Edvard Munch, the Norwegian, is a much bigger man and artist. The
feminine note, despite his sensibility, is missing. He has control of
his technical forces and he never indulged in such nervous excesses as
Kubin. Besides, he is sincere, while the other is usually cynical. He
deals with the same old counters, love and death, debauchery and
consequent corruption. He is an exponent of feverish visions, yet you
never feel that he is borne down by his contact with dwellers on the
threshold. A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a
more precise vision; in a word he is a mystic, and a true mystic
always sees dreams as sharp realities.
It was Mr. Saintsbury who first called attention to the clear flame of
Flaubert's visions as exemplified by his Temptation of St. Anthony. So
Munch, who pins to paper with almost geometrical accuracy his personal
adventures in the misty mid-region of Weir. And a masculine soul is
his. I can still recall my impressions on seeing one of his early
lithographs entitled, Geschrei. As far as America is concerned, Edvard
Munch was discovered by Vance Thompson, who wrote an appreciation of
the Norwegian painter, then a resident of Berlin, in the pages of
_M'lle New York_ (since gathered to her forefathers). The "cry" of the
picture is supposed to be the "infinite cry of nature" as felt by an
odd-looking individual who stands on a long bridge traversing an
estuary in some Norwegian harbour. The sky is barred by flaming
clouds, two enigmatic men move in the middle distance. To-day the
human with the distorted skull who holds hands to his ears and with
staring eyes opens wide a foolish mouth looks more like a man
overtaken by seasickness than a poet mastered by cosmic emotion.
In 1901 I visited Munich and at the Secession exhibition at the Glass
Palace I saw a room full of Munches. It was nicknamed the Chamber of
Horrors, and the laughter and exclamations of disgust indulged in by
visitors recalled the history of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and the
treatment accorded it by Parisians (an incident utilised by Zola in
L'Oeuvre). But nowadays, in company with the Neo-Impressionists, the
Lampost Impressionists, Cubists, and Futurists, Munch might seem tame,
conventional; nevertheless he was years ahead of the new crowd in
painting big blocks of colour, juxtaposed, not as the early
Impressionists juxtaposed their strokes of complementary colour to
gain synthesis by dissociation of tonalities, but by obvious discords
thus achieve a brutal optical impression.
His landscapes were those of a visionary in an Arcadia where the ugly
is elevated to the tragic. Tragic, too, were his representations of
his fellow men. Such every-day incidents as a funeral became
transfigured in the sardonic humour of this pessimist. No one had such
a quick eye in detecting the mean souls of interested mourners at the
interment of a relative. I possess an original signed lithograph
called, The Curious Ones, which shows a procession returning afoot
from a funeral. Daumier, himself, could not beat the variety of
expressions shown in this print. The silk hat (and Goya was the first
among modern artists to prove its value as a motive) plays a role in
the Munch plates. His death-room scenes are unapproachable in seizing
the fleeting atmosphere of the last hour. The fear of death, the very
fear of fear, Maeterlinck has created by a species of creeping
dialogue. (The Intruder is an example), but Edvard Munch working in an
art of two dimensions where impressions must be simultaneous, is more
dynamic. The shrill dissonance in his work is instantly reflected in
the brain of the speaker. In his best work--not his skeletons dancing
with plump girls, or the youthful macabre extravagances after the
manner of Rops, Rethel, De Groux, or James Ensor--he does invoke a
genuine thrill.
Psychologic, in the true sense of that much-abused word, are his
portraits; indeed, I am not sure that his portraits will play second
fiddle to his purely imaginative work in the future. There is the
Strindberg, certainly the most authoritative presentment of that
strange, unhappy soul. The portraits of Hans Jaeger, the poet (in oil),
the etched head of Doctor A., the etched head of Sigbjorn Obstfelder,
poet who died young, as well as the self-portraits and the splendidly
constructed figure and eloquent expression in the portrait of a woman,
an oil-painting now in the National Gallery, Christiania, these and
many others serve as testimony to a sympathetic divination of
character. His etched surfaces are never as silvery as those of Anders
Zorn, who is a virtuoso in the management of the needle. Not that
Munch disdains good craftsmanship, but he is obsessed by character;
this is the key-note of his art. How finely he expresses envy,
jealousy, hatred, covetousness, and the vampire that sometimes lurks
in the soul of woman. An etching, Hypocrisy, with its faint leer on
the lips of a woman, is a little masterpiece. His sick people are
pitiful, that is, when they are not grotesque; the entire tragedy of
blasted childhood is in his portrait of The Sick Child.
As a rule he seldom condescends to sound the note of sentimentality.
He is an illustrator born, and as such does not take sides, letting
his parable open to those who can read. And his parable is always
legible. He distorts, deforms, and with his strong, fluid line
modulates his material as he wills, but he never propounds puzzles in
form, as do the rest of the experimentalists. The human shape does not
become either a stovepipe or an orchid in his hands. His young
mothers are sometimes dithyrambic (as in Madonna) or else despairing
outcasts. One plate of his which always affects me is his Dead Mother,
with the little daughter at the bedside, the cry of agony arrested on
her lips, the death chamber exhaling poverty and sorrow. By preference
Munch selects his themes among the poor and the middle class. He can
paint an empty room traversed by a gleam of moonlight and set one to
thinking a half day on such an apparently barren theme. He may suggest
the erotic, but never the lascivious. A thinker doubled by an artist
he is the one man north who recalls the harsh but pregnant truths of
Henrik Ibsen.