Munch, ‘Death and Desire’

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 20

Munch, ‘Death and Desire’

review

Edvard Munch, “Death and Desire,” at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. January 22 to February 28. Reviewed by Julie King. Edvard Munch hated to part with his work. When the artist died, in 1944, he left more than 1100 paintings and 18,000 prints, as well as watercolours and drawings, to the city of Oslo, which set up the Munch Museum in 1963. It is from these rich resources that Munch has been presented to the world’s public in Oslo and more recently by successive touring exhibitions. “Death and Desire,” organised by Gerd Woll, the museum’s curator, has come to New Zealand after an Australian tour. The show introduces Munch as a printmaker and concentrates on his work done in the 1890 s, which drew on his own memories and observations to explore the themes of death and desire and the troubling connections between them. Many painters in the nineteenth century, including Gauguin, whose work impressed Munch, Toulouse Lautrec and Mary Cassatt, realised the potential of printmaking both as a creative process and as a way to reach a wider public. The exhibition shows how Munch stands out as a print-

maker because he experimented with a whole range of techniques and processes in etching, drypoint, lithography and woodblocks. Usually he began by making a painting of a subject which he subsequently treated in prints. In this way, a basic theme was defined through a variety of processes. Included in the show are two versions of “The Sick Child,” first realised in painting and seen by the artist as a work which established his direction. The image carries no comforting sentiment or redeeming religious and moralising perspective; in the drypoint print two heads of mother and child were drawn in drypoint’s characteristic dark line. In the lithograph done two years later, the design focused only on the suffering head of the child, drawn in red against the paper and a clashing green background. Munch discarded an inherited nineteenth century naturalism to explore the inner reality of feeling, developing what has become recognised as the language of expressionism; strong and simplified designs, bold free lines or rhythmic contours, emphatic contrasts of dark and light and clashes of colour.

Woodcutting, the oldest and most basic process taken over by German expressionists, is well represented here. “The Lonely Ones, Two Human Beings” shows how he printed simplified areas of colour and cut out sharp contours to find an equivalent form to express content. In “Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair” the grain of the woodblock shows through on the paper, adding to the network of lines which entangles the trauma of the relationship. Of course another way of looking at the prints is to look at the artist. To what extent do the prints depict Munch’s own plight? Experiences such as the early deaths of his mother and sister, sexual liaison with women in the Bohemian society of Oslo and Berlin, an unhappy affair, and alcoholism might all be related to the work. Certainly opening up the artist is one way, although too often we lose sight of the prints and are left only with a retrospective psychoanalysis.

His life is summarised and his inventive printmaking techniques clearly described in a wellillustrated catalogue. Unfortunately, the catalogue does not develop ways of, understanding Munch’s art today. We find meanings in images by finding contexts for them. Munch’s attitudes to women shape many images in “Death and Desire,” and they need to be

seen not only in the context of his troubled life but also in relation to their time. Society had idealised woman as “the angel in the house”; upholding women’s sexual purity and their domestic role enforcing their dependence.

Towards the end of the century, as reflected in the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg (whose portraits appear in the exhibition), women claimed independence and political and sexual freedom. These social changes seen as threats parented another stereotype for women when Munch and fellow artists created from their desires and fears their “femme fatale,” whom they endowed with lethal attractions.

Munch’s “femme fatale” appears on the front of the catalogue and so often in the exhibition she could well be described as its star, flaunting her seductive charms and ensnaring male victims in her long, flowing hair. This stereotype has had a powerful hold on imaginations. One of the most powerful prints is his “Madonna,” which contrasts with Christian depictions since the Renaissance.

Framed by a border depicting sperm and a cringing foetus, a “femme fatale” with a red halo looms out of the picture, her waves of hair and power reverberating in the blackness. Here, in what has been described as a Darwinian Madonna for a post-Christian world, procreation depends on sexual attraction, which demands a sacrifice. What we need for the exhibition are contexts; Munch’s work relates differently to our time. By reaching across time and place and understanding the beliefs which shaped the images, their relevance is held up for the public today. These contexts are not really provided by the catalogue, nor by the way the show is hung according to print processes rather than in terms of ideas. However, there is a film programme and the valuable service of guides. Munch’s images, once seen, are never forgotten, and since most of his work remained in Norway the show provides a “not-to-be-missed” opportunity to look back at Edvard Munch, original maker of anxious images, prey to fears and desire and the victim of his own creation, his "femme fatale.”