in human behaviour.
Munch in his repeated visits to Germany during the years 1892-I908 impressed
writers and painters there by his method of expressing psychological awareness. He was
drawn into the Berlin literary and theatre milieu, which encouraged and influenced his
art. His concentration on visual demonstrations of psychological tension stimulated
younger generations of painters in central Europe, like Kokoschka, who also fluctuated
between painting and drama. Remarkable for the development of expressionism is that
Munch's projections of psychic mobility by gesture, colour, perspective and background
emerged most clearly when he competed with modern dramatists and responded to the
theatre.
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b---Edvard Munch, Woman,1894. Berg
(PP- 97 f., 205)
L--:
a-Edvard Munch, Tingel-Tangel.MusicHall inBerlin,1895. Oslo,
Munch Museum (p. 195)
c-Edvard Munch, Jealousy,1895. Bergen, collection Rasmus Meyer
d-Edvard Munch, Woman(PeerGyntP
(pp.198,202 f.)
ii-:-i,
'•ii:-
a-Edvard Munch, TheScream,
1893.
Oslo, National Gallery (pp. 194, 197)
b-Edvard Munch, Programmefor
PeerGynt,Thedtre
del'Veuvre,
1896.
Oslo, Munch Museum (pp. 193, 199,
•'•i•>*
202)
1:
a
c-Edvard Munch, Ibsenand
Nietzschewithgenii,c. 1908. Oslo,
d-Edvard Munch, August
1896. Oslo, Munch
Strindberg,
Museum (pp. 193, 199)
d
C
24
a-Edvard Munch, Scene from Ibsen's Ghosts,I906. Oslo, Munch Museum (pp. 193, 203)
b-Edvard Munch, Family Scene (from Ibsen's Ghosts), 90o6.Oslo, Munch Museum (p. 203)
a-Edvard Munch, Osvald(for Ibsen's Ghosts:detail),
I906. Oslo, Munch Museum (p. 204)
25
b-Edvard Munch,Jealousy,1907. Oslo, Munch
Museum (pp. 203 f.)
c-Edvard Munch, Deathin theSickRoom,1896. Oslo, Munch Museum (p. 206)

Edvard Munch`s Dramatic Images 1892-1909

Transcription

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