Paywalls being what they are, I wasn’t able to access Murray Whyte’s review of “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth” in The Boston Globe. Curious as to what fellow critics made of the show, I thought a cursory trawl of the internet might be helpful in putting my thoughts in order. “Trembling Earth” is, after all, the first U.S. exhibition to focus on how the famed Norwegian painter depicted the natural world, both as an independent subject as well as an adjunct to his figurative compositions. Given Munch’s belief that “nature is not only all that is visible to the eye” but “also includes the inner pictures of the soul,” the curatorial tack seemed appropriate and sounded promising.
Little did I imagine that the painter of The Scream (1893) and other indelible images of psychological disquietude was a progenitor of social justice. That aforementioned Globe review? The url said it all: “munch-foretells-our-climate-crisis.” Of course he did. Greta Thunberg will want to call it a day. Make way for Ed Munch, eco-warrior!
All of which is unfair to Whyte, who likely read the exhibition catalogue and learned how the meteorological conditions depicted in Munch’s landscapes make him a peculiarly twenty-first-century artist. The independent curator Jill Lloyd—who organized “Trembling Earth” along with Jay A. Clarke, the Rothman Family Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Trine Otte Bak Nielsen from Oslo’s Munchmuseet—notes that The Scream underscores “the conflicted, vulnerable, sometimes destructive role that humanity plays within a natural world that is far greater than itself.” Of course it does.
Forget the catalogue.
The cultural classes of a given era invariably try to locate historical art within a contemporary context, sometimes bending it to fanciful ends. Surely, you might think, there are better paths to relevance than extra-aesthetic strong-arming? But forget the catalogue. The curators ultimately cede the floor—or, rather, the walls—to the art at hand. What, they ask, did Munch bring to his paintings of the shore, the forest, and “Chosen Places”—that is to say, specific locations like the port town of Åsgårdstrand or Warnemünde, a German resort town on the Baltic? “Trembling Earth” is, in the end, a serious venture.
The life of Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is well documented, particularly the early years. Disease and death were commonplace occurrences. His mother died of tuberculosis when Munch was five; his older sister succumbed to the same malady nine years later. Another sister was diagnosed as mentally ill and subsequently institutionalized. Young Edvard was often kept from attending school due to illness. What about Dad? “From him I inherited the seeds of madness,” wrote the artist years later when considering Christian Munch. Given his family’s travails, you can’t help but extend a measure of sympathy to the otherwise begrudged Munch paterfamilias.
What about Dad? “From him I inherited the seeds of madness.”
Munch took to art as a teenager, dropping out of technical college to pursue life as a painter or, in his father’s disapproving coinage, the “unholy trade.” While studying at the Royal School of Art and Design, Munch proved himself a quick hand and became enamored, for a time anyway, with the Impressionists. All the while he was hanging with a dubious crowd: flâneurs, bohemians, and Hans Jæger, a nihilist whose theories did much to influence Munch’s worldview. By the time he made the obligatory trip to Paris and, later, Berlin, Munch was on his way to establishing himself as a formidable talent and something of a provocateur.
All of which takes us, roughly speaking, to the eve of the twentieth century. The Scream and its variations were over and done by the mid-1890s. The Clark show includes a lithographic version of the image from 1895, as well as related prints and paintings: Anxiety (Angst) (1896), Ashes II (1899), The Storm (1893), and Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893), a moonlit image of ghostly quietude. The grieving man and archetypal woman seen in Separation I (1896) put a melodramatic gloss on romantic misery—adolescents the world over are bound to love it—but the work is marked by Munch’s painterly acuity, by an uncanny ability to endow the thinnest of pigments with corporeality. It’s as if the surfaces of his canvases were capable of bruising.
Though “Trembling Earth” is arranged according to natural and geographical motifs independent of a timeline, you can’t help but be cognizant of chronology. The pieces in each section tend to be wildly different in temper, tone, and quality. Munch, as it turns out, was not ever thus. At some point in the first decade of the twentieth century, the palette turned to chalk, the brushwork became pasty when it wasn’t rushed, and the navigation of pictorial space choppy, bordering on unsure. Among the first images we see at the Clark are The Yellow Log (1912) and The Logger (1913), sizeable canvases in which linear perspective is employed awkwardly and to no structural purpose. Munch’s contours lose their fluidity and his symbolism becomes stiff and theatrical. What happened?
Observers of the time chalked up this distinct shift to Munch’s battles with alcoholism and recovery from nervous exhaustion. His getting older and the changing mores had an effect: the enfant terrible became a Norwegian national treasure with all the attendant boosts to his ego and checkbook. But I suspect the true reason for Munch’s decline was the advent of Modernism. However much his work may have once tested prevailing notions of taste, Munch remained a creature of the nineteenth century and, as such, a Grand Old Man increasingly at sea among an international cadre of Young Turks. Their innovations, one feels, left him flabbergasted, isolated, and desperate. That’s the unintended upshot of “Trembling Earth,” and, truth to tell, it proves a distraction. Still, the masterworks peppering the exhibition go some way in obscuring Munch’s ultimate exhaustion and make a trip to Williamstown rewarding.