Not the "Scream"

There's a very good introduction to the exhibition I saw at the Pinacothèque, opposite the Madeleine in Paris, on this webpage. If you click on the Culturebox video, you can access an audio-visual commentary on it, too.

In these galleries were 170 of the rarely exhibited paintings, sketches, drawings and lithographs which the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch refused to sell. The famous "Scream" (Skrik) was not part of this exhibition although its mood was all-prevalent. Solitude, fear, despair: those were Munch's themes.

Despite the fact that his mother had died of TB when he was five years old and his sister of the same disease at the age of fourteen, his earliest paintings, first exhibited in the 1880s, were not so grim, more like the impressionist landscapes of the Parisians he met when he went to France (Nice, St.Cloud) as a young man. There is a woman in a blue dress (painted in 1891) beside a fjord, who at first glance looks like a Renoir, except that her red hat anticipates Munch's Madonna paintings and that the black shadow she casts has a menacing aspect. He became obsessed with the Madonna image five years later and in this exhibitions were four versions of it, lithographs with wild swirls for the eyes and breasts and with a ghost like foetal child in the bottom left hand corner of two of them.

There were sad images from his past, such as the Souvenir d'Enfance, a drawing in crayons (back view) of his mother holding him, as a child, by the hand, and of course the series of "sick child" drawings and paintings from the mid 1890s. Mostly, however, it was his unhealthy sex life that absorbed him to the extent of driving him crazy. I found etchings of a naked woman holding (squeezing?) a heart that was dripping blood over her feet, of a vampire woman, of a harpy. Not difficult to grasp the meaning of those. Baudelaire's great poem La Chevelure was mentioned in the exhibition notes. There's the life-size, crouching, Weeping Nude in oils of 1914, her face hidden by her hair, and a Baiser sur les cheveux (1915). Sin (Le Péché) was a woman with long, deshevelled hair, bare breasts, staring blue eyes and a grim expression, and in 1930 he was still painting canvasses like this: the Femme allongée les cheveux défaits (the same woman as in the Madonna pictures, by the look of her).

I suppose Munch must have tried to perk himself up from time to time by trying to paint something less negative, the four embracing couples in the park on a Summer Night, or the lithograph of a Van-Gogh-like starry night, or the famous Dance of Life (for which I saw a sketch in coloured crayons) with its white moon reflected in the water in the disturbing shape of a crucifix (this image appears in many of Munch's pictures). There was also a winter landscape very like those of the Canadian painter Emily Carr and in the last gallery of the exhibition a Manteau Bleu au Soleil, an almost cheerful picture of a woman facing forward in a sunny spot. But more typically, his work is gloomy. Five versions of Solitaires (a man and a woman standing apart, back view, staring out to sea from a rocky beach) were shown in the exhibition, in different colour combinations. Munch's self portraits were not normal either, being entitled Self Portrait with the 'flu, Self Portrait with bottle (he was an alcoholic), S P in bed, S P with beard, etc. and in the Despair of Alpha series it seemed he had completely flipped into madness, with Alpha being himself, presumably, a screaming (!) naked man, ditto being devoured or killed by beasts, Alpha drowning Omega... Omega was his female counterpart, a naked woman, pictured with a donkey, with a pig or (very young) with a big bear (representing death, most likely, Der Tod und das Mädchen) or, on a sick bed, with a devouring tiger. Again the crucifix/moon image in these pictures. They were fascinating, but not very pleasant.

Even ostensibly conventional pictures by Munch turn out, on closer inspection, to have disturbing qualities. The unfinished (?) portrait of Inger Barth (1921) has dribbles of paint running down over her hands. Munch was decades ahead of his time. Or the titles are a give-away. A portrait of Laura, 1920, is subtitled Melancholy and a canvas showing a man welcoming a woman to his house, she carrying a posy of pretty flowers, is entitled Marat and Charlotte Corday! Presumably the posy conceals a dagger.

By the way, I recently listened to a BBC podcast (in the In our Time series, chaired by Melvyn Bragg) of an informative discussion about Munch, recommended.

As if that weren't enough for me I took a look at the other exhibition in the Pinacothèque as well, a slightly ironic tribute to the Munch oeuvre, created this year by Bedri Baykam, an artist from Ankara: 4-D Lenticulaires it was called, being a large scale compilation of holograms and photographs of the Munch pictures and other familiar images (by Toulouse Lautrec, for instance) deliberately distorted and juxtaposed by parallax shift. I was too exhausted to give the pieces these attention they deserved, but they were impressive, and clever.

After seeing the two exhibitions I cleared my mind of melancholy images in the brightness of the Tuilleries gardens between Place de la Concorde and the Louvre looking at the classical white statues (Demeter, though, the Goddess of Summer, had lost a hand) and took a seat in the Café Renard "depuis 1905"—I bet they didn't charge €3.20 for a café noisette in those days, although I did get a little square of black chocolate with it, served by an obsequious waiter wearing a black waistcoat.