Art Review: Looking at Edvard Munch, Beyond ‘The Scream’

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Visit Oslo in midwinter and high summer and you’ll know the atmospheric sources of Edvard Munch’s art: barely broken darkness, and sunlight you can’t escape. Both are evoked in “Munch and Expressionism” at the Neue Galerie, where paintings and prints by Munch and his younger German contemporaries glow and flare like lamps against midnight-blue walls.

There’s no question that Munch was a product of his Norwegian homeland. But the show makes him part of a larger history, too. It argues that his art significantly shaped, and was shaped by, European culture of the early 20th century, when an atmospheric clash of liberationist yearning and doomsday fear charged the air like lightning and sparked reality-fracturing art styles, including German Expressionism.

It was in Germany, where he lived from 1892 to 1908, that Munch developed an international career, though by the time he arrived, his art and thinking had essentially been formed. Born in 1863, he went to art school in Oslo, where he hung out with bohemian writers and political radicals, dropping down to Paris now and then to catch what was trending there. In 1886, he chalked up his first succès de scandale when his painting “The Sick Child” was reviled by Oslo’s art establishment. The subject — inspired by the memory of an older sister, Sophie, who had died at 15 — wasn’t the problem, but his Impressionistic style was an affront to a local taste for academic naturalism.

His reputation spread. A solo show in Berlin in 1892 was noisily shut down by a conservative art faction, giving him, as he was delighted to note, invaluable publicity. To make the most of the “Munch affair,” as it was called, he settled in the city and stayed for nearly 16 years. Some of his best-known images originated during this time: “Madonna,” “Puberty,” “The Scream.” Classic versions of them are at the Neue Galerie, along with enough additional work to make the show more than worth the price of admission for any Munch fan.

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Even at that time, he had an ardent following among vanguard German and Austrian artists. Many of them — Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in Germany; Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl in Vienna — were his juniors by two decades or more. And they looked to him as an active model for a new strain of modernist art that came to be called Expressionism.

What did they see in his example? The same basic thing they saw in older heroes like Gauguin and van Gogh: a willingness, amounting to a compulsion, to use art as a vehicle of emotion in extremis. In addition, Munch brought to his work an up-to-the-minute content, new-century attitudes toward sex, psychological disturbance, occult spirituality and utopian politics.

There were, of course, generational and personal factors that set Munch apart. He was old enough to have had a kind of lived experience of 19th-century Romanticism unavailable to younger artists; he would circle back to it as he grew older. And where a fixation on mortality in his art had roots in childhood — his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5, his sister when he was 14 — the morbidity that ran through Expressionism was a reflection of the present, a time gearing up for the Armageddon of World War I.

Whatever the differences, younger artists learned from Munch; and he from them. And patterns of “influence and affinity” are what the exhibition — organized by the art historians Jill Lloyd and Reinhold Heller in cooperation with the Munch Museum in Oslo — spells out. Some are easy to illustrate. In a small, dim, chapel-like gallery — Peter de Kimpe is the installation designer — you’ll find the “The Scream,” in the 1895 pastel version sold at Sotheby’s a few years back. The image is now pure Pop, but it wasn’t always. When it was new, many artists took it seriously.

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In a 1917 woodcut, Heckel, traumatized by wartime service in the army medical corps, turns Munch’s screamer into the figure of a man standing on what looks like a battlefield holding his hands to his head as if stunned. And in a 1910 watercolor self-portrait, the great Schiele presents himself as a shocked-and-awed existential casualty, his head swollen to E. T. size, his mouth agape in a colicky, wailing O.

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By the time Schiele painted this, Munch was no longer living in Berlin. In 1908, an episode of what sounds like alcoholic psychosis had landed him in a sanitarium, and when he got out, he moved back to Norway. But he took lessons learned in Germany with him. Thanks in part to years of exposure to the Expressionists, who valued process over polish, and mixed realism with abstraction, his style had changed, loosened up. His twilit palette lightened too, as if the sun had come out. A comparison of his original 1894-95 version of “Puberty,” moody and tightly brushed, with the florid Expressionist 1914-16 reworking in the show, says a lot.

The other, huge gain from his Berlin years was in printmaking. The show’s most dynamic and densely hung gallery is devoted to it; here many learning curves intersect. It was in Germany that Munch mastered traditional woodcut techniques and invented his own. Innovatively, he created color prints by cutting up blocks, coloring the pieces and puzzling them together. He used the natural grain of wood, usually covered up, as an expressive element. In a suite of four woodcuts called “Towards the Forest,” we can at least see his exploratory, mad-scientist moves as he, somehow — I couldn’t figure out how — lays down veils of diaphanous color and makes images come and go before our eyes.

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Artists were watching his moves too. In a set of 1913 lithographs, the Expressionist painter Emil Nolde experimented with painterly color in ways very similar to Munch’s in variations on an image of a female head. (It’s even possible that, in this case, Munch was watching Nolde.) And in a sensational 1917-18 monotype titled “Head of a Sick Man, Self-Portrait,” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the most gifted and prolific of German modernist printmakers, does what Munch repeatedly almost does: He dissolves the line between printmaking and painting.

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With these two Expressionists, along with Beckmann, Schiele and the alluring Gerstl, we are in deeply interesting and difficult company. They are far more than supporting players to Munch in the show. The half-Danish Nolde, born in 1867, was close in age to Munch, which created a bond, though it didn’t last. As Munch’s sensibility lightened, Nolde’s darkened. As early as the 1920s, he signed on with the Nazi Party. Kirchner, who as a young artist studied Munch closely, then spent a career denying his influence, committed suicide in exile in Switzerland in 1938 out of fear of a German invasion.

Kirchner’s art, like that of nearly all the Expressionists, including Nolde, was ruthlessly censored by the Third Reich. There was an irony here: By the 1930s, the once-revolutionary style had come to be, by the standards of international art fashion, old hat, ho-hum, its origins half-forgotten. In the context of Nazi aesthetic politics, it was red-hot, a cultural pollutant. As such, it was yanked from museums, shoved into storage, sent abroad, lost. Work by Munch in German collections was swept up with the rest. When Norway was invaded, his property was seized. He stayed in his studio, working till he died in 1944.

The paintings from the last decades of his life are a funny mix. Some, like the gaunt self-portrait called “The Night Wanderer” (1923-24), are tight, shadowy, theatrically haunted things. They look like visions of an earlier age, illuminated by gaslight. And there are outdoor scenes, set on beaches, with pale nude bodies in beating-down sunlight. The painting style can look loose to a fault, flabby, but it can also point, bracingly, toward de Kooning. The Neue Galerie show points, even more bracingly, in the other direction and situates Munch and his contemporaries in the mid-spring of their lives, in the high-yield hours of noon to dusk.