First French retrospective devoted to Munch
About the exhibition "Edvard Munch. A Poem of Life, Love and Death" at the Musée d'Orsay from 20 September 2022 to 22 January 2023.
It's the kind of painting that you can't even dislike because it's so gripping. And then by using the emoticon of fright at every turn or seeing the mask of the film "Scream" in every corner of the horror, you have the impression that you have always known The Scream, almost that you have grown up with it... Yet it is indeed an original work of art. The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) created five versions of the painting between 1893 and 1917 to symbolise modern man in a crisis of existential anguish, against the backdrop of the Oslo fjord, as seen from the Ekeberg district. And it is also one of the works of art for sale that has broken world records, with one version fetching ninety-one million euros at a Sotheby's auction in 2012. In short, The Scream is a star. But is Edvard Munch a star?
"We often only know about Munch as The Scream," admits Claire Bernardi, director of the Musée de l'Orangerie and curator of the exhibition "Edvard Munch. A poem of life, love and death" which is being held at the Musée d'Orsay from 20 September 2022 to 22 January 2023. "He is an artist who has disappeared behind a work of art. His name is familiar without being familiar, we don't know how to pronounce it. Where does he come from, to which century does he belong? His work is abundant, powerful and very coherent. One is seduced or not, but one is carried away by his universe," she adds in the interview granted to journalist Jérôme Coignard for his article in the September issue of Connaissance des arts. The tormented painter who inspired German Expressionism before becoming the flagship artist of European Symbolism has entered popular culture unintentionally.
Because even if he was a pioneer of art accessible to all by showing his work in the streets, public spaces and in the middle of nature, one cannot really suspect Edvard Munch of having been driven by the idea of seducing by obstinately representing the madness of life and the anguish of death... A death with which he was violently confronted at a very young age when he lost his mother and then his older sister Sophie, both of whom were struck down by tuberculosis. Hence The Sick Child, a decisive painting by Edvard Munch at the age of 22, which caused a scandal at the 1886 Oslo Autumn Exhibition and of which he painted six versions until 1927. "Love, loneliness and death now weave the fabric of a work marked by a pessimistic vision of human destiny," writes Jérôme Coignard.
Edvard Munch was 16 years old when he decided that he would be a painter despite the wishes of his father, a military doctor who had forced him to study engineering and considered painting a hobby. By dint of persistence, the young Edvard managed to attend the Royal School of Drawing and was even awarded a scholarship which enabled him to be admitted to the Royal School of Design in 1885. He was influenced by the great Norwegian naturalists of the time, Frits Thaulow (1847-1906) and Christian Krohg (1852-1925), but also by the painter Oda Krohg (1860-1935) and the anarchist and feminist thinker Hans Jaeger (1854-1910), as well as by the French artists Edouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel as well as the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), the Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) or the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)... Munch absorbs. Munch digests. Munch searches.
At first "marked by an austere realism, his works brightened up under the influence of Impressionism, whose touch he also adopted, as evidenced by Evening Hour in 1888", notes the journalist from Connaissance des Arts. But in his Manifesto, written in 1889, when he moved to Paris after a first stay there in 1885, and before living in Berlin where he caused a sensation in 1892 with an exhibition of fifty-five of his works, Edvard Munch distanced himself from Impressionism. "We will no longer paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. We want to paint living beings, who breathe, feel, suffer and love," wrote the artist who ended his feverish travels in 1908 and returned to Norway to settle permanently.
Death is not the only companion of the artist. Madness was always around him, as was the case with another of his sisters, Laura Cathrine, who fell into a serious depression before being interned for the rest of her life. He himself lived in a psychiatric hospital at her request in 1908, suffering from serious nervous disorders. His convalescence under the influence of Nietzsche and the vitalist movement led him to release colour and sunlight in large canvases painted in the open air. And in the 1940s, the artist will make pure colour vibrate in his self-portraits. "Far from the symbolist huis clos, the master who inspired the German expressionists fixed his pathetic old age in the burning colours of summer," concludes Jérôme Coignard. The fact remains that the master had previously dedicated almost all of his paintings to his great work called The Frieze of Life.
This ambitious allegorical project, like a popular ballad from birth to death, remained unfinished. But it brings together the major works of the 1890s, such as The Scream, The Kiss, Vampire, Metabolism and Madonna, which can of course be appreciated individually. "I felt this fresco to be a poem of life, love and death", wrote Edvard Munch. Hence the subtitle of the Musée d'Orsay's retrospective, which for the first time in France offers a global rereading of Munch's work, between macabre eroticism and solar dazzle, and which, rather than being chronological, adopts a cyclical approach that allows paintings painted at very different dates to be integrated into the narrative. This thematic approach plunges the visitor into the heart of Munch's obsessive creation, and is one of the "pluses" of the exhibition, as noted by Connaissances des arts, along with the strength of the graphic work and the presence of masterpieces such as Despair or Starry Night.
As for the "minus" of course, the art magazine can only deplore the absence of the famous Scream among the sixty or so paintings and a significant group of drawings and prints in the Paris exhibition: the two versions in the Munch Museum in Oslo, the artist's legatee and partner of the event, have become so fragile that they no longer travel and are only exhibited for a few minutes each hour. However, we will find a reminder of this with an admirable lithograph from 1895, hand-coloured in red, blue and yellow. And you'll want to go to Oslo, especially since a new museum dedicated to Munch has just been built in the form of a sixty-metre high tower leaning towards the fjord, a real work of contemporary art in its own right designed by Juan Herreros and Jens Richter.