Werner Timm - Edvard Munch - 1982

4 Starlit Night in Asgardstrand

1 3 5 x 1 40 cm. Oil on canvas. Around 1 89 3 . Oslo, Collection Anton Fredrik Andresen

After 1 8 89, Munch spent most summers in Asgardstrand on Oslo fjord ; he had bought a modest little wooden house where he would work. The coastal landscape of the area impressed itself deeply on his mind. It returns as a kind of "leitmotif" in many of his pictures . The sky, the sea and the shore represent for him the eternal forces of nature, the backdrop against which the drama of human life is being enacted . The picture must therefore be seen as a work on two levels : On the one it is the actual impression of a beautiful starlit summer's night ; on the other it seeks to express the deep signifi-

Attraction. 36.1 x 47.4 cm. Lithograph. 1 896

cance inherent in our experience of this particular part of nature. The painting is remarkable for its sensitive nostalgic mood , the quiet harmony of the composition in which the blues of sky and sea envelop everything and even dominate over the dark green of the vegeta­ tion in the foreground . One is reminded of the "mood landscapes" so characteristic of the Romantic School that flourished less than a century earlier. Similar unsolved problems of our existence are here made manifest in comparable visual metaphers . For the Romantics too had similarly tried to project the "feel" of specific emotional states into the landscape. Munch himself confirms this interpretation : "In a strongly felt mood a landscape will have a very definite effect on a man-by depicting this landscape one may achieve an im gc of one's own state of mind . The mood is the main thi ng-the landscape is merely a means to an end ."

5 The Scream

8 4 x 67 cm. Oil on canvas. 1 89 3 . Oslo, Munch Museum

"I walked with two friends. The sun went down. Suddenly the sky was blood red and I felt gripped by melancholy longing. I stopped and leaned against the railings. The sky above the blue-black fjord and the city was like blood and tongues of fire. My friends walked on, and I stood alone, shaking with fear. I had the feeling that all nature around me was filled with tremendous ceaseless screaming."

The immediate inspiration for this picture was thus a highly spec­ tacular atmospheric phenomenon of a kind not too uncommon in Nor­ way. There may be something uncannily threatening in such an atmos­ pheric landscape which in Munch's fevered imagination exploded into an all-pervading anguished cry of despairing creation. The entire landscape of his picture seems to be in violent undulating indeed boiling motion and this motion communicates itself irresistibly to the human figure in the foreground . This is far more than the remarkable documentation of a personal experience. The artist has raised it into a universal symbol of the existential feeling of "Lebensangst".

6 The Morning after

1 1 5 x 1 5 2 cm. Oil on canvas. 1 894. Oslo, National Gallery

The subject matter of this picture might quite well have been taken from Hans Jager's novel "From the Life of the Christiania Boheme" in which alcoholic excesses and carefree sexual indulgence play a major part. This uninhibited life style which flouted what it called prejudices was mostly deliberate provocation-a protest by the younger generation directed against what they felt to be the hy­ pocritical and suffocating conventional morality of the times. No

The Christiania Boheme II. 28 x 37.6 cm. Etching and d ry-point. 1 8 9 5

wonder therefore that the public's reaction to the picture was ind ig­ nant rejection. Even fourteen years later, when the painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Oslo it caused an uproar. One critic wrote : "Respectable citizens can no longer take their daughters to the National Gallery. How long is Edvard Munch's harlot to be allowed to sleep off her alcoholic excess in the State's Picture Gallery?"

Warm earthy hues determine the colour harmony of this painting, shades of brown and brownish reds together with a purplish black. The first version (which was burned) was painted as early as 1 8 8 5 to 1 8 86.

7 Puberty

1 50 x 1 10 cm. Oil on canvas. 1 894. Oslo, National Gallery

This too is one of Munch's early works. The first version goes back to 1 8 8 5 /1 8 86, showing that Munch possessed a highly sensitive understanding of the female psyche quite early in life. The peculiar psychological state of a very young girl at the threshold of physical maturity is movingly portrayed.

Adolf Paul who visited. the artist in Berlin while he was working on a version of the theme describes the scene in his memoirs : "One day I called on him in his furnished room two flights up at the corner

G i rl Crying (Despair) . 49. I x 69.6 cm. Charcoal. I 894

of Fried richstrasse and Mittelstrasse opposite the Polish pharmacy. When I entered I found him busy painting his model, a girl in the nude who was sitting on the edge of the bed . She did not appear to be a saint, yet notwithstanding all degradation there was about her a feeling of innocence and modesty, even chastity-and that it was which roused in Munch the wish to paint her. Quietly she sat, bathed in the bright light of a radiant spring morning, her body casting a dark menacing shadow on to the wall behind and above her.

Munch painted her with all the intensity and fervour he was capable of. That picture-he called it 'Puberty'-became a time­ less statement, universal, profound, and strikingly true to life."