Author(s): Carla Lathe Source: Journal of the Warburg and ...7 See Birgit Prestoe, 'Smitrekk om Edvard Munch', Edvard Munch, Mennesket og kunstneren, p. 138. 8 See C. Gierloff, Edvard

Edvard Munch's Dramatic Images 1892-1909Author(s): Carla LatheSource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 46 (1983), pp. 191-206Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/751120 .

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EDVARD MUNCH'S DRAMATIC IMAGES 1892-1909

Carla Lathe

I

FRESH INSIGHT into the art of Edvard Munch comes from recognizing the significance of drama for his imagery. He was interested in the art of drama and distinguished himself in the early years of his career by his sensitive and original rendering of

people's faces and gestures. He distanced himself from conventional reproductions of people's physiognomy, and tried instead to express their psyche and personality, some- times exaggerating in order to stress important features. In the early I89os, Munch frequently stated 'I paint not what I see- but what I saw'.' It appears that drama was an important influence on his presentation of memories.

People in performance were a lasting stimulus to Munch's art. He enjoyed watching performances in a concert, theatre or circus, and the outdoor performance of street musicians. He himself enjoyed singing, and when he went to Paris to study pictures in 1885 his first outing was not to an art gallery but to the Gaieti theatre to hear the operetta star AnneJudic sing.2 When he returned to Paris in 1889 for another study session, he was again attracted to halls of entertainment. The inspiration for his most famous resolution to create a series of pictures showing 'living people, who breathe and feel, suffer and love' came to him while listening to Rumanians singing in a St Cloud dance hall.3

Munch's interest in the art of performance may provide a key to explaining the discrepancy between the positive way his friends described him and the more negative interpretations of his life and work by people who did not know him. Many of his friends remarked on his sense of humour. How can the currently prevailing image of Munch as the mournful figure of alienation be reconciled with the tale of the fine time he had with Knut Hamsun in I900 at the Tivoli circus, where they disconcerted the clowns by shouting to them from their box? According to Christian Gierloff, Munch and Hamsun's shouts of encouragement also drove the circus horses and their riders to excel themselves in their performance through hoops and wreaths of fire.4 Munch's pleasure in performance went hand in hand with his pleasure in portraying himself and other people in different guises and changes of mood.

In his personal life Munch responded to talented people, and many of his friends were connected with the performing arts. They included good musicians, dramatists and actors.5s Munch came from an imaginative family and appreciated literature from an early

1 Livsfrisens tilblivelse (The Creation of the Frieze of Life), Oslo, c. 1925, p. i, 'Jeg maler ikke det jeg ser - men det jeg sa'. In this pamphlet Munch published reflections and recollections he had written many years before.

2 See Edvard Munchs brev, Familien, selected by Inger Munch, Oslo: Munch museets skrifter, I, 1949, 46 (5 May 1885).

3E. Munch, Livsfrisens tilblivelse, p. 7, 'Det skulde vxere levende mennesker som puster og foler, lider og elsker'.

4 'Litt fra Skrubben og Ekely', Edvard Munch, Mennesket og kunstneren, Oslo 1946, p. 74.

5 See the catalogue to the exhibition 'Frederick Delius og Edvard Munch', Munch Museum, Oslo 1979 (Norwegian and English text).

'9' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 46, 1983



192 CARLA LATHE

age. Like his father, he was a lively story teller, and could visualize the scenes he read in books. He not only responded to modern literature but was a creative writer himself. In the early I890s he wrote prose poems, in I904-08 he wrote a play. In later life he appears to have been attracted to the cinema, and in 1913 he took some guests, together with his dog, to see a Chaplin film.6 The art of dramatic performance, as well as the visual arts, played a part in his life, right from the I880s when he began his career. His close friend in the 188os, Kalle Lochen, changed his career from painting to acting, and Munch said that he was a genius at both.7 According to another friend, Munch took the attractive Miss Drewsen to the Christiania Theatre to see a performance of Ibsen's The Vikings at Helgeland.8 In the late I880s Munch did a portrait ofHjalmer Borgstrom posing as Osvald in Ibsen's Ghosts.

For the development of Munch's images in the period 1892-1909, it is important to take into account his choice of writers, actors and musicians as friends and rivals. His statements about the writers whom he admired suggest that he wished to emulate their exposure of hidden recesses in the mind. Munch made a point of comparing himself with Ibsen, and his treatment of figure composition was stimulated by Strindberg's psychological dramas. Documentary evidence confirms that in his years abroad Munch's affiliations were with the international exponents of 'intimism', particularly in the theatre. An investigation into his response to Scandinavian dramatists reveals him as a calculated draughtsman who became an intermediary between painting and drama.

Munch's understanding of the theatre developed while he was in contact with Strindberg, Ibsen and other writers in the I89os. The gestures, posing, emotive colouring in his pictures compare with scenes created by his friends, and Munch himself acknow- ledged the parallels between his art and their drama. He wrote that after he had explained his paintings to Ibsen in an exhibition of 1895, he and his imagery reappeared in Ibsen's play When we dead awaken of 1899.9 He also thought of himself as Strindberg's ally and rival. When Gordon Craig in 19o6 told Munch that he thought that Strindberg was the best of the bad Scandinavian painters, Munch replied, 'pleased to hear it. Because if Strindberg is our best painter, that makes me our best writer'.10

Munch, who lived 1863-1944, was thirty-five years younger than Ibsen and fourteen

years younger than Strindberg. He met them both in the early I890s and was proud that they came to some of his controversial exhibitions. The similarity between his imagery and theirs was obvious not only to them but also to their translators and producers. For

6 See Hugo Perls, Warum ist Kamilla schon?, Munich 1962, p. 22.

7 See Birgit Prestoe, 'Smitrekk om Edvard Munch', Edvard Munch, Mennesket og kunstneren, p. 138.

8 See C. Gierloff, Edvard Munch selv, Oslo 1953, p. 66. Gierloff dates this visit to the theatre as 1889, and Munch did a portrait of Miss Drewsen in that year. The producer Bjorn Bjornson's journal of the performances at the Christiania Theatre, now in the Oslo Theatre Museum, shows that The Vikings at Helgeland was not performed in 1889, however, but in September I890 while Munch was in Norway. The Ibsen plays he could have seen in 1889 were The Lady from the Sea and The League of Youth.

9 Letter from Munch to Karl Scheffler, Ii February 1924, printed in Werk, xII, 1943, p. 369. See also

Munch's pamphlet Livsfrisens tilblivelse pp. 13-17. Munch's references to Ibsen are available in Pal Hougen's catalogue to the Munch-Ibsen exhibitions at the Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Bergen (May- June I975) and at the Kunsthaus Zurich (February- April, 1976). Munch's interpretation of Ibsen's plays was also discussed by Peter Krieger in his catalogue to the exhibition 'Edvard Munch, Der Lebensfries fiir Max Reinhardts Kammerspiele', Nationalgalerie, Ber- lin 1978, and in my catalogue to the exhibition 'Edvard Munch and his literary associates', Library Concourse, University of East Anglia 1979. 10 Quoted by A. Kahane, 'Edvard Munch', Berliner

Tageblatt, 509, 28 October I926, 'Das freut mich. Denn wenn Strindberg ist unser bester Maler, dann werde ich sein unser bester Dichter'.



MUNCH'S DRAMATIC IMAGES 193

example Lugne-Poei, the director of the Thedtre de l'(Euvre in Paris, met Munch at the home of Ibsen's French translator, and invited the painter to design the programmes for the French premieres of Peer Gynt in 1896 (P1. 23b) and John Gabriel Borkman in I897. In 1898 Emil Schering, Strindberg's German translator, asked Munch to provide illustrations for a joint Strindberg-Munch issue of the Quickborn journal, which was published in January 1899. Despite the considerable difference in age, Munch was therefore linked with Ibsen and Strindberg abroad and he benefited from the popularity of their drama.

Strindberg and Munch were regular drinking companions in Berlin from November 1892 until April 1893. They met again between March and July 1896 in Paris, where Munch portrayed Strindberg in a lithograph (P1. 23d) and Strindberg published a review of Munch's paintings in June 1896 in La revue blanche. Munch acquired the original manuscript of Strindberg's Le plaidoyer d'unfou, which he kept among his papers until his death.

Ibsen and Munch first met briefly in the Oslo Caf6 Grand in 1891, and when Munch happened to cross Ibsen's path in the following years they would stop to talk. In the years between 1896 and his death in 1944, Munch illustrated scenes from The Pretenders, Peer Gynt, John Gabriel Borkman and When we dead awaken. In I906-07 he fulfilled his most exacting literary commission, which was to design sets for the productions of Ghosts (P1. 24a) and Hedda Gabler at Max Reinhardt's Kammerspieltheater. Work on these projects enlarged his understanding of the theatre and influenced his dramatic pictures.

Recognition of Munch's lifelong interest in Ibsen's plays and his close association with Strindberg in the Berlin and Paris of the 189os is important because it throws into question the psychotic labels bestowed on him by fashionable critics. If he seriously wished to equal his literary friends, his images were calculated to draw from the spectator an appreciation of his treatment of human experience rather than of his competence as a painter. The chronology of his images of private stress indicates that they increased during and after periods of close association with writers, and that they decreased when Munch in later life withdrew from the literary scene that stimulated him on the continent. It was a phase in Munch's art which critics and art historians at the time considered to be detrimental to his development, and he was advised against literary and metaphysical tendencies." Nevertheless, Munch was attracted to literature and was out of sympathy with the ideals of many contemporary artists. From investigating his friendship with Strindberg's circle of writers in Berlin in the I89os and his sets for the Ghosts performance at the Berlin Kammerspieltheater in 19o6, it appears that he developed images of psychological tension and atmospheric vibration in order to express the levels of intuition he admired in his friends' writing.

II

Germany, according to Munch, was the country where his major work, 'The Frieze of Life', was understood first and most fully.12 Although he encountered considerable

11 See for example Thadee Natanson, 'Correspondance de Kristiania', La revue blanche, 59, November 1895. 12 'I anledning kritikken', Livs-Frisen, I918, p. 6. This

article by Munch was available with the catalogue of the 1918 exhibition of his later 'Frieze of Life' at Blomqvist's art gallery in Kristiania, and was published in Tidens

Tegn, 15 October I918. Jens Thiis dated the pamphlet Livs-Frisen as 1925 when he quoted from it in 1927 in the catalogue for Munch's exhibition in Oslo Nasjonalgal- leriet, p. 27. He may have mistaken its date for that of Munch's other undated pamphlet with reflections and memories, Livsfrisens tilblivelse.



194 CARLA LATHE

hostility to his art in Germany in the i89os, he also found enthusiastic response. He went to Berlin in October 1892 and made it his base until 1895. It was in Berlin that he began to fulfil the resolution he had made in a St Cloud dance hall to create a series of paintings about the psychological experience of modern people. Munch developed this series after he had been rebuffed by the Verein Berliner Kiinstler in 1892. The Verein in 1892 had a new exhibition committee consisting of younger members who were eager to show modern international art, and they invited Munch to bring an exhibition which had been well received when it was shown in Oslo (then called Kristiania). Their invitation challenged the policy adopted by senior members of the association. The painter Anton von Werner, director of the Verein Berliner Kiinstler, tried to implement the nationalist aspirations of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was patron of the Verein and known to dislike impressionism. When Munch's exhibition opened in November 1892, von Werner's supporters were shocked to find that they hosted a display of pictures in an untraditional, foreign and in their opinion outrageously ugly style. They put forward a motion to close the exhibition at once, and by a narrow majority their motion was carried at a stormy meeting of the Verein. This form of censorship and treatment of a foreign guest so angered about eighty members of the Verein, that they walked out and formed an opposition group called the 'freie Kiinstlervereinigung'. They organized a rival exhibition to that of the Academy in June 1893 and eventually established the Berlin Secession in 1898. At the time, Munch's exhibition was recognized as a test case in the division among the artists, and the critic of the Freisinnige Zeitung wrote on 13 November 1892: 'the conflict about impressionism and the painter Munch has demonstrated the fundamental antagonism between the old ones and the young ones in the Berlin Artists' Association.'13 Munch took advantage of the

controversy and continued to exhibit independently or with dealers like Eduard Schulte in Berlin and other German cities. His exhibitions from 1892 onwards, and his prints, established him as a pioneer of modernism and an important influence on German

expressionist art. His profound dramatic images emerged long before Die Briicke and Der Blaue Reiter groups of painters began to exhibit in the early years of the twentieth century. The Scream, first known under the title 'Verzweiflung' (Despair), was exhibited in Berlin in December 1893 (P1. 23a).

Several modernist Scandinavian writers and painters initially found more response in

Germany than in their own countries. Ibsen's phenomenal popularity on the Berlin stage had attracted Strindberg, who experienced a rejuvenation in the winter of 1892-93 in Berlin. He established himself in the tavern 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel', which became a

meeting place for avant-garde writers, painters, connoisseurs, doctors, students, critics, theatre managers and agents. The group was international, Germans and Poles mixing with members of the Scandinavian colony in Berlin. Strindberg and his friends went to Munch's first exhibition in Berlin in November 1892 and Munch soon joined their circle.

While Strindberg dominated the group 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel', he stimulated the others' interest in modern drama. Munch later wrote of his vivid impressions of the

premieres of Strindberg's plays and was evidently impressed by Strindberg's dramatic skill.14 The plays which were first performed in Berlin while Munch was there were The

13 'Der Streit um den Impressionismus und den Maler Munch hat den grundsiitzlichen Antagonismus zwis- chen Alten und Jungen im Berliner Kiinstlerverein klargelegt'. See also Dr Relling, 'Der Fall Munch', Die Kunstfiir Alle, viII, I January 1893, pp. 102-03.

14 Munch's writing on Strindberg probably dates from 1912, when he heard of Strindberg's death. It was published by PAl Hougen, 'Farge pa trykk', Munch Museum catalogue 5, 1968, p. 6, and in my catalogue n. 9 above, p. 28.




Creditors, The First Warning and Before Death in January 1893, and Playing with Fire in December 1893. Munch even opened an exhibition of his paintings on 3 December, the same day that the Lessingtheater staged a performance of Playing with Fire. Munch was drawn into the theatre milieu by his friends; he was for example invited to a Scandinavian

soiree by Rosa Bertens, the leading lady in The Creditors at the Residenztheater in January 1893. Strindberg in 1893 busied himself with plans for a theatre of his own and urged the writers who gathered at the tavern 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel' to write short one-act plays as he had done in the I88os. His instructions were, 'decorations are not needed; only a room'.15

Berlin offered Munch a stimulating range of dramatic and musical entertainment. Among the writers with whom he associated was Holger Drachmann, a pioneer of the cabaret and Tingel-Tangel movement. That Munch saw such performances is evident from his lithograph Tingel-Tangel, in which he projected the movement of the dancer's right leg in a manner which anticipates later modernists (P1. 22a). Another of his close friends in Berlin was DagnyJuel, a Norwegian girl who was a good pianist. She married the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who impressed Munch above all by his trance-like performance of Chopin's music.16 Music and dancing were the standard entertainment in their home, where Munch was a regular visitor. The dancing ranged from slow, graceful steps to the can-can. Munch, who liked sketching people's movements and the changes in atmosphere, could use his impressions of these performances.

Many painters, including the majority of the Verein Berliner Kiinstler, expressed contempt for Munch's pictures. It was not until I902 that he could report that Max Liebermann approved of his painting Girls on the Jetty.17 In contrast to this neglect by painters, a number of writers tried to analyse his achievement. One of them was Max

Dauthendey, who saw Munch's exhibitions when he spent the winter of 1892-93 in

Berlin, where he hoped to find a suitable stage for an 'intimate' theatre which would

perform his plays. In 1893 Dauthendey wrote an aesthetic manifesto, Weltall. Die Kunst des

Intimen, die Kunst des Erhabenen. Dauthendey drew attention to the function of memory and sense impressions in the creation of art and argued that there was a need for a new concept of beauty and an abrupt technique with which to express it. He praised Munch as a

pioneer of an art which recreated 'intimate' impressions from nature. After Munch had exhibited his new work in December 1893, Stanislaw Przybyszewski

interpreted it as the expression of the unconscious psyche. Przbyszewski in 1894 edited the first book on Munch, Das Werk des Edvard Munch, which was an anthology of four essays. One of the essays was by Julius Meier-Graefe, who had never published any art criticism before.18 A year later, in June 1895, Meier-Graefe wrote a longer essay to accompany his

15 Strindberg, Brev. IX, 2552 (12 June 1893) 'Dekora- tioner beh6fvas ej; bara ett rum!'. 16 E. Munch, 'Mein Freund Przybyszewski', Pologne

Littiraire, 15 December 1928. 17 Letter from Munch to A. Aubert, 7 February 1902, Oslo University Library MS Brevs. 32. 18 Julius Meier-Graefe, who was three and a half years

younger than Munch, had come to Berlin in I890 to study engineering. He started writing in Berlin and in 1893 published a first-person novel, Nach Norden, which shows an enthusiasm for Norway and Scandinavian literature. Kenworth Moffett writes in his book Meier- Graefe as art critic, Munich 1973, p. 10, that Meier-

Graefe's essay on Munch in 1894 was his first piece of art criticism and that it 'shows little interest, even contempt for the medium of painting, combined with a bias toward profundity and "thought"'. Although Meier- Graefe was interested enough in art to become the first editor for the art section of Pan in May 1894, none of the active founder members of the journal were professional art critics or historians: Bierbaum, Dehmel and von Bodenhausen had studied law, Meier-Graefe some engineering. To attract subscribers, they enlisted the support of museum directors who eventually took over the journal in September I895 and made it more specifically concerned with art than literature.



196 CARLA LATHE

publication of an album with eight of Munch's first engravings. Meier-Graefe, Przyby- szewski and Dauthendey were creative writers who were all new to art criticism, and their essays showed the influence of Nietzsche. They wrote in the spirit of inter-arts enterprise, which was so strong among Munch's friends in Berlin that a number of them succeeded in producing the journal Pan. Pan was noted for its high aesthetic standard of presentation and for the breadth of its contributions on contemporary literature, fine art and music.

To deduce from Munch's fictional writing and imagery like The Scream that he suffered from agoraphobia and nerve crises in the early I89os is to ignore the evidence for his social well-being and friendship with writers. Authors, actors, critics, translators of Scandina- vian literature sought his company. On 20 January 1893 Munch wrote home of his busy social life, saying that he was constantly together with Strindberg, Heiberg, Drachmann and Adolf Paul.19 His unpublished correspondence includes invitations from the Swedish writer Ola Hansson, from Ibsen's German translator Julius Elias and from the critic Richard Mengelberg, among others. On 8 January Munch was a guest at the feast given by the publisher Felix Lehmann to celebrate the premiere of Hermann Sudermann's play Heimat. Sudermann, when he was toasted by Holger Drachmann, replied, 'our light comes from the North',20 an indication of the German esteem for Scandinavians at the time. Munch met German writers and painters in Walter Leistikow's studio, but he was identified more with the Scandinavian writers and their admirers in Berlin, thriving in their company. He wrote home on 17 November 1892, 'you ask if I am nervous - I have put on six pounds and have never felt so well'.21 He was able to arrange for the exhibition which had caused the split in the Verein Berliner Kiinstler to tour Diisseldorf, Cologne, Berlin, Copenhagen, Breslau, Dresden and Munich in the winter and spring of 1892-93. A sign of his good spirits is that he ordered a large Norwegian flag to be sent to him in Berlin and specified that it should be a flag without the Swedish mark of union. He hung it from the second floor of his exhibition premises and remembered with pride, 'it was so big that it almost brushed the top hats of the Berlin gentlemen'.22 Even if he suffered poverty, his letters and portraits of his friends revealed that this was one of the most congenial and productive periods of his life.

III

The illusion that Munch produced his images in anguished isolation is dispelled by recognizing his friendship with writers who urged him to develop his studies of love and death. From 1893 onwards he gradually assembled a large frieze of paintings showing scenes of tension between people. The coastal background becomes a backcloth to the men and women who appear in this series, which Munch exhibited with the titles 'Love', 'Motifs from the life of the modern soul', and later 'The Frieze of Life'.

19 Edvard Munch, n. 2 above, 133. 20 See Adolf Paul, Min Strindbergsbok, Stockholm 1930, p. 75, 'Vom Norden her kommt uns das Licht', and August Strindberg, Brev, ed. T. Eklund, Ix, Stockholm 1965, 2460 (26January 1893). 21 Edvard Munch, n. 2 above, 129, 'Du sporger om jeg er nerves - jeg har lagt pa mig 6 pund og har aldrig befundet mig sa vel -'.

22 Undated letter from Munch toJens Thiis, c. 1933, in Munch Museum archive, 'det var sa stort at det nesten streifet Berliner herrernes floshatte'. See also Gierloff, n. 8 above, p. 89.




The nucleus of 'The Frieze of Life' was a group of six pictures which Munch exhibited in December 1893 as 'Studie zu einer Serie "Die Liebe"'. They are known under the titles The Voice, The Kiss, Vampire, Madonna, Melancholy, The Scream. Some of these pictures were based on earlier compositions, but after Munch's association with the writers in Berlin in the winter of 1892-93, he altered them to make them more vivid and dramatic. For example, there was a radical development in Munch's famous painting The Scream from the original painting of a sunset, without a figure. Munch created a parallel picture of a sunset and a brooding man in profile, but it was the sunset alone which he exhibited in November and December 1892 in Berlin with the title 'Sonnenuntergang' in the catalogue. He discussed it with Ola Hansson, who described it as 'an absurdity, consisting of two blotches, one blackish blue and one beef-coloured red, but which presumably was supposed to represent a sunset'.23 Munch's friendJens Thiis wrote that the painting of the sunset, the preliminary for The Scream, was sold to a Viennese collector.24 In 1893 Munch created a new version and inserted a shrieking figure in the centre foreground. It provided a dramatic conclusion to his series of studies on love.

The changes in composition and the formation of his studies as a dramatic sequence in 1893 reflect Munch's wish to reciprocate with Strindberg, Heiberg, Przybyszewski and other literary friends who explored the subject of sexual attraction and disillusionment. While Munch in 1893 developed his series on love, Heiberg wrote Balkonen (The Balcony), Przybyszewski published his Totenmesse and Richard Dehmel the cycle of poems Die Verwandlungen der Venus, which he incorporated in his volume Aber die Liebe.

Letters and cross-references indicate that Munch took a lively interest in the work of his literary friends. On i6January 1893, Munch heard Heiberg read the end of the second act of his play Kunstnere (The Artists) at a Scandinavian evening held by the Freie Literarische Gesellschaft. When Munch first exhibited one of the drafts for Woman at Stockholm in 1894, he made in his catalogue an allusion to another play by Heiberg. He added to the title the quotation '"all the others are one. You are a thousand". (Gunnar Heiberg: The Balcony)'. He took this line from The Balcony, which Heiberg wrote in Berlin when he belonged to Strindberg's group 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel' and was in close contact with Munch . The line Munch quoted in his catalogue was taken from Act im, in which Heiberg suggested that a man who theorized on the soul was bound to lose his beloved to a

23 O0. Hansson, 'Vom kiinstlerischen Schaffen', Die

Zukunfl, III, 1893, p. 321, 'ein Unding, das aus zwei Klecksen, einem schwarzblauen und einem rindflei- schrothem, bestand, aber sonst wohl einen Sonnenun- tergang vorstellen sollte'. I first referred to this version of the painting in a script on Munch's work and reception in Berlin for the BBC Open University 3rd level Arts Course A315. 24J. Thiis, Edvard Munch og hans samtid, Oslo I933,

p. 218, 'Den blodig bolgende aftenstemning er forst malt i Nizza 91, uten den skrikende person i forgrunnen. Dette forste billede blev kjopt av en wiener kunstsamler. En pastell fra 92 eier Munch selv. Komposisjonen med den skrikende figur er forst utformet i 93'. (The gory, undulating evening mood was first painted in Nice '91, without the screaming person in the foreground. This first picture was bought by a Viennese art collector. Munch himself owns a pastel from '92. The composition

with the screaming figure was first formulated in '93.)

Thiis wrote in Zeitschrift fiir bildende Kunst, vI, 19o8, p. 134, that he was there at Munch's first exhibition in Berlin in 1892, and the fact that he met Strindberg confirms that he was in Berlin that winter. The painting 'Sonnenuntergang' of the violently coloured sky, without a figure, described by Thiis and by Hansson (n.23 above), appears to be lost or may have been overpainted. It is not illustrated or mentioned by R. Heller in his book Munch, The Scream, Art in Context series, London 1973. The picture 'Verzweiflung' (The Scream) was described by a correspondent in Morgenbladet, 7 December 1893, and by S. Przyby- szewski in his article 'Psychischer Naturalismus', Die neue deutsche Rundschau, v, February I894. It was exhibited at Stockholm in October 1894 as 'Skrik' and at Berlin in 1895 as 'Geschrei'.



198 CARLA LATHE less analytical man of action. The character Abel comes home and hears his wife's lover call to her in her bedroom, 'just remain standing like that with your arm raised up high. Keep standing there. Everything about you is new. Yes, smile! All the others are one. You are a thousand.'25 Abel could have shot his rival, but he threw away the pistol instead and said that holiness was to be found in contemplating nature more easily than in the waiting of one soul for another: physical embrace was regressive and retarded the individual's potential for growth. Munch's Woman conveys a similar situation. The man in the painting, head bowed, turns away from the woman as the character Abel in the play withdrew, preferring contemplation to confrontation. Munch's painting Jealousy of 1895 shows another stage of the same problem presented in the play (P1. 22c).

Munch's sequence of paintings on love was new in that it emphasized states of mind and unconscious experience compellingly and subjectively. His provocative, primitive approach is close to the writers who broke with convention in order to convey the feeling of mental imbalance and of nervous disorder. The impact of change and destruction which they made was deliberate, because they were amateur psychologists who drew on neurologists' theories concerning cerebral instability. Among the most popular sources were Ribot's Les maladies de la volonti (1883) and Les maladies de la personnalit6 (1885), Bernheim's De la suggestion (1886) and Max Nordau's Paradoxe (I885). These doctors presented the human complex as an irrational conglomeration of fragments which vacillated with the nerves' reactions to memories, associations, environment, suggestion, unconscious urges. The literature which adapted their ideas chose to illustrate nervous, withdrawn characters, remarkable for their excessive susceptibility to suggestion. Munch's friends, Strindberg, Hansson and Przybyszewski kept abreast of neurological research and found it necessary to study case histories of disturbed people to authenticate their work. Moreover, Strindberg began to note down his dreams in 1893, two years before Freud. Munch, too, who read German and French as well as Scandinavian literature, was familiar with books which developed psychological theory. He read for example Geschlecht und Charakter by the Viennese author Otto Weininger.26 Though probably unaware of Freud, Munch became one of the late nineteenth-century amateur psychologists to expose tensions in human behaviour. His own lifelong interest in medicine was stimulated both by his friends and by his father and brother, who were doctors.

The forms of medical inquiry Munch's friends wished to pursue were the investigation into the unconscious, into the control of nerve fluid and nerve vibrations associated with the theories of the Austrian doctor Anton Mesmer. The ideas Mesmer had made popular a hundred years before were given clinical authority when Jean Charcot persuaded the Paris Academy to accept hypnosis officially in I882. Mesmerism, however, continued to stimulate occult sects like the theosophists and spiritualists.

In Strindberg's circle in Berlin it was usual to compare an author or painter's effect on his public with that of a medium or hypnotist. Ola Hansson maintained that Strindberg

25 G. Heiberg, Balkonen, Copenhagen 1894, p. 61, 'bliv staende siledes. Med armen haevet hojt. Bliv staende. Alt er nyt ved dig. Ja smil! Alle de andre er in. Du er tusen'. 26 Johs. Roede wrote that when he first visited Munch

in the summer of I904 a copy of Weininger's book was lying on the table (together with a revolver), 'Spredte

erindringer om Edvard Munch', Edvard Munch som vi kjente ham. Venneneforteller, Oslo 1946, p. 40. C. Gierloff, n. 8 above, p. 149, also found Munch reading Weinin- ger's Geschlecht und Charakter. Weininger committed suicide in 1903, the year after the publication of his book, and his work at first received more publicity than Freud's.



MUNCH'S DRAMATIC IMAGES 199 conveyed his impressions through the written word 'just as the hypnotist transfers his conscious awareness onto the medium'.27 Max Dauthendey compared an artist's com- mand of synaesthesia with a hypnotist's manipulation of suggestibility and psychical experience. He believed that modern artists derived pleasure from observing how cerebral motion passed into the passive brains around him.28 Lidforss, who was thinking of becoming a writer, was told by Strindberg to 'take the plunge and feel the power when by your pen you stir people's brains into molecular activity'.29 By comparing the role of the creative artist with that of the hypnotist, writers indicated their wish to express unknown forces instead of describing more traditionally acceptable modes of behaviour. When Munch held an exhibition in 1895, he showed that in his early Berlin years, he had concentrated on images suggesting mesmerism.

Munch's later remarks confirm that it was above all Strindberg's belief in psychical phenomena that had impressed him. He said, 'there must be some truth in what Strindberg said about waves which surround and influence us. Perhaps we have a sort of radio receiver in the brain? I often turn round when I am walking along the-street; I feel that if I continue, I will meet someone whom I dislike'.30 Munch applied the imagery of atmospheric waves in the frame around his lithograph of Strindberg in 1896 (P1. 23d), and he appears to have shared Strindberg's conviction that the air was not inert but alive to the receptive investigator. Their acceptance of the state of flux was stimulated not by Henri Bergson, but by literary evaluations of psychological analysis and by Nietzsche.

Munch in 1906 gladly accepted a commission to paint a posthumous portrait of Nietzsche, and wrote two years later that he was thinking of painting Ibsen, Bjorn Bjornson, Strindberg and Drachmann in the same decorative manner as Nietzsche, namely not as photographic pictures, like the portraits by most painters.31 Apparently with this aim in mind he drafted a painting of a group of figures, with an aura of genii (P1. 23c). This draft appears to be a continuation of the symbolic composition Munch had designed as an advertisement for Peer Gynt in 1896, and suggests that he appreciated in Ibsen and Nietzsche, as in Strindberg, their psychical perception. Munch's wish to reciprocate by projecting his own psychical perceptiveness is evident in his portraits, for example in the frame around the Strindberg lithograph, and in his groups of paintings illustrating mutations in love.

Notions of psychic mobility helped Munch to define his artistic approach to his subjects. In the mysterious undulating lines with which he surrounded figures like

27 Det unga Skandinavien (189i), Samlade skrifter, xI, Stockholm 1921, p. 92, 'sisom hypnotis6ren 6verf6r sitt medvetenhetsinnehill pa mediet'. 28 Verdensaltet, Det nye sublime i Kunsten, Oversaettelse,

Copenhagen 1893, p. 12. Dauthendey's text, Weltall, Die Kunst des Intimen, Die Kunst des Erhabenen, was translated into Swedish by Gustav Uddgren. A Danish publisher they knew printed it in his Danish translation with the title Verdensaltet. Dauthendey subsequently lost the German manuscript, so it is known only in its Scandinavian version. 29 Strindberg, Brev, IX, 2730 (27 January 1894), 'tag

spranget och kinn magten nir Du sitter andras hjernor i molekularr6relse med pennan'.

30 Quoted by Rolf Stenersen, Edvard Munch, Niarbild av ett geni, translated from the author's Norwegian manuscript by Thure Nyman, Stockholm 1944, p. 40, 'Det maste ligga nagonting i vad Strindberg sa om vigor, som omger och paverkar oss. Kanske har vi en slags radio i hjirnan?Jag vinder ofta om nir jag gir pa gatan. Jag kinner att om jag fortsitter nu, sa moter jag nagon som jag inte tycker om'. 31 Munch's letter, 21I June 1908, was published by

Gierloff, n. 8 above, p. 279.



200 CARLA LATHE

Madonna he gave the impression that the subject was insubstantial, accessible only through the medium of the artist's senses. Apart from their use in evoking sensations of atmospheric vibration, Munch relied on the lines to simplify the structure of his pictures. He therefore accepted and exploited the artistic potential in the contemporary interest in psychical powers. His projection of the simultaneous vacillations in perception anticipates more modern developments like Marinetti's 'wireless imagination', Kandinsky's theosophy, the Surrealists' automatic writing. In the 189os Munch found among his literary associates, particularly in the drama of Strindberg, the major impetus to demonstrate the breakdown of stability and to suggest the relevance of psychical phenomena to physiological and artistic perception.

IV

Strindberg's significance for Munch's development in the 1890s lay in the emphasis on simplicity in the dramatist's projections of psychological movement. Strindberg hoped that his experimental plays would be performed by Antoine's Thedtre Libre in Paris. Amateur actors in this theatre performed short one-act plays called quarts-d'heure of a frequently violent and sensational nature. The action naturally had to be fast. One of the attractions for Strindberg in the one-act play was that he could dispense with an interval and therefore keep the audience in a mood of suspense.

In order to authenticate his presentation of psychic tension, Strindberg had borrowed images from Max Nordau, who in his Paradoxe described the will as a sort of electric battery and the impulse to movement as being transmitted to the muscles by a kind of electric current. He strengthened his argument by applying the theories on suggestion and the popular belief in nerve-currents, nerve-power and nerve-fluid. Strindberg used these concepts to demonstrate the psychological and mechanical impact of suggestion and the state of trance. In his play The Creditors, the exchange between people is at a nervous level, a series of impulses and reflexes; one character tells another that he had been 'the mesmerist who spread his nerve power over your weak muscles, charged your empty brains with new electricity'.32

Strindberg's presentation of involuntary movement and mesmeric powers on the stage is implicit in Munch's series of paintings which demonstrate the attraction and separation of lovers. Munch knew that Strindberg wished to accelerate the exposure of inner life and make it more obvious than in Ibsen's plays. Strindberg thought that there had been too much romanticism and scenery in his own play Miss Julie, and believed The Creditors was thoroughly modern and a better play.33 His attempts to reform the theatre of his day coincided with Munch's artistic attempts to experiment with psychological tension and elimination of static detail. The rhythmic sky in The Scream is a concentrated image for the rhythms passing through the brain which Strindberg tried to project in his plays.

Among the theatrical innovations Strindberg recommended for the production of his plays were more natural make-up, speech, lighting, scenery and especially a small,

32 A. Strindberg, Samlade skrifter, xxIII, Stockholm 1914, p. 244, 'magnetis6ren, som str6k sin nervkraft 6ver i dina slappa muskler, laddade din tomma hjirna med ny elektricitet'. 33 Strindberg, Brev, vii, no. 1663 (16 October 1888).




intimate theatre for a receptive audience. His one-act drama aimed to replace the prevailing romantic conventions and historicism with a contemporary sense of urgency and integration. In 1888 he wrote that he wished that actors would work together to produce a simultaneous, natural performance. He observed in his preface to MissJulie, 'that I shall see an actor's back throughout a vital scene is beyond my dreams, but I do wish that crucial scenes could be played, not in front of the prompter's box, like duets seeking applause, but in the place required by the action'.

Strindberg's attempts to reform the theatre made an impact in German drama circles where, apart from his premieres in Berlin, his one-act play The Creditors was chosen to open an 'intimate theatre' society in Munich in April 1895. Max Halbe, who acted in the play, described the performance and the aims of the 'intimate theatre' in an article in Pan, I895. He wrote that the scenery had consisted of two chairs, a small table, a few lamps which gave subdued light. The invited audience of about forty people and the three actors were on the same level and close together. The prompter sat in an adjoining room in candlelight. According to Halbe the purpose of the 'intimate theatre' was to stimulate the imagination and to rely on simplicity and originality rather than on expensive props and d6cor. Halbe wrote that the naturalism which was so dominant in the contemporary theatre should be directed away from external scenery and back to the internal performance of the actors. In future, the intimate theatre society might hold its performances in a variety of different settings, such as a room, garden or park, which would help to stimulate the imagination. Among the plays he listed for future performances was Gunnar Heiberg's Balkonen (The Balcony).

The 'intimate' theatre's objective of suggesting states of mind as simply and directly as possible was very close to Munch's interest in creating dramatic images. Before he and Strindberg met, they had both used figures primarily as intermediaries for conveying psychological experience. In Berlin they helped each other to make the transition from naturalism to a more open justification of psychical phenomena and dream sequences. The nerve currents Strindberg had tried to rationalize in his earlier dramas are accepted in his later plays as manifestations of irrational forces in a surreal environment. Strindberg's paintings, which were mainly recognizable seascapes before the I89os, became more abstract, his Wonderland for example, which he described in his article 'Des arts nouveau! ou Le hasard dans la production artistique' in Revue des revues, November I894. Munch meanwhile concentrated on the expression of intuition, observing the approach of 'intimate' theatre; early in I894 he considered illustrating Maeterlinck's Pellias et Melisande.

In the plays by Ibsen, the spectator also glimpses a scene by looking past or with intermediary figures, perceiving only part of the situation because the figures are not objective, but nervous and emotional. Temperament obtrudes and blocks the illusion of physiological accuracy. Munch developed this approach in his years of contact with the modern theatre. His undulating lines and interacting figures express temperament like the actors who turn away from the audience towards each other. This is the view he gives in his Attraction, The Lonely Ones, To the Wood.

Munch's concentrated, evocative images were as deliberate as the dramatists' sparing use of scenery and props for visual suggestion about their characters' imagination. The film of pulsating lines, the averted faces, ambiguous backgrounds in his pictures convey the vulnerability of his figures. They hover among shadows and vacillating spaces, remaining over-susceptible to others, indefinite in their identity. The spectator, in being

14



202 CARLA LATHE denied a full clear view, is in the same position as in Strindberg and Ibsen's plays, where he discerns behind screens and blinds, attics and cupboards, the raw feeling in the home. The suppressed, submerged atmosphere helps to focus attention on the latent mental and sexual tension. In some of Munch's scenes, such as Jealousy, a figure confronts the viewer directly, and this frontal position compares with the perspective of a fictional ego in the monologues written by Munch's other literary friends, Knut Hamsun's Sult (Hunger, 189o), for example, or Stanislaw Przybyszewski's Totenmesse (1893).34 Attention is focused on the agitation of the central figure, and the background figures and surroundings shown are those which reveal more about the subject's state of mind. This concern with psychological movement distinguished Munch from his colleagues who wanted to present a painter's painting. He had no wish whatever to paint still-lifes. In his thematic groups of pictures of love and death he followed Ibsen and Strindberg in presenting the tensions in people's unconscious life.

V

Strindberg's wish to mesmerize his audience impressed Max Reinhardt, who in Berlin converted a ballroom into a theatre in order to stage chamber plays. The Kammerspiel- theater was small, with the stage barely separated from the auditorium. It held about three hundred people. Reinhardt asked Munch to decorate an upstairs reception room with a frieze and to design sets for the performance of Ibsen's Ghosts, with which the theatre opened in 1906. Reinhardt's emphasis on the psychologically convincing mood won the approval of Strindberg, who opened his own intimate theatre in Stockholm in 1907. The Berlin Kammerspieltheater, after opening with Ghosts, continued to give three hundred and six evenings of Ibsen's plays and four hundred and ninety-one evenings of Strindberg's plays. Other modern dramatists on the repertoire included Maeterlinck, Shaw, Wedekind, Hauptmann and Schnitzler. The frieze of Munch's paintings decorated a reception room, but it was badly sited and so the paintings were eventually divided up and sold. Eight of them are now in the Berlin National Gallery.

Munch found Reinhardt's commissions among his most exacting tasks. Requests for book illustrations and for programmes such as for Le Thedtre de l(Euvre allowed him freer interpretation of the literary material (P1. 23b). Believing that Reinhardt required for the Ghosts sets illustrations of an old-fashioned Norwegian home, Munch was so uneasy about his lack of historical accuracy that he asked his relation Ravensberg in Norway to help by sending a picture of an interior which would suit the large room, chairs, tables and furnishings on the stage of Ghosts.35 Ravensberg should consult theatre people if necessary, Munch urged. The material Munch collected in this way was useful to him when he designed sets for Hedda Gabler, which Reinhardt planned to stage in January 1907. Hermann Bahr took over the production of Hedda Gabler and fewer of Munch's sets have survived.

In spite of Munch's diffidence, Reinhardt was enthusiastic about the painter's contribution to the performance of Ghosts. It was not a hard, external naturalism or

34 See my article, 'Edvard Munch and the concept of "psychic naturalism"', Gazette des Beaux Arts, xcIII, '979. 35 Letter published by Gierloff, n. 8 above, p. 282.




historicism that he had in mind for his intimate theatre, but just the emphasis on mood and suggestion that Munch had long shown himself able to create. Apart from designing sets, Munch sketched scenes in which he let the figures' different positions express what was happening in the plays. These sketches were greatly appreciated by the actors, who studied them carefully. Ludvig Ravensberg, who attended the first rehearsal of Ghosts with Munch, commented on 23 October 19o6 that Munch had now become an instructor too.36 There is later confirmation for this in a letter Munch received in February 1907 from the actress who played the leading role in Hedda Gabler, because she sought his guidance in the interpretation of Ibsen's play.37

Reinhardt found Munch's suggestions about colours and light effects very helpful. When Ernst Stern, a set designer, saw one of Munch's oil paintings at an early stage, he remarked that it was not detailed enough. Reinhardt replied, 'perhaps so ... But the easy chair tells you everything! Its blackness gives you the whole atmosphere of the drama! And the sitting room walls in Munch's picture! . . . The colour is like a pair of diseased gums. We must try to find wallpaper with this colour. It will put the actors in the right mood'.38

Munch's earlier association with Strindberg had fostered such emphasis or omission of detail in evocations of disturbed states of mind. The sketches for Ghosts satisfy Ibsen's directions but accentuate the importance of the armchair and add a grandfather clock (P1. 24a, b). The chair is large, black and positioned in the centre foreground with its back to the audience. It serves to create the illusion of a fourth wall between the stage and audience, which is strengthened by the movements of the actors, who mostly turn away from the audience. Munch's setting shows an integration of figures and scenery in which not only the actors but also the chair face each other rather than the audience. To see what is happening, the audience must look past the chair in which Osvald will collapse. That Munch made the furniture close in on the figures is appropriate for Osvald's insecurity; Osvald asks for the doors to be closed in the final act, and even locks the door so that no one can enter. The spectator perceives the situation by subtle means, by the shapes and colour of the props and lighting as well as by the pose of the figures. The enclosed space on the stage demonstrates a confined state of mind.

Munch's work on Reinhardt's commissions stretched from the autumn of 19o6 until December i907, when his frieze for the reception room was finished. During 1907 he created a series of pictures which show the influence of the dramatic atmosphere which the intimate theatre aimed to produce. Munch painted scenes of agitation in ugly rooms with disquieting wallpaper: paintings of brothel scenes 'Zum siissen Maidel', the Green Room series, new versions of The Death ofMarat and ofJealousy, which he now set in a room instead of in the symbolist scene with tree and plant, as in the earlier painting (Pls 25b, 22c). Strindberg had written of his one-act psychological murder plays that he could dispense with d cor, needed only a room. Munch's paintings of 1907 appear to produce such a tense atmosphere in just a room. As in Strindberg's plays and in the final scene of

36 See letter from Ravensberg, published by Gierloff, op. cit., p. 189. 37Letter from Gertrud Eysoldt, quoted by Peter

Krieger, catalogue n. 9 above, pp. 27-28. 38Quoted by Pal Hougen, catalogue n. 9 above,

Kunsthaus Zurich, 1976, p. I2, 'Mag sein,... aber der

Lehnstuhl sagt alles! Sein Schwarz gibt die ganze Stimmung des Dramas restlos wieder! Und dann die Winde der Stube auf Munchs Bild! ... Sie haben die Farbe von krankem Zahnfleisch. Wir miissen uns bemiihen, eine Tapete dieses Tons zu finden. Sie wird die Schauspieler in die richtige Stimmung versetzen!'.



204 CARLA LATHE

Ghosts, Munch evoked a sense of insecurity, and when he did show an open door, as in his Jealousy, it offered no release.

Through his work for Reinhardt's theatre Munch broadened his insight into stagecraft. In the winter of 19o6-o7 he lived intermittently among the actors and theatre staff and had the opportunity of meeting other people involved with dramatic art. When he attended the party to celebrate the opening night of Ghosts on 8 November 1906, he sat opposite the English stage designer and wood engraver Gordon Craig. As Peter Krieger has pointed out, Munch may also have met Frank Wedekind.39 Between the two plays by Ibsen, Reinhardt produced Wedekind's Friihlings Erwachen on 20 November 1906, in which the author played the part of the masked gentleman.

Munch's experience at the Kammerspieltheater may have stimulated him to develop further his own play, Fra den fri Kjerligheds By (From the Town of Free Love), 1904-o8. Munch wrote it in prose and rhymed verse and set it in five acts, but did not publish it. It was a satire on his former fiancee and her friends. He cast himself in the main role as a type of bard or minstrel who comes into conflict with the people he meets in the 'town of free love'. He undergoes a number of grotesque trials, is trapped in the town and forced into marriage. It has affinities with an operetta, and there is an analogy with Ibsen's poetic drama Peer Gynt, particularly when Munch's singer is enticed by the Dollar Princess, in the same way as Peer by the Dovre king's daughter in the kingdom of the trolls. The singer cries out, 'O, free me from this town of freedom', but is executed by the inhabitants.40

That Munch cast himself in the role of a wandering minstrel in his play is another sign that he associated himself with the performing arts. His illustrations for his play resemble a series of drawings which he showed to Gustav Schiefler in Warnemiinde in 1908, and which he adapted for the print portfolio Alpha and Omega, published together with a satirical text in I908-09.41 Neither the play nor the satirical drawings with aphorisms and other texts are of high artistic calibre, but they convey Munch's wish to provoke. He was by then used to constant publicity and was certain that he could exhibit his work, so that he could calculate the effect he wanted his pictures to make. He sent his print series Alpha and Omega to the Berlin Secession in 1909 and wrote while it was on exhibition, 'the twenty sheets are sufficient to set minds in motion down there'.42 Like his first literary friends in Berlin, Munch in the images of his fantasy tried to rouse a response from his viewers.

VI

Of all the dramatists whom Munch knew, Ibsen appears to have impressed him most, and long after his work on the sets for the Kammerspieltheater he continued to illustrate the themes of Ghosts for his own pleasure. In 1920 he repeated two of his paintings in lithographs. His painting and lithograph of Osvald's collapse (P1. 25a) intensified the

39 Krieger, catalogue n. 9 above, p. 28. 40 Quoted by Trine Ness, 'Edvard Munch og "den fri Kjarligheds By"', Kunst og Kultur, LVI, 1973, P. 150, 'O fri mig for denne Frihedens by!'. See also Arne Eggum, 'The Green Room', catalogue to Edvard Munch exhibition, Liljevalchs and Kulturhuset, Stockholm 1977; Gerd Woll, 'The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil', catalogue to Edvard Munch exhibition, National Gallery of Art, Washington 1978, p. 232; and the

exhibition catalogue 'Edvard Munch, Alpha and Omega', Munch Museum 1981, in which the play is published in an English translation. 41 Gustav Schiefler, Edvard Munch. Das graphische Werk

19o6-1926, Berlin 1928, p. 18. 42 Letter to Sigurd Host, 24 May Igog, quoted by Pola

Gauguin, Edvard Munch som vi kjente ham. Venneneforteller, p. 155, 'De tyve Blade er nok til at sette Sind i Bevaegelse dernede'.




drama between invalid and mother which he had depicted in The Sick Child, of which he made replicas in 1907. The chair is different, but the tragic juxtaposition similar. Munch found his and Ibsen's scenes interchangeable.

Ibsen's Ghosts had been published in I881, when Munch at the age of seventeen had

just started his career as a painter. Munch's subsequent images were so similar to Ibsen's creative work that they fused together in his memory. In the recollections he wrote when approaching his seventieth birthday, he described the 'Osvald mood' of his 'Frieze of Life' paintings and linked Osvald's craving for the sun with similar scenes in his own work. He wrote that the painting Spring: was the craving of a mortally ill person for light and warmth, for life. The sun in the Aula was in 'Spring' the sunshine in the window. It was Osvald's sun ... From my mother on, I and all my dear ones have sat winter after winter, longing for the sun, in the same chair in which I painted the invalid - until death took them. From my father on, I and all my dear ones paced up and down in the room, filled with the fear of life and madness.43

Munch's reveries about the 'Osvald mood' of his 'Frieze of Life' paintings are typical of his tendency in the late 1920os and 1930os to dwell less on individual initiative than on the afflictions of his youth. Though wishing his work to be compared with Ibsen's dramatic achievement, it is clear that he identified with Ibsen's ailing characters. Interpretations of Munch's early pictures which rely on these late reveries, however, ignore the time-lag of some thirty years, as well as much of the original context in which the images had been created. The 'Frieze of Life' series of paintings had expressed a broad contemporary interest in unconscious behaviour, and literary friends like Strindberg had stimulated Munch to project sensations of hypnosis and mental stress. One may well ask if Munch would have produced his 'Frieze of Life' at all without the literary stimulus.44

Another factor to Munch's reveries and identification with Osvald was his ingrained inclination to dramatize his life. He saw himself in many roles, of which Osvald was one. Other roles were that of Peer Gynt, Rubek, Solness, Hamlet, Marat, an anatomist, a poet, a minstrel, a monk, John the Baptist, Christ. While he associated with writers, he repeatedly expressed heightened dramatic moments of human experience, as in The Scream and Jealousy, and in Ibsen's plays he could find metaphors for private ordeals.

Munch's adaptation of his images to illustrate Ibsen's plays could be light-hearted as well as serious. For example, his sketch Woman (Peer Gynt Paraphrase) of 1895 is a lively variation of his painting Woman (Pls 22d, b), and appears to refer to Peer's encounter with the upland herd-girls. This drawing, too, conveys his pleasure in suggesting the actors'

performance.

43 Draft letter in Munch Museum archive, quoted by PAl Hougen, n. 14 above, p. 26, "'Var" var den dodssyges lengten mot lys og varme, mod livet. Solen i Aulaen var i "Var" solskinnet i vinduet. Det var Osvalds sol ... I samme stol somjeg malte den syge har jeg og alle mine kjaere fra min mor afsat vintre pa vintre, sat og lengtet mot sol - til doden har tat dem. Jeg og alle mine kjaere har fra min far gat op og ned af gulvet i livsangst, galskab'. 44 Munch first used the title 'Frieze of Life' in I918

when he exhibited a later variation of the series. See n. 12 above, and Arne Eggum, 'Munch's late Frieze of

Life', published together with an English translation of Munch's pamphlet Livs-Frisen in the catalogue to Edvard Munch exhibition, Liljevalchs and Kul- turhuset, Stockholm 1977. Before 1918 the series had been exhibited as studies on the theme of love (1893-95) and as motifs from the life cycle (1902-05). Much of the information about Munch's intentions for his frieze derived from pamphlets he published in later life, in Livs-Frisen (1918) and in Livsfrisens tilblivelse (c. 1925). Munch wrote that he considered the series would remain unfinished until such time as it could be assembled permanently in one place.



206 CARLA LATHE

Because of his wish to provoke and suggest situations, Munch's supposedly autobio- graphical pictures cannot be considered reliable, literal records of his life. Even his

lithograph Death in the Sick Room (P1. 25c), which apparently referred to the death of his sister, shows that he presented the experience in a dramatic way. The floor in the lithograph slopes upwards and resembles the boards of a stage. Whereas the Munch family's living quarters were cramped, the sick room in the lithograph looks empty and

large. The sister in the chair died in 1877, when the other children ranged in age between nine and thirteen, but Munch shows them as adults. His presentation of this memory is therefore larger than life. As in the intimate theatre, he made a dramatic spectacle from his revelation of private experience.

VII

If assessments of Munch take into account his association with Scandinavian and continental authors, he no longer appears an isolated psychotic but an accomplished and

imaginative draughtsman. Some of his more startling images were clearly motivated by his interest in suggesting vivid and dramatic moments. The technicalities of suggesting vacillating states of mind invited experiment, in which Munch excelled. In spite of the

appearance of spontaneity, he repeated and re-worked his images over a long period of time, and in his prints created brilliant new versions of his thematic groups like 'The Frieze of Life'. He was reluctant to sell individual paintings of his series, and made

replicas rather than lose motifs from his groups. Although the prints of the same motifs were often more accessible than the paintings, they lost some of their coherence by being separated from the original thematic group. When hung together, the pictures illustrate his dramatic sense in suggesting the tensions in human behaviour.

Munch in his repeated visits to Germany during the years 1892-I908 impressed writers and painters there by his method of expressing psychological awareness. He was drawn into the Berlin literary and theatre milieu, which encouraged and influenced his art. His concentration on visual demonstrations of psychological tension stimulated

younger generations of painters in central Europe, like Kokoschka, who also fluctuated between painting and drama. Remarkable for the development of expressionism is that Munch's projections of psychic mobility by gesture, colour, perspective and background emerged most clearly when he competed with modern dramatists and responded to the theatre.



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24 MUNCH'S DRAMATIC IMAGES

a-Edvard Munch, Scene from Ibsen's Ghosts, I906. Oslo, Munch Museum (pp. 193, 203)

b-Edvard Munch, Family Scene (from Ibsen's Ghosts), 90o6. Oslo, Munch Museum (p. 203)



a-Edvard Munch, Osvald (for Ibsen's Ghosts: detail), I906. Oslo, Munch Museum (p. 204)

b-Edvard Munch,Jealousy, 1907. Oslo, Munch Museum (pp. 203 f.)


c-Edvard Munch, Death in the Sick Room, 1896. Oslo, Munch Museum (p. 206)



Documents

Author(s): Carla Lathe Source: Journal of the Warburg and ...7 See Birgit Prestoe, 'Smitrekk om Edvard Munch', Edvard Munch, Mennesket og kunstneren, p. 138. 8 See C. Gierloff, Edvard