Edvard Munch was the great painter of the human condition, one of the first who aspired to enter the fragile psychology of the men and women of his time.
His work was, as the painter wrote, "a poem of life, love and death", an expression that now gives the title to a large exhibition that the Orsay Museum opened yesterday in Paris.
The exhibition, which can be seen until January 22, 2023, brings together a hundred top-level works —among them, 60 loans from the new Munch Museum in Oslo— that express the Norwegian's own vision of painting, for whom the art was "a confession" that had the objective of explaining "life and its meaning" to his contemporaries.
All the great themes of existence appear in his oil paintings.
Not only illness and death, but also the difficult relationship with the other,
the chimera of romantic love and the anxiety caused by a lucid observation of the world around us.
They say that Munch did not know the writings of Freud, but his work reflects an almost identical taste for introspection, rather unprecedented in the painting of the time.
The Musée d'Orsay aspires to debunk some myths about Munch's work.
To begin with, it highlights the thematic breadth and aesthetic complexity of his work, although it has so often been reduced to a single painting,
The Scream
.
"His status as his icon made him a screen behind which hides a great work that gave meaning to that canvas," says the museum's president, Christophe Leribault.
Beyond that painting, the Parisian exhibition highlights the primordial place that the painter, author of 1,700 oil paintings, drawings and lithographs, occupied in the art of the period between the centuries.
Munch embodies like few creators the abandonment of nineteenth-century conventions to join the questions of the avant-garde of the following century.
“We should no longer paint interiors with men who read and women who weave.
We have to paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love”, he wrote in 1889.
'Despair' (1892), by Edvard Munch, the painting that announces 'The Scream', which he painted a year later. Thielska Galleriet
The history of art has described him as a symbolist who ended up converting to expressionism.
The sample opposes that handy version.
He prefers to see him as an artist who never abandoned the precepts of symbolism, beginning with its marked allegorical dimension.
Or, better, as "an unclassifiable figure located beyond the movements", according to its curator, Claire Bernardi, director of the Musée de l'Orangerie.
Like the romantics, Munch used to paint on a delayed basis: he made the first sketches for many of his works in Paris or Berlin, cities he frequently visited, and then completed them in Norway, using the essential: memory.
At the same time, he too was influenced by the Impressionists, by their rapid and willfully imperfect strokes, by their urban scenes and their aversion to rampant industrialization.
Munch saw his painting as "a symphony" in which the works spoke to each other and generated "resonances", a definition that the Musée d'Orsay tries to capture in a non-chronological staging, which groups the works by recurring motifs.
Son of a doctor and orphan of a mother since he was a child, in fragile health and addicted to alcohol and women, whom he considered a drug as harmful as any other —for Munch, love only left “a handful of ashes behind it”— , the painter was characterized from the beginning by his baleful gaze on his life and that of his fellow men, an unusual point of view in 19th-century Lutheran Norway.
His first paintings were small scandals: portraits of his sister shortly before she died of tuberculosis (
The Sick Girl
), of a naked adolescent who illustrated the calamitous transition to adulthood (
Puberty
), of a woman who sucked the vital force of her lover (
Vampira
) or of a poet abandoned by his wife who fixed his sad gaze on an incapable sea to comfort him (
Melancholy
).
“We should no longer paint interiors with men who read and women who weave.
We have to paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love,” Munch wrote in 1889.
In a street view, Munch paints the faces of bourgeois turned zombies who look at him suspiciously and seem to prefigure the deformed face in his masterpiece.
But it would be
Desesperanza
(1892), with its red sky and its vanishing point in an underlined diagonal, the work that anticipated the arrival, a year later, of
The Scream.
The painting reproduced a vision that Munch had while walking on the Ekeberg hill, in a city that was then still called Christiania.
and not Oslo.
It was part of a long series of paintings conceived as a sample that wanted to collect all the moods of existence,
The frieze of life
, which Munch organized as if he were a conceptual artist
avant la lettre
—or a curator of himself—, but his graphic expression of anguish in its purest form made him acquire an unexpected autonomy, surely excessive.
There are four copies of the work and none is in the Musée d'Orsay: the Norwegian museums that guard them have not wanted to part with their respective treasures and the only one that is in private hands has not been ceded by its owner, the American magnate Leon Black, who bought it a decade ago for the record price of $120 million.
Paris has to settle for exhibiting a medium-sized lithograph (50 by 40 centimeters), from a Norwegian collection, and with some drawings that he signed in subsequent years.
'Head from 'The Scream' and Raised Hands', 1898 lithograph made from his best-known work. Dag Fosse / KODE
What could be a defect has just become a virtue.
This alternative itinerary through Munch's work allows us to discover the lesser-known edges in his production, despite the fact that the theses of the exhibition are not particularly innovative either.
For example, his women stand out upright and alone in the intimacy of their rooms, symbols of integrity and Protestant rigidity, from his sister Inger in a solemn portrait of youth to the paintings inspired by the works of Ibsen and Strindberg, just as insightful as the time to reflect the daily horrors of married life.
His self-portraits from different eras also stand out, from his semblance as a thirtysomething dandy wrapped in a melancholy cloud of smoke to a picture of Munch turned into an old man, already in the forties of the last century, who seems to know, in his heart of hearts,
who is about to die.
Although the most forceful of all could be the one that closes the sample.
Munch painted him at the age of 40, after his devastating breakup with Tulla Larsen, his great love.
The painter appears enveloped in the flames, but with a serene face, as if he had found accommodation in hell itself.
In December, the exhibition will receive visits from illustrious Norwegians such as the filmmaker Joachin Trier, director of the documentary
The Other Munch
;
the author Linn Ullmann, daughter of Ingmar Bergman, another Scandinavian familiar with the painter's grief, or the writer Karl Ove Knausgård, who in 2017 dedicated an essay to the artist, entitled
So Much Longing in So Little Space
.
The author of the My Struggle
saga
he began by wondering about the inexplicable fascination that one of his most banal paintings continued to exercise over him.
After all, Munch only painted an ordinary cabbage field on it.
"But there is a yearning in that painting, a desire to disappear and merge with the world," Knausgård wrote.
"And if that disappearance ended for the painter as soon as he finished the painting, he is still present on the canvas today, filling us over and over again with his emptiness."
Cabbages, cereals, a piece of forest.
Yellow and green, blue and orange.