‘Why don’t men and women really like one another nowadays?” asks Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Like D. H. Lawrence’s creation, the groundbreaking Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) also felt let down by the ignis fatuus of true love—that elusive will o’ the wisp that too often fails to guide its followers to the arcadia of lasting bliss. Munch’s pessimism about the possibility of finding everlasting love—his troubled views of sexuality, his persistent melancholy, his expressive use of line and color to transfigure nature, illustrate emotion, and convey inner psychological realities, his unshakable existential anxiety centered upon the ever-present specter of death—emerge in startling fashion through his highly personal, extremely original paintings and innovative prints, many of which can now be viewed at this superb exhibition.
Organized in partnership with the Munch Museum of Oslo, the exhibition concentrates upon Munch’s affinity with (and decisive impact upon) German and Austrian Expressionists. It displays not only Munch’s work but that of those he influenced, from Egon Schiele to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, and Max Beckmann, persuasively arguing that Munch was “the father of Expressionism.”
There are few flaws to be found here, but if one wishes to quibble, perhaps the organizers could have made clear just how distinctive Northern European art was—with its depictions of nature as fraught with peril and its portrayal of the human as a helpless creature fated to live in an inhospitable landscape—from the traditions of Classicism (predominant in Southern Europe) and even Impressionism (predominant in France), in which humans are at home in a placid and serene natural world. Moreover, despite a helpful and informative timeline of Munch’s life, the show is not arranged chronologically. We come to The Scream (1895) at the end of the exhibition, as if all of Munch’s other works were appetite-whetting attractions and The Scream is the piping-hot feature presentation—which, undoubtedly, it is. This gives the impression that The Scream represents the culmination of Munch’s career, when in fact it came midway through his journey. Viewers may be led to believe that Munch’s art grew darker and more anguished as his life progressed when, in fact, after receiving treatment in Copenhagen for a 1908 breakdown, his art became progressively brighter, cheerful, even life-affirming, a fact most prominently exemplified in Sunbathing (1914-15), an oil painting of nude bathers frolicking in a pleasant, sunny, Gauguin-like paradise. Its exuberant use of lush, vivid colors has none of the pessimism and melancholy that characterize much of Munch’s mordant earlier work.
Still, despite Munch’s emergence from the dark forest in which he’d been lost, he never found the straight path that might have granted him a modicum of peace. He never quite shook off the constant consternation that pierced his heart with forebodings of loneliness and death. So it’s appropriate to look closely at The Scream, not only as one of modern art’s masterpieces but as the defining masterwork of Munch’s career.
We see The Scream in a small, narrow, dimly lit chamber, giving us the feeling that we’ve entered a chapel, almost a private confessional, in stark contrast to the wide, spacious room in which Kirchner’s Street, Dresden (1908) and Schiele’s Man & Woman (1914) are displayed. It is a fitting space for this iconic image, a painting of an agonized prayer from the depths of the soul.
The screamer is a ghostly, Nosferatu figure of death-in-life, a living memento mori, an animated Yorick’s skull perched on a rail-thin figure. In the background, two boats can be vaguely discerned amidst the swirling, hallucinatory lines and lurid colors that encircle the spectral figure, seemingly trapped in a feverish dream. Perhaps the shipboard dream was the premonition of the horrors of the two world wars, much as the plague had arrived from Asia by boat, spread by rats stowed on mercantile vessels. The best description of The Scream comes from the artist himself: “I was walking along the road with two friends,” wrote Munch, “the sun was setting—the sky turned blood-red. And I felt a wave of Sadness—I paused, tired to Death. Above the blue-black, fjord and city, Blood and flaming tongues hovered. My friends walked on—I stayed behind—Quaking in Angst—I felt the great Scream in Nature.”
Or as Connie reflects in Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
No one would have agreed more readily with these sentiments than Lawrence’s contemporary Munch, for whom the human being was an anguished, anxiety-ridden, sexually tormented creature, at home nowhere in nature, and—like the war-torn Europe of D. H. Lawrence and Edvard Munch’s lifetimes—dying from day to day, fraying out to nothing.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer and rabbinical student in New York.
