Edvard Munch and His Soulful Dance of Life

The largest and most important Edvard Munch retrospective in nearly three decades has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art. It is not to be missed.

The handsome installation ingeniously frames Munch's 1899-1900 painting, The Dance of Life, in the exhibit's entrance doorway. This is an appropriate introduction to an artist whose work sums up much of art history of the 19th century while simultaneously launching that of the 20th. Indeed, this painting is comparable in its broad, theoretical statement to such existential cycles as Rodin's Gates of Hell (1880-1917), Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where are We Going? (1897), and to Eurhythmy (1895), the work of the Swiss Symbolist, Fernand Hodler. In a sense, it represents the other side of the better known Dance of Death, a theme going back to medieval times and perhaps not coincidentally the title of a play by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, which appeared in the same year as Munch's painting (1900).

The Dance of Life (1899-1900), oil on canvas, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design/National Gallery, Norway (Photo © 2006 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

Using this work as a fulcrum, you cannot fail to notice as you go through the show that the Norwegian artist's work encompasses Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Art Nouveau. Like Van Gogh (born 10 years before him and dead by 1890), Munch propels art from Romanticism and Naturalism to the full-blown Expressionism of the 20th century.

Munch's biography goes far to explicate his art. Born in 1863, on a farm outside Oslo (then Kristiania), he lost both his mother and his beloved sister at an early age. His life continued to be plagued by tragedies, some unavoidable, others self-inflicted; repeated themes in his paintings include anxiety, despair, melancholy, pain, separation, unrequited love, jealousy, sickness, and death.

So why does this massive dose of emotional pain not depress us? Perhaps it is because of the honesty and openness with which the artist portrays the human condition. Like a musician singing the blues, Munch pours out his soul in paint. Mastering technique, knowledge, and history, he expresses and exposes our vulnerability.

In the current exhibition, we see Munch's paintings and prints evolve from expressions of loneliness, through attempts at fusion by means of sex, religion, and nature, and back to loneliness. For Munch all these emotions and states are linked together. As he once stated regarding sexual impulses, we "lose ourselves" in the act and are not individuals, but links in a chain of human existence. "People should understand," he said, "the sacred, awesome truth involved, and they should remove their hats as in church."

Melancholy (1891), oil on canvas, private collection. (Photo © 2006 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

In his earliest paintings made during the 1880s, he depicts several claustrophobic, gray, monochromatic, bourgeois interiors. A painting of 1889 marks a turning point; Summer Night/Inger on the Beach borrows Art Nouveau forms, referring back to the French Symbolist painter, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, as well as to Norway's own neo-Romantic artists, and moves towards his later, more psychologically complex works. In fact, it previews the 1893 Summer Night's Dream (The Voice), which Munch placed prominently in his Frieze of Life, a changing series of paintings the artist developed over a number of years. Here, a lone woman clad in white gazes out ecstatically (at whom?). Her columnar, simplified body echoes the bold forms of trees and a stream of moonlight reflected on water. Two vaguely delineated eyes stare out from the forest, and two tiny figures can be seen in a boat in the distance. It is an eerie and suggestive picture.

Munch often portrays someone brooding out over nature. Night in St. Cloud (1890), Despair (1892), Melancholy (1891-92), and of course, The Scream (painted in 1893, and recreated in lithographs in 1895) are all variations of this trope. The universality of the lone person looking out at nature was emblematic of Romanticism, especially in the northern countries (think of Caspar David Friedrich in Germany). When I lived in Sweden, the first word I learned was "grubbla," translated as "to brood or ruminate." But this term seems to me specific to Scandinavian countries, where you see only darkness for most of the year (until summer brings the midnight sun). For Munch this reached its culmination in the infamous Scream, where the subject is not only alone, but seized by nightmarish, incomprehensible anxiety, sensing all of nature conspiring against him.

Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-42), oil on canvas, Munch Museum, Oslo. (Photo © 2006 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

The Kiss, painted several times and made into woodcuts and lithographs, seems at first an ecstatic, positive depiction of a love relationship between a man and a woman. But Strindberg saw it as "the fusion of two beings, one of which in the form of a carp, seems to be about to swallow the larger after the manner of vermin, microbes, vampires and women …" And Munch's friend, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, deemed it "repulsive."

However, Munch's relationships with both Strindberg and Przybyszewski were marked by ambivalence and jealousy. In fact, both Munch and Strindberg (himself a painter, as well as playwright, novelist, and art critic) painted versions of Jealousy only two years apart (Strindberg's in 1893 and Munch's in 1895)—very different from each other. (Ironically, Strindberg's painting, like Munch's Scream and Madonna, was just reported stolen from the Strindbergmuseet in Stockholm by The New York Times.)

Munch's subjects often included women—objects of love, repulsion, or both. His "Madonnas" were heretical and certainly unusual. It should be noted, however, that one painting generally known as Vampire had as its original title, Love and Pain. In this case, the title was thrust upon the artist. Although hurt, yearning, and always searching, Munch was never a misogynist.

Throughout his career, he, like Van Gogh, made numerous self-portraits at varying ages. The last one in the exhibition, Between the Clock and the Bed, is heart-rending, as the aged master stands between the eponymous objects, knowing that his life will soon be over. Most of the late years—represented in the last rooms in the exhibition—were filled with health and vitality. Ironically, though, Munch's late paintings are less interesting artistically than his early, groundbreaking work.

To return to The Dance of Life, the composition works like a clock (or sundial); the column of moonlight can be said to represent the hands. Variations of the same woman and man swirl around, from white/innocence and youth, through red/sexuality, to black/old age and death. The cycle is ineluctable, inevitable, like the ticking of the clock, or the links in a chain. Munch outlined frenetically, as did Van Gogh, his spiritual brother. Clinging to sanity, they both fought against madness. Indeed, Munch's entire oeuvre cries out against loneliness; he is willing to join in the dance of life, even if it must end in death.

"Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul" runs through May 8. The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 West 53rd Street. Hours are Wednesday-Monday, 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Friday, 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m. The museum is closed on Tuesday. Look on MoMA's Web site for many fascinating films and programs associated with the exhibition.

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.