For those who believe those regular reports that Norwegians (and Nordics in general) are the happiest of Europeans, the Edvard Munch exhibition just opened at London’s Courtauld Gallery is the perfect antidote. Imagining the teacher enjoying a vermouth in the sun on a Mediterranean beach with a satisfied smile on his face is a mathematical impossibility. Theirs is melancholy, dissatisfaction, fear, paranoia, anxiety, agony, despair and death.
The Courtauld show, with eighteen paintings (most never exhibited outside Norway) on loan from the KODE museum in Bergen and originally purchased by the businessman, patron of the arts and collector Rasmus Meyer, is a treatise in itself on the authenticity of Munch’s pain, as much as he was a melodramatic character. But it also allows us to discover that his pessimism was progressive, and at least at the age of twenty he saw the world and life with a little joy, without going too far.
The works on display in London date from the 1980s and 1990s, and range from the beginning of his career, heavily influenced by Impressionism (some paintings might seem like Seurat or Pissarro), to his heyday, when the ghosts have taken possession of him, with those elongated spectral forms that would reach their maximum expression in The Scream.
Few artists are as identified with a single painting as Munch, but the exhibition (Bergen Masterpieces) shows the artist from various angles, stages and degrees of existential despair and Scandinavian pessimism. His scream is part of popular culture, but earlier (1884) he painted Morning, where a young woman partially unbuttoned, with one button on her shirt unbuttoned and one foot bare, looks through a window through which light, not Mediterranean, enters but Baltic or North Sea, that something is something. Apart from her sexual message (almost all her works have it), it is a tribute to the power of the sun, as well as the image of her sister with the sea in the background and a hat on her head.
But shadows progressively took over his psyche and his paintings, as his technique became more sophisticated, shapes and planes simplified, and white was replaced by mauve, purple, violet, lilac, mint green, lavender blue, and white. cobalt. Karl Johan avenue in Oslo ceased to be a cheerful and luminous pointillist landscape typical of Seurat (Spring Day on Karl Johan), and became a dark street illuminated by streetlights where sister figures of the protagonist of The Scream stroll in a spectral manner ( Evening on Karl Johan).
Asganderstrand Fjord, where he had a holiday home, was becoming more and more sinister and dark. And her sister, who died very young of tuberculosis, changes the beach (Inger in Sunshine) for the deathbed (At the Deathbed). The couples look genuinely miserable. His self-portrait in a Copenhagen clinic is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s. Any trace of vital joy quickly dissolved.
“I was born already dying,” Munch said in his seventies (he lived to be 81), which applies to everyone, but to him more than anyone else. His works reflect his unhealthy relationship with women, with whom he had traumatic affairs and who inspired him with terror (among other things, contracting syphilis). The agony can be felt. If they weren’t so wonderful, his pictures could push anyone into depression.
