From my Rotting Body, Flowers Shall Grow and I am in them:Edvard Munch at the British Museum.

"We want to create, or at least lay the foundations of, an art that gives something to humanity. An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one's innermost heart" - Edvard Munch, 1889.

"The angels of fear, sorrow and death stood by my side since the day I was born" - Edvard Munch, undated.

When you think of Edvard Munch you tend to think, first and foremost, of just one painting. 1893's The Scream is such a giant of modern art, ALL art, that sometimes it's easy to forget that he made any other paintings. The British Museum's recent Edvard Munch:Love and Angst will disabuse you of that idea pretty quickly.

For it is both chock-full of wonderful pictures and curated with a deft hand that manages to tell the story of how Munch fitted in to the art world of his time along with the development of his own art, the story of his life, and a reminder of his obsessions. Women, anxiety, bohemia, illness, death, and solitude primarily!

Angst (1896)

Drilling down on Munch's most creative years, most works on show were made between 1890 and the end of the First World War, the show starts by informing us that Munch was anything but the Norwegian hermit I'd always, for some reason, assumed him to be.

Although he spent much time in Kristiana (present day Oslo), the 'restless traveller' could often be found mixing with other artists of the time in the larger cities of Paris and Berlin. A scandalous exhibition in the German capital closed after a week but helped launch Munch's international career.

For the most part, despite loving the dramatic landscapes of his home country, he longed to escape the conservative Lutheran ideology that dominated much of Kristiana and Norway during his life. He yearned for the radical hotbeds of sex and philosophy in France and Germany but it was family commitments that kept bringing him back to Norway.  

It seems like one of Munch's extended family was always at death's door so it's perhaps no surprise that mortality should take such a firm hold of his work. 1895's Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm is one of Munch's earliest prints and is seen as a memento mori. Munch's mother Laura had died when he was just five and his older sister Sophie when he was thirteen.

Edvard Munch, sitting on a suitcase in his Berlin studio (1902)

Self-portrait with Skeleton Arm (1895)

"One shall no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They will be people who are alive, who breathe and feel, suffer and love" - Edvard Munch, 1889.

It seems to me that a combination of exposure to modern, bohemian, ideas and these devastating familial losses combined to harden Munch's resolve to paint life itself, rather than an appropriation of it. Life in all its pain, all its anxiety, all its hardship, all its beauty, and all its ecstasy. All the feels as a very annoying person might say today.

Among the characters Munch met in places like Berlin's fantastically named Black Piglet bar were the Polish novelist Stanislaw Przybyszewski (whose novels covered Satanism and eroticism), Przybyszewski's wife - the Norwergian author Dagny Juel, and Hans Jaeger who as the central figure of the Kristiana bohemians was sentenced to sixty days in jail in 1885 for blasphemy and immorality. Munch sought to capture something of the intensity of these revolutionary thinkers by having them stare out at the viewer as if to ask if we 'want some'.

Stanislaw Przyybyszewski (1897)

Kristiania Bohemians II (1895)

Tingletangle (1895)

The Kiss (1895)

Emboldened by his interactions with this scene, Munch began to paint images like 1895's The Kiss. It's a theme he returned to time and again and the lovers would gradually wear less clothes, they'd be more tightly entwined, and they'd be closer to the window. So deep in the throes of passion they've become oblivious to any potentially outraged, or indeed excited, passers by.

Munch made great play of the closeness, or distance, between people. Between lovers particularly. 1905's Head by Head, a woodcut, shows two heads so closely together they almost, like the lovers of The Kiss a decade earlier, blend into one. There's a Degas from twenty years earlier included nearby:- not, I think, so you can deduce that Munch was unoriginal but, instead, to show how he was inspired by the developments in France and how he put his own unique spin on the styles he encountered from Paris.

Head by Head (1905)

Edgar Degas - Sleep (about 1883-5)

Munch returned to his Frieze of Life throughout his own life. He claimed it was "intended as a poem about life, about love and about death". Conceived as a series rather than a single picture, he became so attached to The Frieze he started to see individual pictures, rather dramatically, as his 'children'. 

Munch seemed rather fond of children but hated the institution of marriage. Possibly because he felt it was an outdated idea or, maybe, because he liked the idea of sleeping around. Maybe a bit of both. 1894's Summer Night:the Voice recalls his 'tortured love affair' with the married Milly Thaulow and it's suggested that the reflection of the moon on the water is intended to symbolise a phallus.

Munch and Thaulow's affair was carried out in the small Norwegian coastal village of Asgardstrand and in the lithograph Attraction I we can see how many of Munch's key themes come together. The lovers look skeletal, dead even. Their hair is entwined both with each other and with the somewhat bleak looking Norwegian coastline.

Summer Night:the Voice (1894)

Attraction I (1896)

Seperation II (1896)

These are themes Munch would return to again and again throughout his career. Seperation II, made the same year as Attraction I and touching on the same theme, brought this comment, years later, from the artist:- "I symbolised the connection between the separated couple with the help of the long wavy hair. The long hair is a kind of telephone wire". 

The curators suggest, and I'm inclined to agree, that much of Munch's work 'reveal his obsession with and fear of female power and a sense of suffocation'. It is, of course, another likely reason for his disapproval of marriage. Maybe it's also why he sought solace in the loose-living, hard-drinking, and chaotic Kristiana set. Such was his demeanour however that he couldn't help but see the dark side of the bohemian dream.

Which explains why he was drawn to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. He was inspired by Nietzsche's belief in an individual's free will to act in a meaningless world and, though he never met the German, made this print of him (commissioned by the Swedish banker Ernest Thiel) six years after his death. The intensity of Nietzsche's scrunched up, pensive face and the way it blends with the background seem a perfect fit for both men.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1906)

Self-portrait with a Bottle of Wine (1930)

An outlier, a worthwhile one, in the exhibition is 1930's Self-portrait with a Bottle of Wine in which an elder Munch remembers himself as a younger man working on that Nietzsche portrait in Weimar. He looks sad, heartbroken even, and that bottle of wine looks like it's hardly gonna touch the sides once it's uncorked.

Two years later, in his later forties, Munch would suffer a mental collapse aggravated by alcoholism. Munch had been constantly attracted by mentally unstable but talented people, like himself, and August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright responsible for The Dance of Death and Miss Julie, certainly came under that heading. 

Strindberg suffered bouts of paranoia that are alluded to in the wavy lines that Munch has used for his hair. There's also, if you look closely, a naked woman in that bird's nest of a barnet. Is Munch saying Strindberg had sex on the mind or did Munch have sex on the mind? A third theory is that their friendship, one that began when they met in the aforementioned Black Piglet bar, was soured after Strindberg wrote a bad review of a Munch exhibition in Paris a few months before this work was made. That stinger is also suggested as a reason for Munch spelling Strindberg's name as Stindberg - a play on words that suggests he's a 'mountain of hot air'.

August Strindberg (1896)

Madonna (1895/1902)

Vampire II (1895/1902)



Man's Head in Woman's Hair (1896)

A mountain of hot hair, that was more Munch's thing. Works like Madonna, Vampire II, and Man's Head in Woman's Hair all see the Norwegian fetishising long dark, or more often red, hair. The women are in turns submissive or overly dominant. They're rarely equal. 

Munch had, by this time, become disillusioned with free love but still felt that what the curators coyly call 'the creative act' had a sanctity about it and as such he's included a floating sperm in the work - and, because he's Munch, a foetus in the bottom left corner! 

He did love a bit of symbolism, Mallarme and Verlaine were as influential at the time as Ibsen, and the use of women's hair is supposed to signify female entrapment. You can see that quite explicitly in Vampire II and Man's Head in Woman's Hair. It does seem that the frisky bastard was actually rather terrified of women. 

In fact, Munch seems quite terrified of a lot of other things as well as women. Sickness, death, and life as well as sex and desire. That didn't stop him lampooning other men for the same human foibles. 1898's Desire shows a group of lecherous old men with distorted faces lusting over a much younger woman. Pretty tame stuff in comparison with what Toulouse-Lautrec was coming out with, in his set of brothel scenes, at the same time.

Desire (1898)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Woman Lying on her Back (1896)

Eugene Samuel Grasset - Acid-thrower (1894)

I liked that the team at the British Museum had lobbed in a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Gauguin, and a Degas for contrast and comparison but the best artist in the show, other than Munch of course, was a new name to me. Eugene Samuel Grasset's Acid-thrower looks like it could have done service as a flyer for a beatnik happening in San Francisco in the sixties but actually features a very different type of acid.

The young female anarchist has got herself a swirling bowl of green acid and she's ready to throw it in the face of anyone who tries to prevent the inevitable revolution. It's both beautiful and insanely violent at the same time.

So it fits right in with Edvard Munch's work. Jealousy II shows Stanislaw Przybyszewski in the foreground and his wife Dagny Juel, half naked and all that - standard, under a tree with another man behind the haunted fizzog of her husband. Within a decade, Juel had been abandoned by Przybyszewski and murdered by a jealous admirer.

Jealousy II (1896)

Lovers in the Waves (1896)

Woman with Red Hair and Green Eyes:Sin (1902)

That free love scene was really beginning to go to shit. As those kinds of things so often do. More often that not, it seems to me, the men in these scenes preach free love for them but much less of it for the women. The women are muses, little better than equipment. Good to be lusted after, fucked, and painted and then thrown away when they've served their purpose.

I write this, of course, with the benefit of over a century's hindsight and it would be plain daft to imagine that Edvard Munch, a great artist for sure, would have been in any way 'woke' when you consider the era and milieu he operated in but nevertheless these things need saying. Some of these paintings are,indeed, very beautiful but they do shed light on the historical exploitation of women and subjectification of their bodies.

I'm not saying I'm much better by the way. Just saying it as I see it. The fact Munch didn't even bother naming the model for Woman with Red Hair and Green Eyes:Sin (it's all in the subtitle, eh?) says a lot about both him and how artists of his time, men of his time, behaved. It's said that she resembles Tulla Larsen who was, it appears, the nearest thing to the love of his life.

They met in Kristiana, became engaged in 1898, and separated four years later following what's described as 'a shooting incident' which left Munch with a permanently damaged hand (there's an X-ray on display showing a bullet lodged in it). Twenty seven years later Munch made what appeared to be some kind of confession that he had, pissed up, fired the shot himself. It's unclear if it was aimed at Larsen or some kind of act of self-harm because no sooner had he made the semi-confession he'd retracted it!

'Tumultuous' starts to look like an understatement when describing the Munch Larsen relationship. Look at the painting of them both below, made three years after their split, and you get the impression Munch was still very bitter about things for a long time afterwards despite having fallen in love with Eva Mudocci, a famous English violinist who claimed of her man "he never looked merely at the surface of anything but always beyond" in the meantime. Sore loser!

Self-portrait with Tulla Larsen (about 1905)

Eva Mudocci/The Brooch (1903)

Puberty (1894)

More problematic still to modern sensibilities is 1894's Puberty. Of course it's possible to interpret in a number of ways but when we know what we know about Munch's attitudes to sex and women then it's difficult to view this image as anything other than deeply prurient and borderline paedo. Great handling of the chalk though, eh?

The Scream (1895)

Melancholy II (1902)

"For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art" - Edvard Munch, c.1908.

Leaving aside the fact that if he was operating now he'd be suffering from a deep feeling of anxiety about Operation Yewtree knocking on his door, you have to admit Munch pretty much nailed it with that quote. He may have made more famous works about existential despair than Melancholy II but it does appear a remarkable work, imbued with sadness, heartbreak, and a sense of life having no purpose.

It's believed to show Jappe Nilsen, a close friend of Munch's, brooding over his love for the married Oda Krohg while clouds hover, storms build up, and the cold, we're led to believe, whips in. Nature, once again, rhyming with our protagonist's mental state. It's said to be inspired by the melancholic art of Albrecht Durer and, maybe because they couldn't source a suitable Durer, the curators have included Max Klinger's Night, to show how German Symbolist painters at the same time as Munch were interpreting Durer.

Max Klinger - Night (1889)

Moonlight, Night in Saint-Cloud (1895)

It's good but it's knocked into a stovepipe hat by Munch's masterful Moonlight, Night in Saint-Cloud. A drypoint from 1895 that utilises shadow with no little brio to depict Munch's then room-mate, the Danish poet Emanuel Goldstein, sat gloomily in a darkened room looking out the window at a street that's only marginally more lit. The shadows of the jamb create a crude cross on the floor as if shorthand for death. 

It's one of my favourite works in the entire exhibition. Two Human Beings:The Lonely Ones is another. A woodcut of a man and a woman, their backs to us, looking out at the sea. The connection between them is difficult to read, faces tend to help with that kind of thing, but they don't appear close. They're not holding hands or touching in anyway. In fact their solitude seems so complete it's easy to imagine them wading into the icy waters of the Oslofjord to their certain deaths.

Two Human Beings, The Lonely Ones (1899)

Young Woman on the Beach (1896)

Moonlight I (1896)



The Spirits of the Dead Are Watching (1893-4)

I came to think that Munch worked best in woodcut. He'd cut up woodblocks, ink each piece independently, and then reassemble. This created an emphatic outline which reinforces the sense of isolation that Munch's sitters tend to emanate. Paul Gauguin was using woodcut to create colourful portraits of Tahitian women and it seems this inspired Munch to adapt his style to the gloomier, darker, and more morose climes of Scandinavia.

As much as he was interested in art, Edvard Munch was interested in the emerging science of psychology. He attended lectures at a hospital for women suffering from mental illness where some of the patients were 'provoked' into hysteria (which hardly sounds ethical) and his own sister, Laura, like Munch himself who spent several months in a Copenhagen clinic after his 1908 booze fuelled meltdown, experienced a complete breakdown.

His older sister, Sophie, escaped the curse of mental illness by dying of tuberculosis aged just fifteen. The painting was criticised at the time for its roughly worked appearance but in Munch's assertion that "few painters have ever experienced the full grief of their subject" he seemed to have the answer to the naysayers. The mourning woman is Karen Bjolstad, Munch's aunt.

The Sick Child (1907)

Death and the Woman (1894)

The Day After (1894)

In the final rooms of the exhibition, sickness and death become our constant companions. Munch believed that tuberculosis and mental illness were family legacies but he also said that given the choice, he would not cast off his illnesses as his art owed so much to them. It's hard to look anywhere without a reminder that one day we shall all return to the dust from whence we came. A dance of death between a sperm and a foetus, a sprawled unconscious body in a bed, and, with Inheritance (below), a woman displaying the effects of syphilis on her child!   

Munch had visited a syphilis hospital in Paris many years before he made this lithograph of which he said:- "this face distorted by despair must be painted" as it was seen. He also remarked on how he had to capture both the "searching" and the "suffering" in the eyes of the child. When the work was shown to the public the rotters laughed at it.

Inheritance (about 1916)

The Sick Child I (1896)

Death in the Sick Room (1896)

Two Women on the Shore (1898)

Munch became so attuned to death, sickness, and ageing that, at times, his works seem to be almost theatrical considerations of these themes. Death in the Sick Room looks more like a staged recreation of his sister's death than anything grounded in reality and Two Women on the Shore echo the design he provided for a theatre programme for Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Munch was a big admirer but he still allowed himself to stick one of his trademark, and frankly unrealistic looking, cocks to the right of the picture. 

Why not? Munch lived until 1944, his later years mostly in quiet seclusion it seems, and I take it on trust (and it certainly felt valid) that the works he made in this relatively short period were his finest. There were certainly far more good among them then than there were bad - and there were a handful of truly exceptional pieces. 

Despite some of his problems with women I'd not go so far as to say separate the man and the art. Like Munch and his tuberculosis/poor mental health, I accept that it was his mixed up way of looking at women, death, and life that helped create the art that, to quite a substantial degree, changed the way we consider what art can be and do. He might have been a grumpy, lecherous old git terrified of commitment but now he's gone he's our grumpy, lecherous old git terrified of commitment - and he had a bloody good idea of what made for a powerful image. I scream. You scream. We all scream for The Scream!

Munch in his studio on his 75th birthday surrounded by works belonging to his Frieze of Life (1938)

Two Girls on the Bridge (1918)