VISIONS OF THE SOUL IN COLOURS

SCREAM : EDWARD MUNCH'S MOST FAMOUS & ICONIC PAINTING

SELF PORTRAIT OF EDWARD MUNCH

Visions of the soul in colours
Go through the creations of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch and you find an underlying feel of anxiety, uncertainty and melancholy, says Sujit Chowdhury

Every age gets reflected in an artistic icon. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa shows the perfection and serenity of Renaissance period while Van Gogh’s Sunflowers’portrays the inner turbulence and transience of human life. Similarly, Edvard Munch’s Scream epitomizes the existential angst of modern times. In this painting, we see a horrified person with a twisted fatal face with holes in place of eyes and mouth. He is closing his ears against the scream of nature in a backdrop of blood-red skyline. Munch wrote about this painting: “I was walking along a path …the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city…I stood there trembling with anxiety– and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” Existential PredicamentsEdvard Munch (1863-1944), the celebrated Norwegian artist, established the Expressionist movement in modern art. He was a prolific painter and printmaker. His ouevre shows his existential predicaments and his aesthetic quest to deal with the complex issues of birth, growth, love, decay and death. In his entire work, we find an underlying feel of anxiety, uncertainty and melancholy. He has seen his mother dying when he was only five and later his elder sister and younger brother died while one sister was sent to a mental asylum. Munch too had a fragile health and a weak mental disposition as he said on his 70th birthday, “Illness and insanity and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle”. The fear of death haunted him throughout his life as he wrote, “when I cast off on the voyage of my life, I felt like a ship made from old rotten material sent out into a stormy sea by its maker with the words: If you are wrecked it is your own fault and then you will be burnt in the eternal fires of Hell”. But, the sense of uncertainty of life fuelled his creativity as he said, “without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder…my sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me and their destruction would destroy my art.” Intellectual companionAfter an informal education at home, he joined Royal School of Design at Kristiania (now Oslo) but left it to study painting. He was associated with the Bohemian circle of intellectuals and was exposed to the emerging movements in literature, music and theatre. In the beginning, Munch started painting in the naturalist style but soon he shifted to simplified forms and vibrant colours to evoke intense feelings in a symbolic manner. He was influenced by Gauguin’s primitive symbolism but Gauguin had to travel to Tahiti to get inspired whereas Munch “carried his own Tahiti inside himself” as one critic hailed his work. He travelled extensively and divided his time between Berlin and Paris that brought him closer to August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen and also helped him to evolve his own distinguished style after progressing through impressionist, post-impressionist, Fauvist and symbolist styles. His was a narcissist art born out of personal experiences and existential truthfulness.BreakthroughDuring this period, Munch also started etching, lithography and photography. Munch achieved a breakthrough with his first solo exhibition in Berlin in 1892 which was labelled as ‘objectionable art’ by the authorities and was closed down. With this, Munch became famous overnight. Critics found his paintings as “pictures of Ibsensque mood arousing curiosity both on a social and psychological level.” In fact, 1890s was the most productive phase in Munch’s career. His paintings expressed varied aspects of human existence in modern times as felt and internalised by Munch himself. Munch exhibited these paintings in 1902 in Berlin as a series called Frieze of Life. This series had 22 paintings that inluded well known works like Despair, Melancholy, Jealousy, Anxiety, Death, Madonna, Summer Night’s Dream, Self Portrait with Cigarette, Death in the Sickroom’ and The Scream. Through these paintings Munch established a set of motifs, images and symbols to express the most subtle visions of the soul; something unseen in art history before. Personal crisisThough Munch had become a sought after painter in Europe, he was undergoing a severe crisis in his personal life. Coupled with his fragile health, he started having bouts of depression particularly after the death of his father in 1889 and two failed relationships that left him remorseful. He stated drinking heavily and had become more of a split-personality as he recounted, “the influence of alcohol brought the schism of the mind or the soul to its extreme…like two birds in a single cage…under the violent schism of these two mental states arose an increasingly stronger inner tension – a conflict – a fearful battle in the cage of the soul.” In 1908, Munch had a nervous breakdown and after eight months of treatment in Copenhagen, he returned to Norway. By this time Norway had got its independence. Munch was received in his home country as a national artist. He got several commissioned work especially decorative murals. Munch settled down in Ekely, an estate on the outskirts of Oslo. His ‘children’Now, Munch turned outwards as mostly he painted landscapes and countrylife. He also revisited some of the earlier themes from Frieze of Life. He spent a reclusive life without any companion. He called his paintings his children. When he died at the age of 80, 1008 paintings, 4443 drawings, 15,391 prints besides an equally huge number of woodcuts, etchings, lithographs and photographs were found in his house which he had bequeathed to the Oslo Municipality. What sets Munch apart from other artists of all times is the ‘inward gaze’ that gave rise to the Expressionist movement. Munch penetrates through the human soul; its outwardly invisible forms and discovers the spiritual aura of ‘self’. He gives voice to the unspoken fears and aspirations of the modern man, and above all, his struggle against the outside forces. Munch’s creativity was not inspired by an ‘impression from outside rather it was truly an ‘expression from inside’.

Article published in Deccan Herald (Bangalore) Sunday Magazine