Munch

Essentially this famous picture is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk, after his two companions, seen in the background, had left him. Fitting the fact that the sound must have been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal state, Munch renders it in a style which if pushed to extremes can destroy human integrity. As previously noted, the flowing curves of art nouveau represent a subjective linear fusion imposed upon nature, whereby the multiplicity of particulars is unified into a totality of organic suggestion with feminine overtones. But man is part of nature, and absorption into such a totality liquidates the individual. Beginning at this time Munch included art nouveau elements in many pictures but usually only in a limited or modified way. Here, however, in depicting his own morbid experience, he has let go, and allowed the foreground figure to become distorted by the subjectivized flow of nature; the scream could be interpreted as expressing the agony of the obliteration of human personality by this unifying force. Significantly, although it was Munch himself who underwent the experience depicted, the protagonist bears no resemblance to him or anyone else. The creature in the foreground has been depersonalized and crushed into sexlessness or, if anything, stamped with a trace of the femininity of the world that has come close to assimilating it.

Several facts indicate Munch was aware of the danger of an art of this sort for a neurotic humanist like himself. He soon abandoned the style and rarely if ever again subjected a foreground figure to this kind of radical and systematic distortion. At the top of another version of the subject (National Gallery, Oslo) he wrote: 'Can only have been painted by a madman.' He certainly had a horror of insanity, which had afflicted his sister Laura. Within the picture, he has set up a defense, in the form of the plunging perspective of the roadway and its fence, which preserves a rational world of three dimensions, holding at bay the swell of art nouveau curves. Safe in this rational world, the two men in the distance remain unequivocably masculine. In the foreground unified nature has come close to crossing the fence, close enough to distort the form and personality of the protagonist. But the fence still protects it from total absorption into subjective madness.

The Screamhas been the target of several high-profile art thefts. In 1994, the version in the National Gallery was stolen. It was recovered several months later.

The Sunis perhaps the greatest achievement of modern mural painting. Symmetrically structured, it occupied the enormous front space of Oslo University's assembly hall, dominating through size, unmitigated frontality, and power of imagery.

Munch extended the sun image in this mural from a partial to an embracing role, having first proposed a Nietzschean Mountain of Man that rose toward a sun-covered sky. Upon further reflection, and in compliance with advice from friends, he abandoned the problematical symbol to retain the sun image in pure, intense, and masculine dominance.

Illuminated by the sunrays are the water of the ocean, the bare rocks of a Northern landscape, and a slim strip of verdant green that separated land and sea. A clean, straight horizon line divides the waters from sky. The great sun is all-pervasive, shinning from the heavens upon land and sea, its rays reaching out to all eternity. Inhuman itself, it is the source of all life.

When Jens Thiis bought this picture for the National Gallery, Oslo, in 1909 the public was shocked; one critic denounced it as portraying a drunken prostitute. This is unlikely to have been Munch's idea. He did paint several pictures of prostitutes, tending to depict them as unattractive or even grotesque, whereas this woman closely resembles theMadonnaand, different though the setting, shares her ethereal beauty. She is probably intended to illustrate one aspect of the essence of protean womanhood portrayed in that work. Both paintings in fact relate to a lost picture by Munch that Hans Jaeger had with him in his prison cell when jailed in 1886 for publishing From Christiania's Bohemia, a novel in which descriptions of free bohemian life parallel what is shown here. The present picture is more directly a replica, modified by his style of the 1890s, of the same subject painted in 1885-86 and also lost. One important Norwegian precedent for the depiction of a dissolute woman would undoubtedly have been known to Munch, Hans Heyerdahl's tiny, exquisite painting ofThe Champagne Girl, which was also strongly attacked when exhibited. If Munch's picture representsThe Day After, Heyerdahl's might be called 'The Evening Before.'

Until his late years Munch never showed any interest in still-life painting for its own sake, but he sometimes introduced it into subject pictures, giving it, as in this case, the status of a separate image, a material correlate of the human situation portrayed.Gauguinhad employed still life in a similar manner in some of his portraits, without giving it the same degree of independence. InThe Day Afterthe differing pairs of bottles and glasses hint that the woman has had a nocturnal visitor.

No other painting conveys so strongly Munch's belief in the working class as the dominant force in the society of the future. The tramp of the weary workers along the road home, from the distant vanishing point up to and beyond the picture plane, almost certainly signifies the march of the working class from the distant past up to the present and beyond it into the future, which is to belong to them. In contrast to this forward movement, and causing it to seem all-the-more relentless, the perspective shoots inward, accompanied in the middle ground on the left by a few small figures of bourgeois appearance; they recede into the past which, from Munch's standpoint, is where they belong. To augment the grandeur of the workers' procession he shows most of the scene from a low eye level, but as the foreground figures successively approach the picture plane the eye level rises in steps, so that the man in front, seen from a height and bisected by the base line, seems to be walking past us out of the picture, creating a cinematic effect. The use of multiple contours, especially evident in the leading figure, further increases the impression of movement. In fact the whole picture seems dominated by a tangle of wiry lines, more like a drawing than a painting; the lower legs of the man on the left are actually transparent, allowing us to look through them at the cobblestones.

The practice of free love by the bohemians of Christiania, advocated by Jaeger as suited to an anarchist society, led to a good deal of jealousy. Among those who aroused it was Oda Krohg (wife of the painter Christian Krohg), who became, to borrow Tom Lehrer's phraseology, the hypotenuse of a triangle involving her husband and Jappe Nilssen, a young journalist who was a friend of Munch. His jealousy inspired this symbolic composition which Munch painted in several versions under various titles:Jealousy, andMelancholy.

Nilssen sits miserable among the rocks on the shore at Asgardstrand, in the profile position of contemplation. In the distance the figures of a man and a woman, Christian and Oda Krohg, are about to embark on a boat, bound for an island where they will make love. Nilssen is painted in the manner of the Pont-Aven school, in heavy inflexible contours. The further flatten a figure already flattened by the profile silhouette, and do not altogether harmonize with the vague plastic implication of the face and the hand supporting it. The distant view is fused into art nouveau undulations, We are in fact presented with two different image: firstly, an imaginary but objective view of a melancholy man and secondly, a blurred picture of the distant scene his mind's eye conjures up as a metaphor of the cause of his melancholy. Such double images, demanding a transfer from our own eyes to the mid's eye of a foreground figure, are not uncommon in Munch Munch paintedThe Stormin Aasgaardstrand, a small Norwegian seaside resort he and other artists frequented. The painting may have been inspired by a violent storm that occured there that summer, but it also conjures a sense of psychic distress. Standing near the water on an eerie blue Scandinavian summer night, a young woman clad in white clasps her hands to her head. Other women, standing apart from her, echo the anguished gesture. The windows of the housebright, yellow, arrestingimbue the building with an almost human presence while suggesting a vibrant world from which the women are excluded.