The Flowering and Passing of Love

The one hundred and thirty odd works on display at Edvard Munch: The modern life of the soul at the MoMA showcase Munch’s career of over sixty years, rich with the influence of the outside world and solidly rooted with each passing year in his own style and his own feelings.

Rue Lafayette, 1891 marries Caillebotte’s perspectival use of a grand avenue and Parisian buildings (Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877) along with three of Caillebotte’s balcony paintings. Munch’s balcony is made with hasty swirls but the pattern on the grille emerges in the shadows it casts. The man standing on the balcony in a top hat is like Caillebotte’s except in that he is faceless.

Munch’s early self-portrait from 1881-82 when he was still a teenager shows us an almost romantic figure, a clean boy. One that doesn’t fail to remind me for some reason of Klimt’s Portrait of the Pianist Joseph Pembauer done later in 1890. Klimt seems to have been influenced by Munch in the early twentieth century but it’s unclear he would have seen any of Munch’s work so early. A later self-portrait hung in the same room as the first one was done in 1886 a year after Munch met his first love Milly. This slightly older Munch has a bad boy look even though he stares at us from the corner of his eye just as he did at eighteen.

Mourning and love of every type are intertwined in Munch. Inheritance I, 1897-99 depicts a woman with a naked baby on her lap. The red blotches on the baby suggest he’s sick or worse. His eyes are huge and his stare fixed, the eyebrows hoary; as if he has already passed through life. The woman’s head is bent and she has a white kerchief in her hand suggesting her tears. Right next to this baby who is almost dead or dying hangs Madonna in the Churchyard, 1896 in India ink and watercolor. The woman in this one is standing. The fetal skeleton on the side holds a bow and two arrows. Motherhood and death, love and the grave go hand in hand.

Vampire, 1893-94 shows us a man with his face turned down toward the woman’s body just like in Ashes, 1894. The position of the bodies themselves do not suggest vampirism. The woman in the painting has flowing and fiery red hair that can be taken to symbolize rivulets of blood but it seems like the title of the painting is not the original one given by Munch who intended to call it Love and Pain. In Ashes, the woman’s white dress is emphasized by her brightly colored bodice. The dress is split open almost all the way down until the crotch. Her mood suggests that she has been in a moment of revelry that is over; she faces us directly. The man in the painting on the other hand is turned away from us and his face buried in his arms. In one of Munch’s graphic works where he once again takes up Ashes, the placement of the figures is different and so is the mood. The man is less to the edge of the piece and now buried into his own hands, the woman’s mood less easily identifiable but possibly more drunken on the revelry that has passed. Munch returned to the same faces, that of his lover and his self in minute variations in different mediums.

In Angst, 1894 a stream of haunting faces stare at us. The faces closest to us have a few discernible features but as they recede they have only eyes and then just hollows. Ghostlike beside a red sky, these people are silent and miserable. A misery that was visible in Despair, 1892 which pre-figured The Scream for Munch. He is alone to the side on a bridge while two figures hover far away behind him. Though Munch said of Despair that he felt a loud unending scream piercing nature the mood of the painting itself is silent because of the faceless figure of Munch in the foreground and the faceless people in the background. In Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1894 the stream of strange ghostlike figures seem to be coming home from a joyless modern place, their steps heavy. The loneliness of the individual, the dreary quality of our communal existence and the isolation of our crowded spaces make the experience of these three paintings somewhat like that of being in a burial ground.

Love regenerates, even if the intimacy of it has the tone of a dirge. In his 1892 painting The Kiss the male figure (Munch) is facing the side and the woman is not visible. They are faceless in a dark room that has a window from which you can see other windows down the street. The other windows are lit. Their own love is dark. Light comes from the outside. The version of The Kiss from 1897 is even darker but more intimate. The outside world is sealed off from it though a sort of parted curtain is visible in the lower left. The couple is still faceless but there is a sense that the man is melting into the woman and they are more unified with each other because of the brush strokes that form a sort of halo around their combined forms. In the woodcut The Kiss III, 1898 the couple is indistinguishable, the forms of the man and the woman and the immediate space around them is all one in color and texture. Because one views such art in public spaces encumbered by the presence of other bodies and voices one doesn’t have the privilege of sealing off the world of the painting hermetically. A lady with a southern drawl remarked, “Apparently he liked painting the kiss.” To which one of her companions replied, “You’d think he’d say been there done that.” One kiss then is like another, one lover like another, one self like another, one faceless ghostlike modern soul on the street like the others. In a way Munch recognized this malaise of our times but in another he fought it. The loss of life and of love, its mourning and passing, are recorded and re-recorded, observed in detail, the experience altered. In the case of the painting By the death bed, 1895 a family is gathered to mourn the passing away of a member. The woman at the forefront and the bearded man beside her are more visible than the rest of the family which has only eyes. In a lithograph from 1896 by the same name the mourners are more clearly visible, two ghosts now haunt the wall in the back and the hands of the dead body seen from our perspective suggest someone small has died.

Love entails an ending. In Separation, 1896 the male figure clutches at his heart with red hands while a woman in white, her hair and dress blowing behind her, glides away from him with her head held high. It seems as if she has walked away and metamorphosed from an apparition to a real woman, liberated in some way by their separation. In Separation II, a lithograph from the same year, the woman’s scarf/veil is ornamented and the man simply dejected, resigned to his suffering. The ocean to the side is bluer and the woman now free, she has completely left behind her earlier existence. If couples separate they also come together, at least symbolically. In Metabolism, 1899 a large work, the man and woman face each other. We don’t see the intimacy we saw in one of The Kiss pictures but nor do we see the pain of Separation or Vampire. In Metabolism as well as in one of Munch’s later paintings Nude Figures and Sun, 1910-19 we see hints of Koloman Moser’s work from the same period, his strange use of color to stake lines into his paintings, his extravagant use of colored sunlight.

The Dance of Life, 1899-1900 which greets the viewer on entering the show, features a couple in the center dancing. Other couples behind them are incidental but in motion. The central couple are flanked by a woman in a white dress to the left and one in a black dress to the right. Both these women face the dancing couple. While these figures are heavy with symbolism, Munch seemed to have explored their symbolism differently in 1895. In the acquatint and drypoint Women II, he showed us a naked woman in the center of the painting facing us full front. To her left is a woman in white and to her left a woman in black but both are turned away from her. These women, virgin and death come back to us in The Dance of Life but in it they face the dancing couple. Maybe Munch decided that all the stages of our existence our linked. The virgin already containing seeds for love and love pre-figuring in its very nature, the void. Munch’s women are lovers, sisters (two died, one rather young), his mother (who died when he was less than ten) and his models.

In The Artist and his model I, 1919-21 the model is dark-faced as if traumatized while the painter behind her looms like an ethereal figure. The studio is in shambles, the artwork hanging in the back not very clear, and the tools of the painter’s life nowhere to be seen. The interiors have a kind of Matisse-having-a-breakdown feeling to them. Weeping Nude, 1913 recalls a Kokoschka nude though Munch’s is slumped over so that she is all hair and no tears, her legs akimbo. In the 1916 Metabolism, a small graphic work, a pregnant woman stands under a tree with budding leaves in the full sun. Skeletons play at the bottom of the tree on the earth. It is in our nature to consume our experiences, to devour each other, to love and move on, in a sense to cannibalize. Though in the after-time of introspection things are changed. Kiss in the Field, a 1943 woodcut done by Munch when he was eighty shows us a couple that are so merged together in harmony with each other and the surrounding fields that they have faded into a distant memory. Looking back across a lifetime the searing and rending that is love softens into a gentle past event.

The majority of Munch’s self-portraits are hung at the end of the show. In 1903 Munch is in hell, his naked torso surrounded by flame, his face scorched. And from then on we see how he has made it to the other side. Despite the dark motifs and the melancholy Munch manages to let the world in. Like Munch’s bad boy self-portrait from 1886 his Self-portrait in Bergen from 1916 has a Schiele-esque tone to it. Munch is seated on a balcony, beneath him the life of the city goes on. Even in The Night Wanderer, 1923-24 though Munch paints himself alone, he is outside on a balcony, the world, in other words, is acknowledged. In Self-Portrait during the Eye disease I from 1930 he is a skeletonic Scream-type figure amidst a colorful ribbon of ruin that looks like a universe that has melted. In Self-Portrait between Clock and Bed made two years before his death in 1942, Munch faces us squarely, his hands by his sides and his feet opening to us in a soft V-shape. His whole body and his life (the room, the painting of the woman to the side, the bed) are offered up to us.

And we know that despite everything he faced he has come through.