Munch
Paris, Frankfurt, London and Edinburgh

by MERLIN JAMES

Passing through an initial, somewhat documentary room, the visitor to Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye at Tate Modern, London (to 14th October),1 enters a long second gallery to be riveted by Girls on the bridge (1927; cat. no.21; Fig.41) maybe fifty feet away. Familiar, yet realer than remembered, its impact at that range is spectacular. After being drawn close – by the picture’s perspective – one turns to see another rendition of essentially the same composition, echoing it from the opposite end of the hall (no.20). Hardly larger, around a metre square, this 1902 version is again electrifying at a distance. Such are the high points in this exhibition – stunningly powerful works shown to their best advantage. (The unnecessary red wall colouring in room two happily does not reappear.) Through the entrance to the third gallery one previews the equally famous Red Virginia creeper (1898–1900; no.52; Fig.40), its foreground face staring back, haunted and accusing. Once more, from afar, the energy and organic cohesion of colour, light and shape is manifest. Later, Street workers in the snow (1920; no.95) may lack strong hues and opt for a divergent two-point perspective, but again when seen through doorways from two rooms away it bursts with an inexplicable optical illusion of volume and dynamism. Finally, already visible from the penultimate room and brilliantly placed right at the show’s exit, we have Between the clock and the bed (1940–43; no.141; Fig.42). It is Munch’s unforgettable valediction in which he emerges from the open doors of his studio like some symbolic figure appearing on the hour from a mechanical clock. The face is almost Buddha-like, intently conscious yet removed.

The exhibition is not, however, billed as a parade of greatest hits. It aims to present new research into Munch – as a modern, twen­tieth-century artist, rather than a fin-de-siècle Symbolist; alert to the contemporary world around him rather than introverted; an artist of technical and optical concerns, not purely interior vision. Much space in the galleries and fat catalogue2 thus goes to diverse topics, including Munch’s use of photography, forays into theatre design, experiments with a movie camera, awareness of current affairs and popular media, use of compositions apparently from postcards, and even his visual documenting of an eye disorder. One understands the desire for new angles. The cliché of Munch as the existential angst-monger obscures his real complexity. The Museum of Modern Art’s survey in New York some five years ago, while showing his broader range, largely stuck to psycho-spiritual readings and finally diffused his achievement.3 Nevertheless, the novel approaches at Tate Modern rarely illuminate Munch’s genius. His snippets of home movies seem typical for their time, his photographs mostly unexceptional, not informing his paintings to great effect. His designs for Ibsen productions around 1906 have merely general resonance with the claustrophobic interiors he was painting which, like Expressionist theatre itself, can verge on unintentional comedy. The works recording his eye disease are only of mild interest (a blob obscured his vision, oddly recalling the head-like forms that haunt his paintings).

The more significant curatorial concern is with Munch’s repeated revisiting and adapting of motifs. As well as two iterations of Girls on the bridge, there are five other pairings (nos.10–19) facing each other across room two: versions of Ashes from 1895 and 1925; of The sick child (1907 and 1925); of The vampire (1893 and 1916–18); The kiss (1897 and 1914) and finally Two human beings: the lonely ones from 1905 and 1933–35. Munch could recreate a motif several times, revisiting it up to ten and more years after its first invention or its last re-investigation. There exist six canvases of The sick child, for example, made over several decades. In the catalogue Angela Lampe discusses this practice, surmising a mixture of creative and commercial or career motivations and seeing this as again qualifying romantic ideas of authenticity and unique artistic expression. She concludes that Munch developed something analogous to a commercial brand, even a proto-Warholian art of self-franchise. That is going a bit far. Munch’s replications echo – as Lampe earlier acknowledges – those of many artists: it is almost rarer for painters not to make copies and variants of their signature works. However, it remains fascinating to see Munch reprise his compo­sitions, and the show (which has relied overwhelmingly on the Munch-museet holdings in Oslo) could profitably have assembled even more of, say, the seven known oils of Girls on the bridge. A room of several Weeping woman paintings (nos.67–71) is rather different as these are more a continuous series made around 1907–09 (though lithographs of 1930 take up the theme).

Lampe aptly notes a web of self-quotation in Munch, with not only whole compositions readopted and adapted but separate elements resurfacing, migrating, reconfiguring in different combinations. In this connection his prints are underplayed in the show, and it is a fortunate viewer who can also visit the extensive Edvard Munch: Graphic Works from the Gundersen Collection at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (to 23rd September).4 More locally, Edvard Munch: Landscapes of the Soul at Connaught Brown, London (closed 14th July), also featured some fine impressions. The combining of woodblocks, lithographic plates and stones, the ability to return to them to regenerate an image, adding new layers or elements, hand colouring, reprinting on different coloured paper, achieving reversals of composition and so on – Munch’s radical printmaking feeds directly into his painting.

If such repetition and leitmotif are potent it is also because Munch’s images themselves evoke déjà vu. They are obscurely perennial, suggesting (at best not too obviously) folk-tale encounters, Bible stories, philosophic emblems, psychological or mythological archetypes. More than that, his strongest scenes, such as that of the Proustian petite bande on the bridge, have the tenor of things seen in the past or in a dream, that have printed an indelible impression, that keep coming back to one. This can be reinforced by foreground figures and faces, often strangely somnambulant, looking either directly into or out of the scene. Munch’s identification with his subjects (and by extension our identification with them/him) is always in play, and the confronting face often suggests the artist–viewer’s own reflection. The face-on figures seem aware of the vista spread out behind them, as if seeing it through our eyes. Or we can feel as if we are being shown a scene that exists in their imagination or memory, its forms sometimes literally emanating or projecting from them.

Munch is hugely uneven of course. He can churn out unremarkable modernist renderings, such as Man with bronchitis (1920; no.134); and the curators have wisely excluded most of his more formal portraits, and all his Nordic naturist hymns to the masculine nude. More problematically, however, features of his best works are often present in his worst. In Women in the bath (1917; no.80), loose transparent delineation, so radical elsewhere, becomes a hopelessly daubed attempt at erotic dreaminess. In Death of the bohemian (1925–26; no.79) his collaging of motifs devolves into a self-pastiche of stock poses and sentiments. The sun (1910–13) is crude kitsch, with the cringe-making device of a hidden head staring out from the rays, upside-down. Right across Munch’s work that trope of engaging eye contact can turn trite or de trop. Melodrama becomes embarrassing, swooping perspectives too insistent and sensational. The liquid immersing of forms into and out of one another becomes Art Nouveau affectation. Pools and swirls of colour, recalling the wood-grain of the relief prints, becomes empty romantic flurry. Some works hover right on the border between brilliance and farce. The head-on Galloping horse (1910–12; no.44) is finally too much of a ‘dramatic conception’, and the nag’s anatomy too pantomime. On the operating table (1902–03; no.47) shows an etherised patient, somehow levitated in deep perspective, with observers crowding behind a rectangular frame. While potentially this is an interesting metaphor for the relationship of artist and audience, the hovering head-shaped pool of blood is perhaps unnecessary and the attendant nurse and consulting doctors are slightly silly.

Munch’s best work does not necessarily avoid melodrama but can incorporate it successfully into a qualifying pictorial vitality and inventiveness. Even the absurd and comedic can be absorbed into disarming candour, as in Self-portrait with bottles (?1938; Fig.43) in which the plastered painter’s pose, as he reaches blindly for another shot, suggests someone in a nightmare, running but getting nowhere. And Munch’s under­lying dramas of associative form can work brilliantly when all his distorted ovoids evoke, understatedly enough, heads, skulls, auras, disembodied animals, foetuses, wombs, hearts or eyes. In both versions of Girls on the bridge shown here, the large fissured tree form is in some way like a head – a mind in which the whole scene could be playing. (In another version, the yellow hat of an implied foreground figure, looking into the scene with us, is exactly the same shape and size as the tree.) And the tree’s reflection in the water is key. The whole becomes a Neo-­Platonic emblem resonating not least with the nature of painting, the girls gazing into the depths (or at the surface?) of a reflected reality that must also include them, and us.

1    Before its London showing, the exhibition ran at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (22nd September 2011 to 23rd January 2012), and at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (9th February to 23rd May).
2    Catalogue: Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye. Edited by Angela Lampe and Clément Chéroux, with essays by François Albera, Magne Bruteig et al. 320 pp. incl. 290 col. + b. & w. ills. (Tate, London, 2011), £40 (HB). ISBN 978–1–84976–023–2; £29.99 (PB). ISBN 978–1–84976–058–4.
3    See K. McShine, ed.: exh. cat. Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, New York (Museum of Modern Art) 2006.
4    Monograph: Edvard Munch: Fifty Graphic Masterpieces from the Gundersen Collection. By Ina Johannesen. 211 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Aschehoug, Oslo, 2010), £55. ISBN 978–8–2032–52129.