Edvard Munch: A Defense
Translated from the Norwegian by Jordan Barger
It was when I first saw Munch’s work that I began to believe in the force of painting. I come from a small town and, beforehand, I had never seen proper oil paintings. It was at an autumn art exhibition that I first saw works like that. There were landscapes: green fields, in both old-fashioned Düsseldorf green and the new Parisian green. There were trees and gray stones, oceans with blue waves.
I could understand what I was looking at. But I couldn’t understand the point of it all. I was left feeling that what I had seen with my own eyes was better.
In Munch, I found something similar to what I had seen with my own eyes. Color that shimmered and lived, changing every second. My eyes made the strangest shapes from mere stone. A girl by the beach whose dress was not a dress but a symphony in white, whose hair was fluttering gold ribbons.
Munch is a poet of color. He has discovered how colors can be used in art. Munch weaves meaning and longing into his colors. Since seeing his work, I now know what the other artists were missing.
I think he is the only one who can compose a poem with mere colors, with hardly any other elements, with the simplest contour lines. In the picture “Death and Spring,” there are only two colors side by side, the blue of the deathbed and the light green of spring. But it still catches the eye. It is like one of those simple folk songs where they may sing about death, but the chorus is about spring.
He is above all a lyricist in color. He feels colors, and he feels in color. He doesn’t just see them. He sees sorrow and screams and brooding and decay. He does not see yellow and red and blue and violet. He sings just like the lyricist, letting the colors run on their own accord, in strokes and waves, never limiting them. And like the lyricist, his work is tinged with music. He has paintings that, like symphonies, need no title. There should have been no title for the painting The Scream. This word from the world of sound is only a distraction.
Edvard Munch, Death and Spring, 1893. Oil on canvas.
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Munch is an anomaly. He represents no movement. His art has a distinct stamp of individuality, a style of its own. It is precisely this style that has caused such a stir. You don’t feel obliged to come up and meet it, but rather to let it dissolve into you.
This style would be barren if the expressions were arbitrary. But they are not. They are defined by a search for harmony. Munch searches between the shared experience and his own. In his gaze, he seeks undiscovered beauties.
With Munch’s tendency to let color go its own way, wavy masses of color emerge from his paintings. Munch employs these waves in many different places: the shore winding along the sea, the ebbing branches of trees, and the undulous bodies and hair of women. Like a musician, he has certain rhythms; he returns to certain chords. He favors a few deep blue tones that show the depths of his emotional life.
In his self-portrait, he has gathered and blended all of this. Munch offers a painting of his soul rather than a portrait of his face. A work of stark, wide-eyed beauty rather than an accurate work of portraiture. In fusing technique and content, it is brilliant. The finest meanings, what the verbal word could never reach, are told in color. They speak of suffering and beauty in a language of signs which, before Munch, we were not capable of understanding. One cannot help thinking of other self-portraits. Rembrandt’s, for instance, also depicts an inner life by using means most peculiar to the artist. They have similar goals but employ different language — where one uses shadows, the other uses deep colors, and line details differ throughout.
They feel similar, and yet they are not at all similar. The vocabulary of life has since changed, and with it, the visual forms of feeling and observation have also changed. There are new sources of suffering and joy; there are new worlds, and this is, perhaps, the essential energy that transforms language.
Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895. Oil on canvas.
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Impressionism was on the rise when Munch started painting. He has lived with it, intensely — it is natural to him — and however much he tries to distinguish his own art, he will always be an Impressionist.
Hans Jæger has also had an impact on him. Munch has painted him. He was the one who gave our era its brightness, its strangeness, its revolutionary qualities.
At that time, there was much to see for a painter’s eye — twilight meetings — under strange lights, in all variety of cafés, — lips, like outcasts, defying words, without boundaries and without fear, often strong and with Norwegian brutality — immeasurable shadows of misery, of powerlessness and lousiness — souls stretching themselves to be great, full and gentle, which will never be. And among all these faces, there was Jæger, whose logic was sharp as a scythe and cold like icy wind. Whose fervor burned bright, so that all mankind might come to this light and grow rich, fulfilled.
Above all, Munch’s insight comes from life itself. These insights are indivisible in his art. The decorative impulse is alien to him, and if there are decorative elements in him, it is where the outside world assumes a certain architectural tone in his eyes, such as vertical tree trunks facing the sea. The Pre-Raphaelite impulse is even more distant to him. He resents having to look back to other flourishing art periods in order to recreate beauty.
Out of life itself, Munch draws his temperament, exactly as he sees and feels it. Life showers over him. The art of painting, like the other arts, must portray life as it is. In all its heaviness, bitterness, and depth.
Art must be able to stir in us what moves us most deeply. Every artist, whether poet, painter or composer, takes pride in being a human being, in living the life of others, and in seeing others as they are. Life is a thousandfold, has many regions, and not everyone can live through them all.
But what they do experience, artists will share. If the means of their art set limits, they will seek to move those limits.
Only those born into a particular art form can do this. For those few, more than the rest of us, receive the impressions of life through a special sense through which their art must pass. I imagine that when Munch saw death in his childhood, he saw first and foremost the color of the bedspread in that moment. Then, ten years later, when he thinks of death, he again sees the color of that bedspread from that moment.
Edvard Munch, Hans Jæger, 1889. Oil on canvas.
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Everywhere in his paintings, man is present, man who feels, loves, suffers — including man as a social animal. There was a time when he could not omit from his landscapes a head, a face, or the like. The intention was for the mood to come from the figure, or rather that the figure gave the landscape a mood.
In his great starscape painting, there is a lump, which is really a tree. I could never really get hold of it; I could not blend it into my mood. Then I discovered the same motif in an etching. There he had added two heads, man and woman. Large and heavy and strange, they stand there and cover the whole starry sky. Then I understood the lump. I even began to like it. I remembered how I went out at night, and the trees and stones and haystacks had become unbelievable; I sensed colors more than I saw them, felt nature more than I understood it.
But even if there is no human eye to explain it, one feels the artist’s urge to seize the picture while the heart still beats freshly behind it, before the reflections are gone and before the forms have taken on sharp, objectively real outlines.
This is one way to comprehend the unfinished quality of Munch’s paintings. Sometimes, I suppose, they are sketches. But more often they give a finished, irresistible impression. It takes so much work to maintain this, to remove all that would stir our skepticism, just as much work as it does to perfect a picture.
He also prefers to choose his subjects where the emotion bursts forth in strength, love, death, and sickness.
For me his Madonna picture is the epitome of his art. It is the Madonna of the earth, the woman who gives birth in pain. I think you must look to Russian literature to find a similar religious concept of woman, such glorification of the beauty of pain. What lies at the bottom of life is not clear to our eyes, either in form, color, or idea. Life has wrapped itself in a mysterious delicacy and terror. So dense that the sensibilities of ten humans could not define it, but which a great lyricist can attempt. The longing to raise the human up and out, to magnify all that our daily toil has diminished, to show it in its original gaiety — here it reaches its highest arc and takes on a religious tone.
Munch sees that it is woman who carries the greatest wonder on earth in her womb. He returns to this motif again and again. He seeks to portray, in all its horror, the moment when the feeling awakens; he paints the cold, black shadow strongly on the wall in order to vividly put us in the moment. Unlike the French, he never vividly paints the woman herself, as softness and roundness. She is, for him, part of the coherence that runs through his pictures. He paints the warmth more lovingly than the woman — the kiss that emerges from the darkness, the love affair before the couple becomes serious and anxious.
Edvard Munch, Starry Night, 1893. Oil on canvas. Getty.
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Munch’s first paintings still hang on to regular Impressionism. They are more complete than many of his later works. They are prettier. They have something sharp, delicate and full of soul, which they later lose.
Then came the fierce urge to bring out the self. Life burst open in Munch. It was to shatter his every form — and yet it was to have form itself. It had to tell not only of death and of that which fades, but also of that which happened before and what is behind it, the movement, the play, the feeling. There is more speed in his later pictures, more sizzle; they have better colors and sharper contrasts. Although he was not successful every time, these experiments always produced three, four, five interesting works.
But under these years of striving, there are perhaps sides of his personality that have come to lie fallow. Munch has more than feeling — he also has spirit. His portraits show it.
But he is not spiritual; he does not have the kind of imagination that describes new worlds, new experiences and adventures. He has a reproductive imagination. He is receptive. His service is such that he can suffer intensely under the power of life. He does not recreate it. If his imagination is great where color is concerned, it is poor in producing new lines.
Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895-1902. Lithograph.
But what lines there are, he sees as no one else. And it is as if out of all this, out of the whole of existence, with all its forms and all its chaos, he extracts the one line he is looking for, which he twists and twists. Is this the line of his innermost self? Or is it the one separating his soul from the world around him?
When all sides of his personality merge: spirit, emotion, and beauty, then Munch will enter his third and last period. It could be a long, long time from now. It may happen before anyone realizes.
May he have peace to collect himself!
“Edvard Munch. – et forsøg,” Samtiden, Volume 7, 1896
Jordan Barger is a translator currently attending the Literary Translation MFA at the University of Iowa. Translations can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, FENCE, Circumference, and The Poetry Review. Jordan has also translated Obstfelder’s play The Red Drops and his novel The Cross.
