Morbid Arena
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow Morbid Arena Edvard munch comes to us with all the credentials of a modern artist. Yet, he was one of the few important masters not wholly committed to the formal...
...He died there in January 1944, leaving the bulk of his work to the city of Oslo...
...The debt to Manet is apparent in the early years, and there are occasional suggestions of Van Gogh and Cezanne...
...Thus his reputation and example among younger artists in Germany was considerable...
...But where Gauguin put these devices to use in brilliant decorative effects, Munch employed them to promote a sense of psychological disturbance and uneasiness...
...The Museum has obviously chosen to emphasize the earlier portion of Munches work, when his painting was a tributary to the mainstreams of modern art...
...The surface effects are hurried over, the shapes appear haphazard, as if the painter were more concerned with exorcising a ghost than creating a masterpiece...
...Since Munch has been much better known here as a graphic artist, the current exhibition affords the American public an opportunity to see the artist's development in works that have hitherto been inaccessible...
...The Renoir, a lush bouquet of anemones and fritillaria, is one of those exquisite Impressionist productions, the canvas pampered with each loving touch of a full brush that plays out every silvery modulation along the patterned wallpaper of the background...
...the shape of a few rocks along the edge of a shore are thrust in and washed over with deft strokes of color...
...he was himself considered— during the earlier phases of his career—one of the most radical of contemporary painters...
...He stayed at the clinic less than a year...
...Within five years he was awarded a scholarship and traveled to Paris, where he was impressed by the paintings of Edouard Manet, an influence that had direct bearing upon his own work...
...The museum established to house this collection—it opened in 1963—possesses a thousand Munch paintings as well as several thousand prints, drawings and watercolors...
...The event was one of the factors contributing to the formation of the Berlin Secession, a group which Munch joined along with other important artists like Beckmann, Nolde and Kandinsky...
...Thereafter, he settled in Norway with intermittent trips to Germany...
...It is less generous with the later phases, following Munch's confinement in 1908...
...Perhaps that accounts for the jealousy and abuse to which he subjected his paintings once he finished with them...
...But the odd thing about Munch's work is the way in which the paintings do come together, seen from some middle distance where facture and detailing are no longer accountable to the eye...
...As A PAINTER, Munch was only slightly interested in facture...
...In his youth and middle age Munch was crucially involved in the avant-garde...
...Following his avowal of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist practices, his painting begins to grow loose and thin...
...It is from the Munch-museet, as well as from private and public collections in Norway, that most of the work has been drawn for the Guggenheim Museum's current Munch exhibition...
...At the age of 45, Munch suffered a nervous breakdown and committed himself to a clinic in Copenhagen...
...The psychological content of Munch's art—its existential fervor —is both powerful and timely...
...More often than not, the paint is applied hurriedly in thin dripping washes that have the effect of watercolor...
...But his reputation suffered from the circumstances of his old age as well...
...Nor is there any finical care about the details of a form...
...Yet, he was one of the few important masters not wholly committed to the formal innovations which both shaped and signified modern art...
...He was, moreover, not simply affiliated with the vanguard literary and artistic movements of France and Germany...
...In his later years, suspicious and quarrelsome, he lived in isolation...
...That date, which coincides with the beginnings of Cubism, appears to mark the end of Edvard Munch's modernist development...
...In the Guggenheim installation, one's accidental glimpse of a Renoir Still Life (dated 1885) while descending the ramp makes even more apparent the differences that obtain between Munch and his French mentors...
...The color, too, which seemed at close hand muddy and unresolved, at a distance melds into striking contrasts and rich effects...
...He subsequently left college to enroll in the Royal School of Design in Oslo...
...During that time, he lived and worked in the artistic centers of Europe, particularly in Paris and Berlin, His circle of friends included, Strindberg, Mallarme and the critic Julius Meier- Graefe...
...Munch's painting has none of this...
...This distinction is all the more remarkable when one considers that Munch's long career was lived out during the entire course of development of modern painting in Europe...
...Nevertheless, it should restore Munch to a more viable position than his current textbook status...
...This showing of the Norwegian master brings together more than 60 of his paintings and a sampling of his graphic oeuvre...
...Among modern artists, he is the one who most maintained a distinction between form and content —that is, form as one judges it from a Parisian bias—and it is from this dichotomy that his reputation has suffered...
...For that reason alone, one would have preferred, in the Guggenheim exhibition, a more strictly retrospective approach to Munch's work, one in which the strengths and weaknesses of his later paintings might have been measured against the phenomenal achievements of the School of Paris...
...One thinks of how exacting the task was for Cezanne, laboring over a similar background element in his Portrait of Gustave Geffroy...
...The historic precedence of French painting in the evolution of modern art has been under challenge during the past several years, mainly in the form of exhibitions and publications devoted to German Expressionism, a quarter in wruch Munch's work is spiritually more at home...
...In his later years...
...The indifference to the physical condition of his work is, I think, another indication of Munch's distance from the concerns of French painting and its formal innovations...
...Inevitably, one tends to feel, this preeminent role of French art will be subject to revision, just as its current position in the realm of contemporary art is being questioned...
...The further influence of Gauguin's Art Nouveau style with its sinuous lines and flat shapes is even more significant...
...There may also be another, more symbolic explanation: The distance which Munch's painting dictates for the viewer marks the psychological distance which Munch maintained between his work and himself—a distance far greater than that allowed by the intimacy which French painting preferred...
...In what he referred to as his "horse-doctor's cure," Munch left his paintings lying about in open-air studios, exposed to the Norwegian weather...
...The placement and use of color, the glory of French painting, were of Utile deliberate importance to Munch...
...The surface of the table is nearly opalescent in its close value hues...
...This hoarding, however, was strangely out of keeping with the manner in which he treated his finished work...
...his paintings were exhibited in the Parisian gallery, L'A rt Nouveau...
...The delineation of the human figure is apt to be just as desultory...
...The incident is relevant to the tormented themes of his art—death, sickness, isolation, jealousy, sexual abandon, drunkenness— all of which themselves relate closely enough to the scant biographical details of Munch's life available in English texts...
...Munch's commitment to art was early and decisive...
...A face will be the merest blob with a crude wriggling line for an eye, rather like an over-exposed photograph...
...Then the awkward shape of the girl in a white dress or the man in a black suit becomes absolutely incisive and instinct with life...
...In 1892, Munch became famous overnight when his paintings in the Verein Berliner Kiinstler created a public scandal and the exhibition was closed...
...Consider the Portrait of Harry Graf Kessler, a respectable piece of character analysis...
...The current exhibition will not go far in apotheosizing Munch because it lacks the quantity and quality for that definitive task...
...Munch tended to be difficult and chary about letting his work go, a fact which accounts for the prodigious number of paintings he left in his bequest...
...There are, of course, a number of influences to be traced in Munch's work as seen at the Guggenheim...
...Born in 1863, he took up painting at the age of 17, while training as an engineer in a technical college in Norway...
...His graphic work was represented in La Revue Blanche...
...And his Bohemian life exemplified the fate of the modern creative temperament in the midst of political and social upheaval...
...Even in so impressive a painting as The Dance of Life, a comparatively well executed figure will exist in the same plane as the grossest caricature...
...Within nine years, he had his first one-man exhibition in Oslo...
...During the Nazi occupation of World War II, he lived in his farmhouse at Ekely, which he had converted into a group of indoor and outdoor studios...
...In the near future, perhaps, our reading of the history of modem art will be more inclusive than it is today...
...He remained, however, one of the most esteemed artists in Norway and he executed a series of important mural commissions for public buildings in Oslo...
...In accounting for this strange facet of Munch's work, one falls back upon a simplistic explanation —that Munch, characteristically, worked from a similar vantage point when viewing his work in progress...
...But the model is seated before a shelf of books whose bindings are sketched in with brisk light washes of color —a bluish green, a muddy yellow, a soft pink—that are hardly varied from one section to another...
...For Munch, painting was the arena of his own deepest and most morbid feelings...
Vol. 48 • November 1965 • No. 22
