Essentially this famous picture is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction
based on Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a
walk, after his two companions, seen in the background, had left him. Fitting the fact
that the sound must have been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal
state, Munch renders it in a style which if pushed to extremes can destroy human
integrity. As previously noted, the flowing curves of art nouveau represent a subjective
linear fusion imposed upon nature, whereby the multiplicity of particulars is unified
into a totality of organic suggestion with feminine overtones. But man is part of
nature, and absorption into such a totality liquidates the individual. Beginning at this
time Munch included art nouveau elements in many pictures but usually only in a
limited or modified way. Here, however, in depicting his own morbid experience, he
has let go, and allowed the foreground figure to become distorted by the subjectivized
flow of nature; the scream could be interpreted as expressing the agony of the
obliteration of human personality by this unifying force. Significantly, although it was
Munch himself who underwent the experience depicted, the protagonist bears no
resemblance to him or anyone else. The creature in the foreground has been
depersonalized and crushed into sexlessness or, if anything, stamped with a trace of
the femininity of the world that has come close to assimilating it.
Several facts indicate Munch was aware of the danger of an art of this sort for a
neurotic humanist like himself. He soon abandoned the style and rarely if ever again
subjected a foreground figure to this kind of radical and systematic distortion. At the
top of another version of the subject (National Gallery, Oslo) he wrote: 'Can only have
been painted by a madman.' He certainly had a horror of insanity, which had afflicted
his sister Laura. Within the picture, he has set up a defense, in the form of the
plunging perspective of the roadway and its fence, which preserves a rational world of
three dimensions, holding at bay the swell of art nouveau curves. Safe in this rational
world, the two men in the distance remain unequivocably masculine. In the foreground
unified nature has come close to crossing the fence, close enough to distort the form
and personality of the protagonist. But the fence still protects it from total absorption
into subjective madness.
The Scream has been the target of several high-profile art thefts. In 1994, the version
in the National Gallery was stolen. It was recovered several months later.
The Sun is perhaps the greatest achievement of modern mural painting. Symmetrically
structured, it occupied the enormous front space of Oslo University's assembly hall,
dominating through size, unmitigated frontality, and power of imagery.
Munch extended the sun image in this mural from a partial to an embracing role,
having first proposed a Nietzschean Mountain of Man that rose toward a sun-covered
sky. Upon further reflection, and in compliance with advice from friends, he abandoned
the problematical symbol to retain the sun image in pure, intense, and masculine
dominance.
Illuminated by the sunrays are the water of the ocean, the bare rocks of a Northern
landscape, and a slim strip of verdant green that separated land and sea. A clean,
straight horizon line divides the waters from sky. The great sun is all-pervasive,
shinning from the heavens upon land and sea, its rays reaching out to all eternity.
Inhuman itself, it is the source of all life.
When Jens Thiis bought this picture for the National Gallery, Oslo, in 1909 the public
was shocked; one critic denounced it as portraying a drunken prostitute. This is
unlikely to have been Munch's idea. He did paint several pictures of prostitutes,
tending to depict them as unattractive or even grotesque, whereas this woman closely
resembles the Madonna and, different though the setting, shares her ethereal beauty.
She is probably intended to illustrate one aspect of the essence of protean
womanhood portrayed in that work. Both paintings in fact relate to a lost picture by
Munch that Hans Jaeger had with him in his prison cell when jailed in 1886 for
publishing From Christiania's Bohemia, a novel in which descriptions of free bohemian
life parallel what is shown here. The present picture is more directly a replica, modified
by his style of the 1890s, of the same subject painted in 1885-86 and also lost. One
important Norwegian precedent for the depiction of a dissolute woman would
undoubtedly have been known to Munch, Hans Heyerdahl's tiny, exquisite painting
of The Champagne Girl, which was also strongly attacked when exhibited. If Munch's
picture represents The Day After, Heyerdahl's might be called 'The Evening Before.'
Until his late years Munch never showed any interest in still-life painting for its own
sake, but he sometimes introduced it into subject pictures, giving it, as in this case,
the status of a separate image, a material correlate of the human situation
portrayed. Gauguin had employed still life in a similar manner in some of his portraits,
without giving it the same degree of independence. In The Day After the differing pairs
of bottles and glasses hint that the woman has had a nocturnal visitor.
No other painting conveys so strongly Munch's belief in the working class as the
dominant force in the society of the future. The tramp of the weary workers along the
road home, from the distant vanishing point up to and beyond the picture plane,
almost certainly signifies the march of the working class from the distant past up to
the present and beyond it into the future, which is to belong to them. In contrast to
this forward movement, and causing it to seem all-the-more relentless, the
perspective shoots inward, accompanied in the middle ground on the left by a few
small figures of bourgeois appearance; they recede into the past which, from Munch's
standpoint, is where they belong. To augment the grandeur of the workers' procession
he shows most of the scene from a low eye level, but as the foreground figures
successively approach the picture plane the eye level rises in steps, so that the man in
front, seen from a height and bisected by the base line, seems to be walking past us
out of the picture, creating a cinematic effect. The use of multiple contours, especially
evident in the leading figure, further increases the impression of movement. In fact
the whole picture seems dominated by a tangle of wiry lines, more like a drawing than
a painting; the lower legs of the man on the left are actually transparent, allowing us
to look through them at the cobblestones.
The practice of free love by the bohemians of Christiania, advocated by Jaeger as
suited to an anarchist society, led to a good deal of jealousy. Among those who
aroused it was Oda Krohg (wife of the painter Christian Krohg), who became, to borrow
Tom Lehrer's phraseology, the hypotenuse of a triangle involving her husband and
Jappe Nilssen, a young journalist who was a friend of Munch. His jealousy inspired this
symbolic composition which Munch painted in several versions under various
titles: Jealousy, and Melancholy.
Nilssen sits miserable among the rocks on the shore at Asgardstrand, in the profile
position of contemplation. In the distance the figures of a man and a woman, Christian
and Oda Krohg, are about to embark on a boat, bound for an island where they will
make love. Nilssen is painted in the manner of the Pont-Aven school, in heavy
inflexible contours. The further flatten a figure already flattened by the profile
silhouette, and do not altogether harmonize with the vague plastic implication of the
face and the hand supporting it. The distant view is fused into art nouveau
undulations, We are in fact presented with two different image: firstly, an imaginary
but objective view of a melancholy man and secondly, a blurred picture of the distant
scene his mind's eye conjures up as a metaphor of the cause of his melancholy. Such
double images, demanding a transfer from our own eyes to the mid's eye of a
foreground figure, are not uncommon in Munch
Munch painted The Storm in
Aasgaardstrand, a small Norwegian seaside resort he and other artists frequented. The painting may have
been inspired by a violent storm that occured there that summer, but it also conjures a sense of psychic
distress. Standing near the water on an eerie blue Scandinavian summer night, a young woman clad in
white clasps her hands to her head. Other women, standing apart from her, echo the anguished gesture.
The windows of the housebright, yellow, arrestingimbue the building with an almost human presence
while suggesting a vibrant world from which the women are excluded.
