EDVARD munch: PSYCHE, SYMBOL AND EXPRESSION Edvard Muiuli (1863-1944) was du' lirst Nordic visual .irlisi to earn an inlornational rc'pulalion dm ini> llu' ('\|)l()sion ol c ic'.iliv ily in die lalo niiu'ti'c'ndi and c'arly Iwc'iidotli (('ulm ic's dial luis boon callc'd du' Scandinavian Rc'iiaissaiu c\ Ilis liaunling image' ol The Scream has Im'coiiu' an c'liibk'ni ol modc'i n anxirly, and may now bc' tlu' most lr('(|uc'ndy rc'produc cel work ol ail in lIu' world. Yi‘1 llu'ic is miic h iiioic lo Mime li's arl lliaii ibis single’ sli i dcMil noU\ I’roeinc live' lor more' llian six ele'e aele's, Mime li was an insiglidnl portraitist and landsc ape' paintc'i, as we'll as an c'xae ling c'xploicr ol lumian passions, iiic ineliiig nnivc’isal llu'iiu's ol love', dc'atb and spiritual longing. This voluiiK' acTompanic’d an e’xhibilioii lu'lel at die' (diai Ic's S. and Isalx'lla V. McMullen Museum ol Arl al Hoslon (aillc'ge' Irom February 5-May 20, 2001, one ol die mosi e emipre’he'nsive’ c'xlii bitions ol Edvard Mnneb's work e’ver shown in America. The’ exhibition leatnred 83 works liy Edvard Mnneh, inelneling 25 outstanding paintings, many ol which had lU’ver hc’en on pnhiie display belore in America. All works are illnslrale’d here in 43 color and 41 black and white plates. The eight c atalog e’ssays also include over 120 comparative illnsiralions. The c’xhihilioii and catalog take an innovative and iiiterdi.sciplinary ap|)roaeh to llic’ study of the style, subject matter, and inter|)retations ol ihe art ol Edvard Munch in modern Enropc'an cniinre. Scholars Irom a vari ety ol disciplines explore the meanings ol Mnneh's image’iy, his sources in Symbolist art and his Ic'gacy (or (iernian Expressionism in the context ol contem[)oraneons de’velopme’nls in psychology, literature, theater, religion, and philosophy. To illuminate many important and Ic’ss lamiliar aspc'c Is ol Munch's achievement, the exhihilion was organi/.e’d around sc’ve’ii pi unary the’ine’s Boundaries 0/ ihe Self [ lower oj I’oin Flower oj Uwe: Men and Women Nature Mysticism and Relifjion Dramatic imnqes: Munch and Ibsen I Kfiires in the Void: Portraits Workers and the Land COVER Dcl.iil ol r.dviiril Mum h, .S(>// 1 ‘ortrail in Itrtt 1903, oil on c anvas, 82 x (tO cm Mnm li Mnscnm, Oslo, mm m 391 INSIDE FRONT COVER llclail ol l.clvanl Menu li, A/c'/nnr/io/y iiScg), woocic 111, 37.5 X 4S-4 ( in Mnsenni ol l ine' Ai ls, Boston Willi. im I ram is Warden I nml, 37.33^ INSIDE BACK COVER Dc’lail ol hdvard Mnm li, liiirounlcr in Sjxn c 1899, woodc 111, nS.i X 23.1 ( m I ram I rnsi EDVARD MUNCH PSYCHE, SYMBOL AND EXPRESSION EDITED BY JEFFERY HOWE This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression at the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. February 5 to May 20, 2001 The exhibition is organized by the McMullen Museum of Art. Principal Curator; Jeffery Howe Co-Curators: Claude Cernuschi Scott T. Cummings Katherine Nahum Vanessa Rumble Stephen Schloesser, S.J. This exhibition and catalog are underwritten by Boston College and the Patrons of the McMullen Museum with additional support from Per Arneberg and the Andrew E. and G. Norman Wigeland Fund of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Scandinavian Airlines System provided assistance with transportation. Copyright © 2001 by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Library of Congress control number 00-135498, ISBN 1-892850-02-8 Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Exhibition and publication coordination by Thea Keith-Lucas Copyediting by Naomi Rosenberg, Thea Keith-Lucas and Lisabeth Buchelt Produced by the Office of Marketing and Communications at Boston College and the McMullen Museum of Art Catalog design by Julia Sedykh Design Printed and bound in Singapore by Eurasia Press All works by Edvard Munch are reproduced with the permission of the Munch Museum, The Muncli-Ellingsen Group, and the Artists Rights Society, New York. Photographs have been provided courtesy of: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College: fig. 98 Alinari-Art Resource: fig. 40 Bergen Kunstmuseum: fig. 86 Bibliotheque Charcot, La Salpetriere: figs. 46-48, 51, 52 Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation: nos. 17, 51, 52 C. M. T. Assistance Publique, Paris: fig. 50 Copenhagen Teatermuseum: fig. 69B Deutsches Theater: figs. 70, 72-75, 87 Drottningsholm Teatermuseum, Sweden; fig. 67 Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Niirnberg; fig. 104 Harvard University Art Museums: nos. 12, 23, 32, 34, 67, 71 Jeffery Howe: figs. 1, 7-11, 60 Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe: fig. 59 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: no. 7 Munch Museum, Oslo: nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 14, 19, 33, 36, 38, 39, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62, 80, 81, 82; figs. 5, 12-18, 23, 26, 27, 32, 36-39, 61-63, 76-78, 79-84, 86, 117 Musee dTxelles, Brussels; fig. 35 Museum of the City of New York: fig. 69A Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; nos. 10, 11, 13, 16, 26, 37, 42, 44, 45, 57, 68; fig. 95 The Museum of Modern Art, New York: fig. 117 National Gallery of Norway, Oslo: nos. 48, 50, 63, 64, 66, 74; figs. 2, 3, 4, 6, 20, 85 Osterreiches Museum, Vienna; fig. 71 Royal Museums of Art, Brussels: fig. 24 Staatsgalerie Stuttgart: fig. 89 Wallraf-Richarts Museum, Cologne; fig. 112 CONTENTS DIRECTOR'S PREFACE NANCY NETZER introduction: munch in context JEFFERY HOWE THE SCANDINAVIAN CONSCIENCE: KIERKEGAARD, IBSEN, AND MUNCH VANESSA RUMBLE “IN WILD EMBRACE”: ATTACHMENT AND LOSS IN EDVARD MUNCH KATHERINE NAHUM nocturnes: THE MUSIC OF MELANCHOLY, AND THE MYSTERIES OF LOVE AND DEATH JEFFERY HOWE FROM SPIRITUAL NATURALISM TO PSYCHICAL naturalism: catholic decadence, LUTHERAN MUNCH, AND MA DONE MYSTERIOUC STEPHEN SCHLOESSER, S.J. “A STRANGE BOULDER IN THE WHIRLPOOL OF THEATER”: EDVARD MUNCH, MAX REINHARDT, AND GHOSTS SCOTT T. CUMMINGS NOTES ON THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A SCENIC DESIGNER'S MODEL FOR IBSEN'S GHOSTS CRYSTAL TIALA SEX AND PSYCHE, NATURE AND NURTURE, THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL: EDVARD MUNCH AND GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM CLAUDE CERNUSCHI EDVARD munch: A BIOGRAPHICAL CHRONOLOGY DANIEL BRUNET WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION 7 11 20 31 48 75 111 132 134 168 175 DIRECTOR’S PREFACE NANCY NETZER This exhibition owes its origin to Anna-Elizabeth Arneberg, an undergradnate at Boston College, who, after viewing an exhibition of contemporary Irish art, wandered into the McMullen Museum office to speak with our curator Alston Conley. She inquired whether the Museum had ever considered mount- ing an exhibition of Edvard Munch, who had been a friend of her Norwegian grandfather, Arnstein Arneberg (no. 69 ), an architect in Oslo. Later her father Per Arneberg, who had assembled a collection of Munch’s work for the Eram Trust and had devoted many years of creative study to his country’s most famous artist, offered to help the McMullen organize this exhibition. We gathered a group of profes- sors from the faculty who specialize in the art and culture of northern Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to generate new questions an exhibition might pose of Munch's works. These professors then selected works to embody in vivid form the points they wished to make. We were encouraged from the start by the positive response from institutions and private collectors to our requests for loans. In particular, our colleagues in Norway have been extraordinary in their generosity, lending works of the utmost rarity, most of which have never before been displayed on this side of the Atlantic. We are especially pleased to show View from Balcony, Aasgaardstrand (no. 18 ) which was dis- covered recently in the wall of Munch’s studio in Aasgaardstrand and brought to our attention by Per Arneberg. Prom this modest beginning developed Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression, the most comprehensive exhibition of Munch’s work in America since Edvard Munch: Symbol and Image was shown at the National Gallery in Washington in 1978. The subject is a daunting one, especially as so many exhibitions and books have been devoted to this artist. The present exhibition, however, marks the hrst time that a broadly interdisciplinary view of his work has been attempted on such a large scale. The mission of this project, from its inception, was to focus on several key themes that dominated the intellectual and cultural life around the turn of the last century. The examination of Munch's artistic oeu- vre in this light has led to reappraisals of a number of familiar — as well as a few unfamiliar — works. The entire undertaking of exhibition and catalog could not have been achieved without the tireless work of the curators and museum staff. The chief curator of this exhibition was Professor (effery Howe of the Pine Arts department at Boston College. His knowledge of the field and wise judgment have informed his editing of this book to great advantage. Each of the co-curators from various departments, Professors Claude Cernuschi (Fine Arts), Scott Cummings (Theater), Katherine Nahum (Fine Arts), Vanessa Rumble (Philosophy), and Stephen Schloesser, S.j. (History) charted a new avenue of research for his/her essay. Our debt to the curators is enormous, and we thank them for welcoming Edvard Munch, a demanding, if fascinating, companion, into their lives for the past year and a half Other faculty, especially John Michalczyk (Fine Arts), Mark O’Connor (Honors Program), and Lawrence Wolff (History) aided their endeavor. The circle of those involved in the exhibition has extended in numerous directions and drawn on the expertise and generosity of many beyond our cam- 7 pus. Special thanks are due colleagues at several other institutions: Arne Eggum, Petra Pettersen, Mar- ianne Kemhle, and Karen Lerteiin (Munch Museum); Marit Lange, Ernst Haverkamp and Torill Bjordal (National Gallerv. Oslo); Lisheth Weltzin (Borre Koininune); George Goldner, Colta Ives, Lisa Yeung, and Mar\ Doherty (Metropolitan Mu.seum ol Art); Malcolm Rogers, Sue Reed, George Shackelford, Patricia Loiko. Kim Pashko. Patrick Murphy, and Christopher Atkins (Museum of Pine Arts, Boston); James Cuno. lerrv Cohn, Maureen Donovan, and Ada Bortoluzzi (Harvard University Art Museums); Jane Blaf fer Owen, James Clifton and Celia Cullen Martin (Sarah Campbell Blaffer Poundation); Sarah Epstein, Krista Hottpauir and Vi\ i Spicer (Epstein Poundation); Nancy Hall-Duncan (Bruce Museum); as well as ■•\kka Arneherg, Anders Bjork, Dag Kleven, Aldis Browne, Andrew Rose, Ian MacKenzie, Anne-Ruth and Jan Klein, Tore Maehle, Paal Smith Kielland, Einar Tore Diving, Christoph Adamski, Jonathan Yuen, Susan Cleary, and Peter Nahum, We also extend special thanks to Professor Crystal Tiala (Theater) for the reconstruction (in the exhibition) of Munch’s stage set for Ibsen's Ghosts and to Daniel Brunet, an undergraduate at Boston College, for the biographical chronology in this volume. The staff of the McMullen Museum and others from across the University have been deeply involved at \ arious stages with this project. In particular, our curator Alston Conley designed and, with his crew, installed the exhibition; our exhibition coordinator Thea Keith Lucas played an invaluable role in the production of the catalog and in the exhibition’s overall organization, and our administrator, Helen Swartz coordinated all efforts. We are grateful as well to Steven Vedder and Gary Gilbert for photog- raphy, to Naomi Rosenberg for copy editing of the text, to Lisabeth Buchelt and Emily Hankie for proof- reading text, to Rosanne Pellegrini for publicity, and to the members of our Development office, especially Gemma Dorsey, who aided our funding efforts. In designing the catalog Julia Sedykh has created an expressionist work in itself. Such an ambitious project could not have been attempted were it not for the generosity of the administration of Boston College, We especially thank president William P, Leahy, S,J,, academic vice- president John J, Neuhauser, associate dean of faculties Patricia DeLeeuw, dean of arts and sciences Joseph Quinn, and assistant to the president Rose Mary Donahue, Very generous support was provided by the Patrons of the McMullen Museum chaired by C, Michael Daley, Additional support came from Per Arneberg and from the Andrew E, and G, Norman Wiegand Eund of the American-Scandinavian Eoundation, New York, Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) provided assistance with transportation, Einally, we wish to thank Per Arneberg, who buttressed our dreams from their inception. His infec- tious enthusiasm and optimism inspired this new vision of Edvard Munch’s work. We hope that this book will serve as a lasting tribute to him and all mentioned above who contributed so much to its real ization. 8 EDVARD munch: PSYCHE, SYMBOL AND EXPRESSION NOTE TO THE READER Works in the exhibition are designated as numbers (no.). These works appear as plates, beginning on page 175. They are arranged Recording to their placement in the exhibition. Additional images are designated as figures (fig.). introduction: munch in context JEFFERY HOWE Courage comes in many forms. In the popular imagination, Norway evokes images of fjords and Vikings, untamed nature and intrepid explorers. Compared to these heroic hgures, a modern artist, particularly one as open about his anxieties as Edvard Munch, may seem to be overly fragile and sensitive — deca- dent, even. Yet Munch faced his fears directly, and rendered their likenesses on canvas. Neither his life nor his art was all gloom and angst, in any case; his portraits bear witness to a wide circle of friends, and his paintings of the Norwegian landscape capture the beauty and Romantic spirit of the Nordic setting. Appropriately enough, one of Norway's most intrepid explorers, Fridtjof Nansen, who journeyed to the North Pole in 1893 in a wooden ship, owned Munch’s Starry Night painting of 1893 (Getty Museum, Los Angeles).^ Unlike the arctic explorer, however. Munch had no need to journey to remote regions of the earth to discover new worlds; in 1894, Franz Servaes observed that Munch carried his "inner Tahiti” within him.^ Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was the first Scandinavian visual artist to earn an international reputation during the explosion of creativity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has been called the “Scandinavian Renaissance.” His haunting image of The Scream (paintings in 1893, lithograph in 1895, no. 7) has become an emblem of modern anxiety, and may now be the most frequently reproduced work of art in the world. Yet there is much more to Munch’s art than this single strident note. Munch, productive for more than six decades, became a major portraitist and landscape painter, as well as an exacting explorer of human passions, including universal themes of love, death and spiritual seeking. Associating Munch with spirituality may seem unusual, but in the aftermath of Impressionism, he strove, as did the Dutch Vincent van Gogh and the French Paul Gauguin, to make his personal emotions and spiritual longings the focus of his art. Although the religious dimension of his works is sometimes overlooked. Munch insisted that "in all my work people will see that 1 am a doubter, but 1 never deny or mock religion.”^ Even his controversial works such as Madonna, or Loving Woman, of 1895 (nos. 54 and 55) are sincere representations of his personal attempt to understand the sacred quality of life and the fundamental mystery of existence. Essays by Stephen Schloesser, S.J., and Jeffery Howe in this cat- alog will address this paradox. A profoundly ambitious artist. Munch sought no less than to express the fundamental themes of life as lived in the modern world, and to portray these themes in an authen tic, powerful style that would lay the groundwork for modern Expressionism. Munch never hid his private pain, but believed that sulTering nourished his art: / do not believe in an art which has not forced its way out through man 's need to open his heart. All art, literature, as well as music must be brought about with our heart blood. Art is our heart blood.'* This aesthetic doctrine is embodied in a number of works, but especially the woodcut The Tlower of Pain of 1898 (no. 12).^ 11 1 Numerous tragedies, hegiuuiug with the deatli of his motlier iu 1868 when Munch was only hve, followed by the deaths of his sister Sophie in 1877 and his brother Andreas in 1895. mental breakdowns of his sister Laura in the 1890s, shaped his life and his art. As Munch noted, "Sickness and insanity and death were the black angels that hovered over my cradle and have since followed me throughout my life.”^ 'let he transcended these losses (Katherine Nahum’s essay provides an eloc|uent exam- ination of the impact of these events). The painting Interior with the Artist 's Father and Sister oi 1884-S5 (no. 63 ), the earliest painting in our exhibition, shows that Munch has already mastered all the stylistic innovations of Realism and Impressionism. Seen from psvchological and social points of view, this intimate portrait underscores his attach ments to his family and his own lived experience. Munch's first artistic activities began when he was a child. Munch manifested a love of drawing at an early age, and was encouraged by his aunt, Karen Bjolstad, who looked after his family following the death of his mother. Munch began his formal artistic training at the Royal School of Design in Kris- tiania (Oslo) in 1880, leaving the school after two years. He began participating in public exhibitions in 1883. In 1885, the successful painter Frits Thaulow (1847-1906), a distant relative who often sup- ported young artists, provided funds for Munch to take a three week trip to Antwerp and Paris. This was his first direct contact with the international art world. His art developed quickly, and in 1889, Munch was given first one-man exhibition held in Norway. Munch came to maturity in the 1880s, a period of radical change and experimentation in art and society. His art more frequently addressed personal issues than political matters, but questions of national identity were inescapable at this time. Norway struggled for independence throughout the nineteenth century. The country had separated from Denmark in 1814, but was still joined to Sweden. The parliamentary system was introduced in 1884, loosening ties to the Swedish crown. Calls for full independence became increasingly insistent tbroughout the century, and Norway finally became inde- pendent from Sweden in 1905. The city of Kristiania, which had been named for Danish King Christ- ian IV in the seventeenth century, reverted to its medieval name of Oslo in 1925. Themes of national identity were particularly prominent in Munch's murals for the Aula of the University of Oslo (1909-12). The Sun (no. 81 ) is an important study for these murals. Munch hoped to continue pro- ducing works for the public sphere with murals for the new town hall of Oslo (1916-1950, fig. 1), designed by tbe architects Magnus Poulsen and Arnstein Arneberg (no. 69 ). Munch’s portrait of Arneberg is one of his many images of fellow artists. Arneberg also drew designs for the studio Munch planned to build at his home in Ekely. Although the commission for the town hall never materialized, Munch’s art shifted from the private sphere of his inner emotions to include new social themes with images of laborers. His series of street workers in the late 1910s and early 1920s dates from this period (no. 72 ). At the height of the Scandinavian Renaissance, the Norwegians Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906; no. 58 ) and Bjornsterne Bjornson (1832-1910), winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1903, and the Swede August Strindberg (1849-1912; no. 67 ) reshaped modern theater, introducing new standards of realism and a new intimate scale of theatrical presentation. The multifaceted relationship of Henrik Ibsen and .Munch is discussed in essays by Scott Cummings and Crystal Tiala in this catalog. They focus [larticu- larly on Munch and Max Reinhardt’s collaboration on a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1906. Another essay, by Vanessa Rumble, discusses Munch, Ibsen and Soren Kierkegaard in terms of their moral and spiritual conscience. In poetry, writers close to Munch such as the Norwegian Sigbjorn Obstfelder : 1866 1900) and the Dane Emanuel Goldstein ( 1862-1921) experimented with the new modes of Sym- bolist poetry that they discovered in Erance and Germany. The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun Arnstein Arneberg and Magnus Poulsen, Town Hall Oslo, 1916-1950. 12 2 1 2 Edvard Munch, Portrait of the Author Hans Jaeger, oil on canvas, 1889. National Gallery, Oslo. (1839-1952), winner of llie Nobel Prize for lilerature in 1920, exjilored subjective states of mind in his writings. The most influential philosophers in Scandinavia in the nineteenth century were tlie Dane Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), and the Germans Arthur Scliopenhauer (1788-1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). The new evolutionary principles of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) also left an indelible imprint on Scandinavian thought at this time. THE KRISTIANIA BOHEMIA Social and cultural rebelliousness flourished among the young intellectuals and artists in Kristiania in the 1880s. They valued independent thought above all, and demanded freedom and non-conformity in social and artistic practice. They came to be known as the Kristiania Bohemians, and their "Nine Com- mandments” were published in their journal Impressionisten in 1889; one should note that the word "Impressionist" still connoted social as well as artistic revolution/ 1. Thou shah write thy life. 2. Thou shah sever thy family roots. 3. Thou const not treat thy parents harshly enough. 4. Thou shah not touch thy neighbour for less than five kroner. 5. Thou shah hate and despise all such peasants as Bjornsterne Bjornson. 6 . Thou shah never wear celluloid cuffs. 7. Thou shah never cease from causing scandal at the Christiania Theatre. 8 . Thou shah never show remorse. 9. Thou shah take thy life. The new intellectual currents swirled with ideas of free love, anarchism, Darwinism, pessimism, and atheism. One of the most prominent leaders of the youthful free-thinkers was Hans Jaeger (1854-1910), whose novel From the Kristiania Bohemia (Fra Kristiania-Bohemen) of 1885 outraged the estab- lishment. The novel was banned, and its author sentenced to several months in prison. To keep Jaeger company in his prison cell, Munch gave him an early version of the picture called Loving Woman or Madonna.^ One of Munch’s finest early portraits is his Portrait of Flans Jaeger, National Gallery, Oslo, 1889 (hg. 2), a tribute to the man who had became something of a substitute father. Jaeger's novel Sick Love (Syk Kjaerlihet, 1893) delineates the free-love society that he envisioned, and its experiments in Kristiania. Munch himself was drawn into a socially rebellious affair with a married woman, Milly Thaulow, whom he referred to as "Mrs. Heiberg" in his letters and journals. For the romantic young artist, this was a critical relationship, and he was devastated when she broke it off. These early experi- ences left a permanent mark on Munch; he continued to paint and repaint scenes of the Bohemians, and especially Hans Jaeger, for the next hfty years. Jaeger's themes were echoed twenty years later in Munch’s unpublished novel titled "The City of Free Love."^ Christian Krohg ( 1852-1925), was another leading hgure among the Kristiania Bohemians and the editor of the journal Impressionisten. He was a bit older than Munch, and gave direction to him and several other artists who shared a studio near the Norwegian parliament building in the mid 1880s. Krohg also wrote a book that scandalized official Kristiania, attacking the official hypocrisy and exploitation that permitted legalized prostitution and condemned free love. His novel Albertine, pub lished in 1886, told the story of an innocent young woman who was forced into prostitution by the police after being caught in a round-up of prostitutes, who were required to undergo regular check-ups 13 3 4 tor venereal disease. Althougli the novel spoke out lor honesty and condemned corruption, it was also censored and K.rohg was tined. Krohg escaped prison, perhaps by \ irtue ot his pronii nent family and his own legal training.^” After the suppression ot the novel. Krolig painted the celebrated life-size large canvas depicting .-l/herf/ne in the Police Doctor's Waiting Room, now in the National Gallery, Oslo. 1885-87 (fig. 3 ). Munch later inti mated that he had painted one ol the prostitutes in the picture, an assertion later denied by Krohg.^^ The relationship between Munch and K.rohg was complex. Although Munch downplayed Krohg’s influence on him, Krohg's painting of The Sick Girl of 1880-81 (hg. 4) was clearly the model for Munch's paintings and prints ot The Sick Child (no. 9 ), and Krohg supported .Munch's art. Sickness was a popular theme for Realist artists; .Munch referred to these early years as his "pillow period."^^ Krohg owned the first version of Munch’s Sick Child, but later exchanged it for Starry Night (1893) so that Munch could sell it to a collector. A few years later. Munch traded again with Krohg so that he could sell Starry Night to Fridtjof Nansen. Krohg, who had lived in Germany for several years in the 1870s, also introduced Munch to the art ot Max Klinger and other international artists, which helped broaden bis understanding, and would influence him in his evolution from Realism to Symbolism.^" Krohg’s wife, Oda Lasson Krohg ( 1860-1935), was also a talented painter, and a conspicuous figure in the bohemian scene. Munch's etching Kristiania-Bohemia II (fig. 5 ) shows her at the end of the table in a bohemian gathering. Her image is based on Krohg’s own Portrait of Oda Krohg, National Gallery, Oslo, 1888 (hg. 6). Gathered at this table are Munch, Krohg, Gunnar Heiberg, who was involved in a tri angular relationship with Oda and Christian Krohg, and Oda’s hrst husband in the foreground at right. Munch gathered much material for his later images of Jealousy II (no. 29 ) and the Dance of Life in these early years in Kristiania. Although Realism and Impressionism dehned modern art in Norway in the 1880s, and Munch began his career as a Realist, he soon criticized the movement for its obsession with the superficial: A great wave swept over the world — Realism. Nothing existed which could not be demonstrated or explained by means of physics or chemistry — painting and literature consisted solely of things that could be seen by the eye or heard by the ear — it was concerned only with the external shell ofNature.^^ .Munch came to agree with the new current of Symbolist artists and writers, who distrusted reality as perceived through the senses, and sought other avenues of knowledge. The Symbolists demanded an art that was faithful to psychological realities as well. As Munch noted: "Nature is not only what is visi ble to the eye — it also shows the inner images of the soul — the images on the back side of the eyes."^^ Elaborating on his dissatisfaction with the limits of Realism and Naturalism, Munch said: Inspiration is thought — Naturcdisrn is craft . . . scdvalion sludl come from Symbolism. By that I mean an art where the artist subri}its recdity to his rule, which places mood and thought above everything and only uses reality as a symbol . . 3 Christian Krohg, Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room, oil on canvas, 1885-87. National Gallery, Oslo. 4 Christian Krohg, The Sick Girl, oil on canvas, i88o-8i. National Gallery, Oslo. 5 Edvard Munch, Kristiania Bohemia II, line-etching, open bite and drypoint on copper, 1895. Munch Museum, Oslo. 6 Christian Krohg, Portrait of Oda Krohg, oil on canvas, 1888. National Gallery, Oslo. 14 Munch’s passion for inner Irntlis ultimately led him to create a new mode of expression that would lead to the Expressionist style. NEW ARTISTIC HORIZONS Foreign travel broadened Munch's artistic horizons, and he soon became an international lignre. His new style and themes were too revolutionary lor the conservative Norwegian critics in the 1890s; his art frequently baffled them. His first trip to Paris in 1885 provided a taste of international modern art movements; a longer stay in 1889-1890, when he wrote his Saint-Cloud Manifesto, was more decisive. It was at this time that he moved beyond Impressionism and discovered Symbolist painting and poetry. The young Danish poet Emanuel Goldstein, who shared a room with Munch in Saint-Cloud, helped introduce him to new literary currents. If Paris opened his eyes to new artistic possibilities, Berlin mounted his first highly publicized exbi bition in 1892. The show, however, was closed by official order after just one week. With the ensuing scandal came a not entirely unwelcome notoriety. As often happens, scandal provided the occasion for celebrity. Munch stayed in Berlin for the next three years, and linked up with a new group of avant-garde artists and writers who frequented the cafe Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (The Black Piglet) from 1892 to 1896. This cafe on a corner of the street Unter den Linden received its nickname from August Strindberg, who, in the dark of night, mistook a hanging wineskin for a piglet.^* Munch’s new friends included the Polish author Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1927), his Norwegian wife Dagny Juel Przybyszewska (1867-1901), the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849-1912), the Norwegian playwright Gun- nar Heiberg (1857-1929), the Danish author Holger Drachmann (1846-1908), the Norwegian art his- torian Jens Thiis (1870-1942), the German poet Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), the Swedish writer Adolf Paul (1863-1943) and the German author Franz Servaes (1862-1947). Munch’s art became the rallying point for the establishment of a new modernist movement in the German capital. Claude Cernuschi's essay in this catalog examines how this German experience affected Munch’s art, and how Munch influ- enced the new generation of Expressionists in the twentieth century. In late 1895, Munch followed Strindberg to Paris, where his interest in Symbolist literature was deepened. In Parisian cafes and salons, the artist met with the leading figures of the movement: Strindberg joined in, and our circle consisted of friends of Gauguin, who was in Tahiti, plus van Gogh — There were also some friends of the now dead Verlaine and of Mallarme; also people from the Mer- cure de France Gircle — Merrill, too, came there. — For a time Oscar Wilde attended — Mallard in Rue Vercingetorix.^^ Munch executed a much-admired portrait of Stephane Mallarme (no. 68) in 1896. Death in the Sickroom (no. 10) and other works show the influence of Maurice Maeterlinck's L'lntruse (The Intruder) of 1891, a play which characterizes death as a nocturnal intruder who steals upon an anxiously waiting family MUNCH AND WOMEN Depictions of women are among Munch’s best-known images; they are distinguished by an unaccus- tomed honesty about sexuality and the relations between men and women. Indeed, along with artists 15 such as Auguste Rodin, Munch was a leader in the new trankness that would become a hallmark of mod ernist art.^° Personal fears and anxieties, and a determination to dedicate his life to his art, however, straineil Munch's relationships with women: I have always put wy art before everything else. Often I felt that women would stand in the way of my art. 1 decided at an early age never to marry. Because of the tendency towards insanity inherited from mv mother and father / have (dways felt that it would be a crime for me to embark on marriage.^^ Munch feared that romantic attachments might subvert his individuality. He subscribed to the stereo- tvpes ot gender diflerences that so strongly marked the jin de siecle: The difference between men and womei\ is as great as between round and strcught lines. A man living exclusively for his woman loses something of his own characteristics — becomes slippery and round. He can no longer be trusted. But a woman, under the same circumstances, becomes rounder and more feminine.^^ Images such as Ashes II (1899, no. 28 ), Vampire (1895/1902, nos. 40 and 41) and jealousy II (1896, no. 29 ) are perhaps too easily characterized as misogynistic, considering their complexity. The recent exhi- bition catalog Munch and Women, Image and Myth by Patricia Berman and )ane Nimmen is a thought fill analysis of the image that has been constructed for Munch. Looking deeper into Munch 's art, we find an abundance of sensitive and positive images of women. .Munch particularly valued his relationships with his female family members, beginning with his mother, his sisters Inger (1868-1952) and Laura (1867-1926), and his aunt Karen Bjolstad (1839-1931), who became his surrogate mother. Recent scholarship suggests that Asta Norregaard (1853-1933), a female artist and a distant cousin of Munch's friend Harald Norregaard, may have been a mentor for the artist. She painted a portrait of Munch in 1885.^^ Other striking examples of strong and independent women with whom Munch had meaningful, if not romantic, relationships include Oda Lasson Krohg (1860-1935), who was a leading hgure of the Kristiania Bohemia, and Dagny Juell Przybyszewska (1867-1901), who was a key hgure in the Berlin bohemian circle which gathered at the cafe Zurn Schwarzen Ferkel in Berlin.^"' Munch's own experi- ences with free love ended in pain for him, beginning with his long affair with Milly Thaulow, the wife of Carl Thaulow (brother of Frits Thaulow). This early love affair may be the source of his paintings and prints of The Voice (Summer Night) (1893, nos. 16, 18b and 19), and is perhaps also related to the images of Attraction and Separation, and The Kiss on the Shore (no. 17). Munch also had a long and stormy relationship with Tulla (Matilde) Larsen (1869-1942) in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century. This affair almost ended in disaster when they struggled over her gun, and a bullet nearly severed the artist's ring finger.^^This episode may have colored Munch's relationship with the beautiful English violinist, Eva Mudocci (Evangeline Muddock, c. 1883-1953). Munch's portrait of her in The Brooch, which Munch first titled Madonna^ ( 19 ° 3 > 'lO- 65 ) is one of his most beautiful portraits. Mudocci later wrote of this image: He wanted to paint a perfect portrait of me, but each time he began on an oil painting he destroyed it, because he was not happy with it. He had more success with the lithographs, and the stones that he used were sent up to our room in the Hotel Sans Souci in Berlin. One of these, the so called Madonna The Broocfi), was accompanied by a note that said “Here is the stone that fell from my heart." He 16 r 7 7 Karl-Johan Street, Oslo. 8 Munch's house, Aasgaardstrand. did that picture and also the one of Bella (Edwards) and me [The Violin Concert] in the sartie room, lie also did a third one of two heads — his and mine — ccdled Salome. It was that title which caused our only row.^^ The long flowing hair in The Brooch resembles that of the woman in tfie paintings and prints of the Madonna (nos. 54 and 55 ). Munch seems to have associated the long, flowing, Pre-Raphaelite hair witfi the image of the Madonna. The confusion of titles also echoes the chaos of his romantic attachments at this time. Munch maintained positive and respectful relationships with other women even during tfiis try- ing period. He painted a portrait of Aase Norregaard (1868-1908), the wife of his friend Harald Nor- regaard in 1895 (no. 64 ), at the height of his associations with Symbolist and Decadent artists and writers, including unrepentant misogynists such as Strindberg. Ignoring the biases of his comrades. Munch wrote to Aase in a warm and confessional tone: The happy, glowing state of marriage may suit many people, not least you and Norregaard. You have preserved your youth as in a sealed jar . . . that is all very fine, but why should all the furies of Hell descend on a poor painter because he has the misfortune not to be able to marry — but he has only managed to steal a small caress.^^ Munch was apparently a favorite guest of the Norregaards’, and he enjoyed talking with them. Sarah Epstein interviewed Aase’s daughters about his working method: For several weeks he had Aase Norregaard dress up in her formal black gown every day. He would then simply chat with her. When she accused him at last of doing this as a ruse to have a chance for con- versation, he said no, he was studying her for the painting. He then produced the portrait without once looking at her.^^ Aase Norregaard died of pneumonia in 1908. Depression over her death, and the loss of other friends within a short time, may have contributed to Munch’s breakdown and hospitalization in Copenhagen later that year.^° THE REFUGE OF ART: MUNCH’S STUDIOS Munch’s art not only grew from pain, but provided solace as well. The studio was the refuge in which Munch created his deeply personal images; one can trace the outline of Munch’s career by following the sequence of his studios. In 1882, after leaving the Royal School of Design, Munch rented a studio with a group of other young artists on Karl Johan Street in Oslo, near the Storting (Parliament). He painted his first mature pictures here. The studio was in the busy center of the capital, near the Grand Hotel, which he frequented with the other Kristiania Bohemians (fig. 7 ). In 1889 he began spending summers in the seacoast town of Aasgaardstrand; in 1897 he bought a small house there which also served as his studio (fig. 8). The cottage, which Munch called "The House of Fortune”, is now a museum. Aasgaardstrand was the setting for his early romantic affairs and dis- appointments; the rocky coast of the fjord is seen in his paintings and prints of Melancholy (no. 13 ). A large house near the hotel (fig. 9 ), with a pair of linden trees in the yard, appears in many paintings and 17 9 10 prints, including Three Girls on a Rridije (no. 78 ) and the Red \ irginia Creeper (no. 74 ). Ttie house takes on a personality, and at times seems almost haunted. It can also be seen in the back- ground of the \’iew from Balcony. Aasgaardstrand (no. 18a), directly opposite ot the brooding hgure ol Munch’s sister Inger, who stands wrapped in a shawl against the autumn chill. Inger and her shawl are mirrored by the house wrapped in its extraor- dinary vine. The nearby Bone woods, which were noted for their Viking graves (hg. 10), may have provided the background tor his paintings of The Voice (Summer Night), 1893 (no. 16 ). Munch called the path to Borre from Aasgaardstrand the "fairy tale path”, a tribute, perhaps, to the magical quality of this forest and sea, and the way it aflected his romantic liaisons.^^ A quotation associated with The Voice (Sum- mer Night) (nos. 19 and 18b) captures the mystery of the night and illicit love: I was walking out there on the greyish-white beach — This is where I first acquired a knowledge of the new world — that of love — Young and innocent — straight out of a monastery-like home — alone among my friends not to have been introduced to this mystery — Never before felt the intoxicating power of a kiss. . . . Here I learned the power of two eyes that grow as large as globes close to me — emitting invisible threads which would steal into my blood — my heart Here I learned the strange and wonderful music of the voice — one moment tender — the next teas- ing, then provocative. . . Love and emotion transformed the world for Munch, and visual reality served only as a starting point for his images. In the 1890s, Munch spent much time abroad. After working in Berlin from 1892-95, he visited Paris in 1896, where his work was shown in the new gallery owned by Siegfried Bing, L'Art Nouveau, which gave its name to the artistic movement.^'' In 1902, he stayed with Dr. Max Linde in Liibeck. Between 1904 and 1908, Munch frequently traveled back to Berlin. In 1907, he began a prolonged stay at the north sea town of Warnemunde, where he painted bathers and sea scenes. In 1908-09, he sought treatment at Dr. Daniel Jacobsen’s clinic in Copenhagen for a nervous breakdown and severe alcoholism. While Munch was there, the king of Denmark conferred the Knighthood of the Order of Saint Olav upon him. On his recovery. Munch returned to Norway, but stayed some distance from Oslo, preferring to set up his studio hrst in the coastal village of Kragero in 1909, and then across the fjord in Hvitsten in 1910. Here he painted the landscape Fra Hvitsten: Landscape with Oslo Fjord (1912-15, no. 76). He hired retired fishermen to pose for his studies for the Aula murals, and to help him with the large can vases he needed for paintings such as The Sun, 1912 (no. 81). The Aula murals were unveiled in 1916. In 1916, Munch bought a [iroperty in Ekely, just outside Oslo, where he built several studios over the years. This was to be bis final home until his death in 1944. Today, only his winter studio survives (fig. 11). It was in Ekely that he painted the Winter Landscape of 1919 (no. 83), the Starry Night of 1922-24 (no. 82) and many other works. Munch plumbed tbe depths of his inner self in these Nordic scenes, treating the landscape as a mystical mirror to his emotions. A great cosmopolitan, Munch trav- eled to many other places, including southern Erance, Italy, and Prague over the years, but it is in Nor- way that his art was forged, and in Norway that he returned to live out the last decades of his life. The meaning and appeal of his art is, however, universal. 9 House, Aasgaardstrand. 10 Borre woods, near Aasgaardstrand. 11 Munch's winter studio, Ekely. 18 1 Louise Lippiricott, Edvard Munch. Starry Night, Malibu, CA: Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1988, p. 66H. Nansen took paintings of Norwegian landscapes by Eilil Petersen, Erik Werenskiold and others with him on this voyage. 2 Franz Servaes, in Das Werk des Edvard Munch, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, editor, Berlin: S. Fischer, 1894, p. 37ff.: "Im gegensatz zu alien diesen Leuten (von Stuck, Hofmann, Liebermann, Gauguin) steht, ohwohl im innersten Kern mit ihnen verwandt, Eduard Munch, der Norweger. Er braucht nicht Bauern und nicht Kentauren und nicht Paradiesesknaben die Primitivitat der Menschennatur zu erblicken un zu durchleben. Er tragt sein eigenes Tahiti in sich, und so schreitet er mit nachtwandlerischer Sicher- heit durch unser verworrenes Culturleben, ganziich unbeirrt, im Besizt seiner durchaus culturlosen Parsifal- Natur. Der reine Thor in der Malere — das ist Eduard Munch.” 3 Munch, Manuscript OKK 2734; quoted by Ragna Stang, Edvard Munch, New York: Abbeville Press, 1977, p. 120. 4 Munch, Manuscript N 29; quoted in Arne Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, catalog of exhibition, Wash- ington, DC: National Gallery, 1978, p. 154. 5 Bodil Ottesen, "The Flower of Pain: How a Friendship Engendered Edvard Munch’s Predominant Artistic Metaphors," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, 124, October 1994, pp. 149-158. 6 Edvard Munch; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 31. 7 “Bohembud" (commandments for the Bohemians), Impres- sionisten, No. 8, February 1889; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 52. 8 This painting, called Hulda, is now lost; see Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 38. 9 The text is translated in Arne Eggum, Alpha and Omega, catalog of exhibition, Oslo: Munch Museum, 1981. 10 Roy Asbjdrn Boe, "Edvard Munch: His Life and Work from 1880 to 1920," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. New York University, 1971, p. 51. 11 Kirk Varnedoe, “Christian Krohg and Edvard Munch,” Arts Magazine, April 1979, pp. 88-95; Krohg's denial of Munch’s participation is cited on p. 90. 12 Munch used the phrase "pillow period” to )ens Thiis: "As far as the sick child is concerned 1 might tell you that this was a time which 1 refer to as the ‘pillow period.' There were many painters who painted sick children against a pillow — but it was after all not the subject that made my sick child. "No, in sick child and ‘Spring’ no other influence was possible than that which of itself wells forth from my home. These pictures were my childhood and my home. He who really knew the conditions in my home — would understand that there could be no other outside influ- ence than that which might have had importance as midwifery. — One might as well say that the midwife had influenced the child. — This was during the pillow era. The sick bed era, the bed era and the comforter era, let it go at that. But I insist that there hardly was one of those painters who in such a way had lived through his subject to the last cry ol pain as 1 did in my sick child. For it wasn’t just 1 who sal there, it was all my loved ones." Manuscript N 45; (juoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols und Images, p. 146. 13 Patricia Berman and Jane van Nirnmen, Munch and Women, Image and Myth, Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1997, p. 45. 14 Marit Lange, "Max Klinger og Norge,” Kunst og Kultur (Norway), vol, 80, pt. t, 1997, pp. 2-40. 15 Edvard Munch, 1892, Violet Book, Manuscript OKK 1760; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p, 79. 16 Edvard Munch, 1907-1908, quoted in Herschel Chipp, editor. Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969, p, 114. 17 Quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 131. 18 Reidar Dittman, Eros and Psyche. Strindberg and Munch in the iSgos, Ann Arbor, Ml: UMl Research Press, 1982, p. 79. See also Reinhold Heller, “‘Das schwarze FerkeF and the Institution of an Avant-Garde in Berlin, 1892-1895,” in Kunstlerische Austausch = Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses fur Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 15.-20. juli 1992, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993, pp. 509-19. 19 Edvard Munch, Manuscript N 222; quoted in Arne Eggum, Munch and Photography, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 67. 20 See Albert Elsen, Origins of Modern Sculpture: Pioneers and Premises, New York: G. Braziller, I1974], pp. 22-24. 21 Edvard Munch, quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 174. 22 Rolf E. Stenersen, Edvard Munch, Close-Up of a Genius [1944), Oslo: Sem & Stenersen AS, 1994, p. 63. 23 Berman and van Nirnmen, Munch and Women, Image and Myth, p. 15. 24 Berman and van Nirnmen, Munch and Women, Image and Myth, p. 31. 25 For the episode of Tulla Larsen and the gun, see Stang, Edvard Munch, pp. 172-174. 26 Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor, The Symbol- ist Prints of Edvard Munch, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 206-209. 27 Eva Mudocci to W. Stabell; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 178. 28 Edvard Munch to Sigurd Host; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 178. 29 Sarah G. Epstein, The Prints of Edvard Munch. Mirror of His Life, Oberlin, OH: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1983, p. 123. 30 Berman and van Nirnmen, Munch and Women, Image and Myth, p. 46. 31 Epstein, The Prints of Edvard Munch. Mirror of His Life, p, 6gff. 32 Lippincott, Edvard Munch. Starry Night, p. 39. 33 Quoted in Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, Mara-Helen Wood, editor, London: National Gallery Publications, 1992, P- 59 - 34 Gabriel P. Weisberg, "S. Bing, Edvard Munch and I’Art Nou- veau," Arts Magazine, 1986, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 58-64. 19 THE SCANDINAVIAN CONSCIENCE: KIERKEGAARD, IBSEN, AND MUNCH VANESSA RUMBLE Edvard Munch presents us with unforgettable images of Scandinavia. The Voice (Summer Night) con- jures up the spell of midsummer nights in which the sun scarcely sets (no. 16). A certain suspense, at times attractive, at times disquieting, marks many of the images in Munch’s Frieze of Life. The force of Munch’s art, like the appeal of Scandinavian summer evenings he loved, derives from the haunting awareness of life’s urgency against the backdrop of long winters and death. Munch's description of his last Christmas together with his mother, celebrated when he had just turned five, offers the same trou- bling pro.ximity of light and darkness: There were many white lights shining all the way to the top of the Christmas tree — some were drip- ping. It was shining in all the colors of light, but mostly in red and yellow and green. It was a sea of light so intense that one almost could not see. The cur was hot and smelled intensely of burned spruce and smoke. Supported by a pillow in her back, she sat silent and pale on the sofa in a deep black silk dress. . . When Laura Munch died of consumption several days later, she left five children behind, the oldest six years old. Edvard Munch’s portrayals of Norwegian life and landscape become visual equivalents for a cer- tain psychic terrain, one in which loss and anxiety are prominent. If Munch’s most recognizable work. The Scream (no. 7), brings his viewers to reflect on conflicts that only an adult could name, we should nevertheless note that the figure's face and gestures, the round eyes and upraised hands, appear also in The Dead Mother (no. 11). Munch’s powerful depictions of Eros and the seemingly inevitable progres- sion from attraction to jealousy, disillusionment, and despair, trigger recurring thoughts of the little wild-haired child, wide-eyed with loss, ft is widely recognized that the losses of Munch's childhood are reflected in the quality of his later erotic attachments and his relation to and portrayal of the natural world. Munch's work, like the writings of his predecessors in Scandinavian letters, the Danish philoso- pher Soren Kierkegaard and the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, explore what Kierkegaard would call, problematically, hereditary sin. Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Munch call into question the possibility of real moral freedom. To what degree do severe losses limit our ability to respond appropriately and whole heartedly to the complex responsibilities that face us? All three thinkers express the tragic poten tial in our checkered moral pedigree: the uncertain intersection of nature and freedom in which we all come into being as moral subjects, and our very mixed presuppositions for doing so. Munch, like Ibsen and Kierkegaard, was preoccupied by the way in which the misfortunes and misdeeds of individuals can echo in generation after generation. Why Scandinavia produced such compelling portraits of the human situation, drawn to and often divided by nature and duty, remains a mystery. One may conjecture that the significant family tragedies 20 that marked the cliildhoods of Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Munch may liave made tliem es[)ecially aware of the gap between the ruthlessness of need and the claims of conscience. Morality and inclination hnd no easy meeting place in their works. One may also wonder, more speculatively, whether this tension may be traced back to an earlier crisis, when Christian teachings brought by Frankish missionaries and merchants met the pagan culture of Vikings. How were the claims of Rome received by Norse souls so used to the urgent rhythms of life, rhythms potentially as threatening as they were gratifying to those led by them? Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Munch, coming on the scene roughly one thousand years after this encounter, offer varied perspectives on the way in which human freedom and the claims upon it have been appropriated and expressed in the Scandinavian conscience. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) sought to find a religious expression for our"entangled freedom”that would retain a reference to individual experience. Brought up in a home marked by the pietism of his father’s west Jutland roots, the young Kierkegaard was introduced to the story of Christ in a way which would underscore the disparity between the worldly happiness of the natural man and the innocent suffering of Christ. Kierkegaard describes his father’s memorable instruction: Imagine a child, and then delight this child by showing it some of those artistically insignificant but for children very valuable pictures one buys in the shops. This man with the look of the leader, with a waving plume on his hat, and riding a snorting steed at the head of thousands upon thousands whom you do not see, his hand stretched out in command . . . — this is the emperor, the one and only Napoleon. — This man here is dressed as a hunter; he is leaning on his bow and looking straight ahead with a look so piercing, so steady, and yet so concerned. It is William Tell. . . . — And in the same way and to the child's unspeakable delight you show the child several pictures. Then you come to a picture that you have deliberately placed among the others; it portrays one crucified. The child will not immediately . . . understand this picture; he will ask what it means, why is he hanging on such a tree. . . . Then tell the child that this crucified one is the Savior of the world. . . . Tell him that this crucified man was the most loving person who ever lived. . . . [T]he child, the first time he hears it, will become anxious and afraid for his parents and the world and himself.^ Not surprisingly, the young Kierkegaard railed in his journals against the oppression and impoverish- ment he saw in the Christian world view: Almost everywhere that the Christian occupies himself with what is to come, there is punishment, dev- astation, ruin, eternal torment and suffering before his eyes. In this respect the Christian's imagination is exuberant and wayward, but when it comes to describing the bliss of the faithful and chosen one, it is proportionately meager. . . .[I write this] not to criticize the Christians . . . but to caution everybody who is still not tightly laced in this kind of a spiritual corset from imprudently entering into such a thing, to protect him against such narrow-chested, asthmatic representations.^ This sense of the Christian world-view as somehow claustrophobic, as excluding earthly pleasure and the best of pagan culture, becomes an enduring conviction of both Ibsen and Munch. Kierkegaard’s rebellion, however, was short-lived. Though he, to the end of his life, claimed that unredeemed human nature is hostile to the demands of Christianity, he came to believe that only the existence of a tran- scendent God can bring genuine freedom to human life. Only the belief in such transcendence, which renders "all things possible,” releases people from the constraints of finitude and worldly probability, allowing them to breathe.'' Kierkegaard’s journey to this conclusion was, however, no simple one. 21 In 1S41, at the age of twenty-seven, Soren Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to the seventeen- vear-old Regine Olsen. Though lie was by all accounts devoted to the vivacious and personable Regine, Kierkegaard had begun to tear that he conld not make her happy. It was never clear to Kierkegaard him- self whether the difficulty lay in his melancholy, his sense of complicity in his father’s guilt, ^ the rest- less need to cultivate his own genius, or the belief that marriage would conflict with a personal religious calling. In any case, less than a month after having defended his master’s thesis in theology at the Uni- versity of Copenhagen, the young Kierkegaard found himself suddenly a social outcast in his provin- cial Copenhagen, and his journals show him struggling to vindicate himself and to recover a sense of identity and mission. He did not wait long. Though his unhappy relationship with Regine left an unmis- takable mark on his writings, it also solidified his vocation: "She made me a poet.” The broken engage- ment itself became an emblem of the human situation, of the manner in which: ( 1 ) freedom interrupts the repose of the human in nature and (2) the misuse of that freedom jeopardizes the relation between human and divine. These two themes are intertwined throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. The hrst motif unites his thought with that of Ibsen and Munch, while reflections concerning the relation of human to divine, unmediated by tbe realm of nature, are seldom broached by Ibsen and Munch. Kierkegaard’s work allows us to see how the psychological and religious concern with human freedom overlap and inform one another. In Fear ami Trembling { 1843), Kierkegaard advocates an understanding of faith as sharply divorced from all social obligation and incapable of recognition by others. Not surprisingly, Kierkegaard defends the claim that some religious obligations lie wholly beyond the realm of social norms. He searches for religious heroes who, like himself, have defied propriety: Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is sin- gled out as a paradigmatic case of faith’s inability to communicate to, or vindicate itself before, a sec- ular audience. At the same time, he betrays his lingering doubts as to the coherence of a self whose fundamental inclinations are so at odds with social expectation. If the individual’s nature is so incom- mensurable with social forms, is this rooted in individual fault, social corruption, or divine retribution of some sort? Shakespeare’s Richard III makes a telling appearance in a work ostensibly concerned with obligation to the divine will: "I [have been] cheated of feature by dissembling Nature, deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionably that dogs bark at me as I bait by them.”^ In spite of Kierkegaard’s will to believe in a deity who can reconcile nature and morality, as well as the desires of the heart and the claims of com- munity, the fear remains that the worlds of desire and obligation are so incompatible that they cannot communicate with one another, the claims of the one unrecognizable to tbe other. What sort of deity would countenance such a situation? While Kierkegaard stops short of outright defiance, his reflections on Richard Ill’s dilemma show him unwilling to explain away the conflict between human nature and moral obligation as either: (1) ultimately subordinate to an inscrutable religious duty and hence dis- missible, (2) ascribable solely to nature, and by extension to its Creator, or (3) attributable exclusively to the perversity of the human will. "For what love for God it takes to be willing to let oneself be healed when from the very beginning one in all innocence has been botched, from the very beginning has been a damaged specimen of a human being!”^ Here, human freedom is clearly assigned the task of "allowing itself to be healed." Nevertheless, belief in grace in a world so inexplicably fragmented would surely require the "leap” beyond rationality of which Kierkegaard wrote, and life in such a world would, he knew, offer no illumination of the meaning behind the sacrifice. Kierkegaard returns to the problem of the relation between freedom and nature in the following year, with the drafting of his brilliant and problematic The Concept of Anxiety. Shifting abruptly from his earlier concern with religious duty to "the Absolute,” Kierkegaard frames a question so decisive for 22 Ibsen and later Munch: liow does freedom emerge in lunnan existence? Final resolutions prove elusive, of course, but Kierkegaard succeeds in communicating the anxiety, the ambivalence, and the all hut inevitable self-deception that accompanies freedom in its genesis. More than any other work. The Con cept of Anxiety is insistent in its presentation of the human being as a contingent, embodied, historical, and sexual being. The issue that remained largely implicit in Fenr and Trembling how a person can assume responsibility for a nature not of his or her choosing — comes to the fore. Kierkegaard strug- gles with the problem of what he calls hereditary sin (Arvesynd): what are we to make of a freedom whose extent can not be determined and whose existence cannot be dismissed? In The Concept of Anx- iety, his response seems to be one that anticipates that of Ibsen and Munch — namely, the recognition of a lack of self-knowledge almost sublime in extent. Anxiety signals the restless point of intersection between freedom and nature, the shifting boundary between innocence and culpable freedom: Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom suc- cumbs in this dizziness. ... In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.^ Late in life, Kierkegaard began to abandon this sublime bracketing of identity. In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus, the most Christian of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, argues that our lack of self- knowledge lies ultimately in the defiance of the Creator. This defiance is no longer accessible to con- sciousness, as it is long since hidden in the folds of sin and time. On this interpretation, it is no longer finitude but individual fault that stands in the way of a transparent self knowledge. The ambiguity that, in The Concept of Anxiety, was said to veil the descent into guilt becomes, in The Sickness unto Death, a willed ignorance. Kierkegaard was well aware that there could be no empirical proof of this claim; indeed, he argued that the extent of human sin could not be arrived at by any human solely through introspection. Rather, "man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person's not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not will- ing what is right.”^ Divine revelation assigns the human will primacy over adverse nature and circum- stance, firmly locating culpability within the individual. While Kierkegaard's prosperous childhood home was filled with a foreboding sense of the immi- nence of divine judgment, Henrik Ibsen’s boyhood home in Skien was marked by life-draining poverty and misfortune. At age seven, he saw his father overtaken by sudden financial difficulties, followed by the auctioning of the family’s main residence, warehouses, boathouses, and personal belongings. They moved to a former summer residence outside the town, and in this relative isolation Henrik watched the slow disintegration of his parents' hopes. As Ibsen's biographer succinctly reports: "Financial ruin has been known to alter a man’s character for the better. It was not so with Knud Ibsen [Henrik's father]."^° Lively and forceful in better times, Henrik’s father became domineering and brutal, and the vitality of the family was lost. The Ibsen children became the unwilling witnesses of this slowly evolv- ing tragedy. An autobiographical fragment, written by Ibsen in 1881, provides vivid descriptions of his earliest memories. Signs of prosperity and optimism abound in the sketch; we see the young Ibsen's delight in the sights and sounds of his native Skien, not least in "balls, dinner parties and musical gath- erings [that] followed each other in rapid succession.”” Tellingly, the sketch terminates abruptly in his seventh year. In Ibsen's adult life, it was only through his plays that he could endure the return to “the 23 evervdav anguish ot tamily In liis hnal years, Henrik Ibsen repeatedly took up the idea of mak- ing the journey to his hirtliplace, hot the impulse would invariably falter, with Ibsen concluding, “It is not easy to go to Skien. Ibsen's dramas, like Munch’s paintings, bring psychic suffering into a disconcerting proximity to the viewer. The two artists captured the vertiginous elfect of psychic distress — the overwhelming qual- ity of prolonged despair, its capacity to alter the shape of daily life. The suffocating sadness of Ibsen’s childhood home, revisited countless times in his dramas, anticipate Munch’s paintings and prints of death chamber scenes. By the time he writes Little Eyolj, toward the close of his productive life, Ibsen is able to produce dialogue in which hardly a line fails to underline the inevitability of his character’s misery. The reader reels as the underlying determinants of what seemed a redeemable, if bleak, situa- tion are unveiled, successively blocking ofl any prospects for a hopeful outcome. The noose tightens slowly and relentlessly in the course of Ibsen’s middle and late plays (Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, John Gabriel Borkman, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken). The vanishing of the protagonists’ possibilities for happiness is the decisive action of these plays. Edvard Munch is said to have called Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman“the best winter landscape in Norwegian art.’’^'' Ibsen himself locates the landscape more precisely as “the interior of a human soul in which love has died.’’^^ Ibsen’s dramas are lasting monuments to this “Ice Church” of the soul.^* Though Ibsen claimed to have “read little of Kierkegaard and understood less,” his companions in early adulthood report a shared enthusiasm for Kierkegaard, and Ibsen would later hear the ideas of the Dane expounded by his mother in law, Magdelene Thoresen.^^ It is difficult to ignore the echoes of the philosopher in the proclamations of a would-be existentialist hero like Ibsen’s Brand: “To be wholly oneself! But how, with the weight of one’s inheritance of sin?”^* In Ibsen’s work, the weight of this inher- itance often appears in the form of a return of repressed desires and humiliations. In contrast to Kierkegaard’s belief in the ultimately willed character of our fate, Ibsen’s tragic sensibility leads him to dismiss such clear-cut resolutions. Kierkegaard’s insistence on sin’s willed ignorance is countered by Ibsen’s depiction of the involuntary, self-protective movements of a soul under attack. The wild duck. Old Ekdal tells us in Ibsen’s drama of 1884, dives, when wounded, deep into protective waters, fasten- ing itself, in the mud and debris of the sea-floor, to twigs and tangled roots: “Goes without saying. Always do that, wild ducks. Plunge to the bottom — as deep as they can get, old chap — bite themselves fast in the weeds and the tangle — and all the other damn mess down there. And they never come up again.”^^Old Ekdal's hunt for the wild duck becomes a metaphor for young Werle’s zealous hunt for family secrets. The wild duck is finally flushed from its hiding place, but it does not come to the sur- face alive. The family secrets that emerge at Werle’s insistence do so prematurely (at least from the point of view of those who from the beginning had most needed obscurity’s protective camouflage), with tragic results. Young Hedvig does not survive Hjalmer Ekdal’s doubts as to her paternity. Ibsen’s depiction of the domain we today would call unconscious is often signaled by reference to the sea, to untamed creatures, or to the wild nature of Norway’s north country. Ibsen’s gestures toward this domain, and his compelling representation of its power, recall the dilemma posed by Kierkegaard: Can creatures subjected to the compulsion of forces so incompletely understood nevertheless be free? Though Ibsen does not burden his characters with an unqualified autonomy, neither does he release them from their responsibility and guilt. Here tbe moral, and sometimes the specifically Christian, dimension of Ibsen’s heritage meets the pagan. In the words of Julian the Apostate in Emperor and Galilean, "Whoever has once been in His power can never com[)letely free bimself from it.”^° Equally impossible, however, is the task of fully domesticating the pagan striving for survival and domination. As a mature writer, Ibsen increasingly erodes the ground for happy compromise between moral or reli- 24 gious ideals and untamed desires; lie rejects, -too, any possibility of skirting the conflict. In conseipience, Ibsen’s dramas culminate in the impossibility of movement. If his protagonists seem at times ener- vated and imprisoned by the demands of conscience or of social [iropriety, the playwright offers no vision of facile emancipation. The jirimal demands of the unconscious, urgent and unscrupulous, can corner and checkmate with pitiless speed, and more surely than any moral code. Only rarely in Ibsen’s work does the confrontation of passion and propriety yield a happy result. More often the main characters, like the protagonists of Rosrnershoirn, are granted too little insight, too late. When, at the outset of the play, the housekeeper at Rosmersholm alludes to the white horses that she sees, the viewer registers the ominous note but doubts their capacity to overwhelm the ideal- ism of John Rosmer and the directness and strength of Rebecca West. Rosmer, a former pastor turned unbeliever, lives in the home of his ancestors, a remote manor long viewed by the community as "a stronghold of order and morality — of respect and reverence for everything that is accepted and upheld by the best elements in . . . society."^^ Rebecca West, an outsider from the north, was introduced to Ros- mer and his wife Beata by the latter’s brother, and she managed the affairs of the house during Beata's Rnal illness. As the play opens. Miss West is living alone with Rosmer on the estate, following the death of his wife. The two plan to work to reverse what they perceive as the grim and life-denying legacy of Rosmer’s ancestors, both at the manor and in the surrounding community. In the end, however, it is the ancestral conscience that wins over the spirits of both Rosmer and Rebecca. In a confession mem orable for its shattering honesty, Rebecca retraces the steps by which she led Rosmer’s childless wife to suspect that she, Rebecca, might be pregnant by him. Beata was seized with suicidal despair, and she acted upon it. Rebecca evaded acknowledgment of her role in her death. The tragically belated moral courage of both Rosmer and Rebecca West only highlights its utter futility. "Enslaved ... to a law which [she] had not previously recognized,"^^ the moral law and religious traditions of her host’s forebears, Rebecca must face a devastating self-knowledge. Without the "radical and ruthless” passion that previ- ously drove her actions, Rebecca is mired in a guilt that she lacks the resources to escape. Without the assurance of a moral basis for their lives, Rosmer and Rebecca are at the mercy of the white horses of Rosmersholm, and their promise of oblivion. As the play concludes, they follow Beata's steps into the millrace. Even when Ibsen vouchsafes the viewer a happy ending, as he does in The Lady from the Sea, the security of the compromise reached between passion and Sittlichkeit (societal norms) is singularly vul- nerable. No natural harmony is posited between the claims of morality and the exigencies of nature. When Dr. Wangel sets his restive wife Ellida free to choose between remaining in her marriage to him or following her former lover, the Stranger from the sea, Ellida is able to shake free of her captivation by the Stranger. The play seems to culminate in an Apollonian victory, but the restored union of Ellida and Wangel is not entirely convincing. Wangel was drawn by his wife's elusiveness, the inaccessibility of her untamed spirit. She, in turn, had accepted the security of his home without becoming a true par- ticipant in the family's life. M. C. Bradbrook captures the irony of the ending: "Prudence, wisdom, and sanity are on Wangel's side, yet the Stranger is an emissary from the hidden sources of power, and there is a contradiction at the basis of the play. The poetic vision, which should control and focus all the dra- matic action, is, instead, set in opposition to it.”^^ The happy ending does not encompass the very ele- ment that Ibsen saw as indispensable and inescapable, those passions that have not submitted to the settled order of things. While Ibsen’s characters must face the disruptive claims of "inner trolls,” Munch’s art focuses on the individual’s confrontation with his or her natural limits. Death and sexuality confront the self with its boundaries. Ibsen's preoccupation with inner conflicts gives way to Munch's fascination with the 25 subject’s attempt to maintain its integrity in the face of wliat is perceived as other. Kierkegaard’s descrip- tion of the spirit s anxiety in the face of sexuality is apropos: "In the moment of conception, spirit is furthest away, and therefore the anxiety is greatest. . . . Why this anxiety? It is because spirit cannot participate in the culmination of the erotic. It cannot express itself in the erotic. It feels a stranger."^"* Like Kierkegaard, Munch views sexuality’s encroachment on the subject’s self-conscious sovereignty as a threat to the coherence of the self Death, like sexuality, poses the question of whether anything per- sonal escapes the grip of nature. For Munch, as we know, this question had been posed to him all too vividly by his mother’s early death. Munch himself contracted tuberculosis in his early adolescence, and his older sister Sophie, from whom he had been inseparable since bis mother’s death, succumbed to the disease when Edvard was fourteen. During the time of his own illness. Munch later recorded in his notes, the adults caring for him sought to conceal from him his own blood-soaked handkerchiefs.^^ Munch's monumental work. The Sick Child, which he reworked in different media for the next thirty-hve years, depicts his dying sister (no. 9 ). The painting reveals the extent of the loss and the mystery that had not been concealed from either Edvard or his sister. By 1885, when Munch began working on The Sick Child, he had already established a reputation for himself as a rising star among young Norwegian painters, and he had received encouragement and financial assistance from the leading Norwegian representatives of Naturalism and Impressionism, Eritz Thaulow and Christian Krohg. Painting the death of his sister defined his independent direction as an artist in much the same way as the event itself defined Munch as a man. Towards the end of his career, when Munch posed for a photographer in one of his studios at Ekely, The Sick Child was propped up against the wall next to him, a token of the work's priority in his art and life. In the painting, Sophie is represented in profile, gazing over the bowed head of her aunt Karen Bjolstad, who cared for her during her illness. Munch describes in his memoirs the terrible exhaustion of his sister, and the weak hands with which she clasped her bedclothes. In the painting, however, she is alert, her head bowed neither in supplication nor helplessness. The child looks past not only her aunt but also the viewer, who might be eager to reassure the child, as her own father did, of our shared mor- tality, and to be somehow exonerated by her. For the viewer can only witness, not heal. The child's presence, with the shadow of a halo in the background, is majestic. She crowns the suffering of the scene. And the suffering, we may imagine, was formidable. Karen Bjolstad had devoted herself to raising her dead sister’s children. The death of Sophie can only have been a heart-rending reminder of her inability to fully compensate for the loss of their mother, leaving the children fragile and exposed to illness. Munch noted his own tendency to view the painting with eyes partially closed, and he incorporates the mark of his lashes on some versions of the scene. In so doing, the silent pres- ence of the fourteen-year-old boy who must endure the slow death of his sister and relive the loss of his mother is imprinted on the canvas. Sophie herself sits with open eyes. She does not shrink from what she sees; nor does the adult Munch who paints her. The sunlight pours over her. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that if one were able to survey the violence of nature without actually being subject to its force, one would experience a mixture of simultaneous pleasure and pain that he designated the sublime.^^ On Kant's account, the pain arose from one's aware- ness of the frailty of one's physical existence, while the pleasure reflected one's consciousness of a moral vocation that transcended physical vulnerability. He famously divided the human being into a physi- cal aspect, governed by natural laws, and an immaterial one, capable of moral autonomy. In so doing, Kant tamed the classical Romantic vision of the sublime as the confrontation of the human individual with an all-engulfing nature, within and without. While Kant isolated the realms of physical and spir itual and designated as sublime those experiences that might indicate the sovereignty of the latter over 26 the former, subsequent philosophers would regard as sublime the very uudecidahility ol our con glomerate natures. At the time of writing The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard followed this path in highlighting the intimate joining of freedom and nature in the human being. In an even more pro nounced manner, Nietzsche would celebrate the contradictions and inevitable suffering of the human situation: "All well constituted, joyful mortals . . . are far from regarding their unstable e(]uilihrium between ‘animal and angel’ as necessarily an argument against existence. . . In like manner, Munch's The Sick Child glorifies not the spirit’s transcendence of death, but its bold encounter with it. It is this "unstable equilibrium" of spirit and nature that Edvard Munch's The Scream celebrates, just as The Sick Child portrays death without dismissing its sting, so, too. The Scream presents the anx iety of the subject impaled by forces it cannot subdue. Echoing the vision of Kant's more radical sue cessors, Munch’s sublime reveals the limits of conscious volition. The dignity of the subject rests in acknowledging this uncertain state of affairs, not in mastering it. The faithful rendering of Hnitude is Munch’s beatific vision. In The Scream, he reworks the memory of a stroll along Oslo’s Ljabroveien in which anxiety descends without warning: / was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired, and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fiord and the city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream pierc- 28 mg nature. tn the lithograph of The Scream (no. 7), vertical strokes welling up from the base of the print clash with the line of the horizon. Munch’s friend and fellow artist, the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, identified the source of the scream as the "horrible battle between mind and sex." In a passage reminis- cent of Kierkegaard’s discussion of spirit and sexuality, Przybyszewski elaborates: "The hero of love must not exist anymore: his sexuality has crawled out of him and now it screams through all of nature. . . While this is not Munch's own account, it should be noted that Munch changed the title of his work to The Scream after reading this description. The terror of undiscriminating and ungovernable drives reappears in an exceptional prose poem composed by Munch during his stay at a clinic in Copenhagen in 1908-09, almost two decades later. The poem is a revealing record of Munch’s anxieties during this period of nervous exhaustion. It tells the story of two lovers. Alpha and Omega, and their life on a deserted island (no. 45). Tales of their appeal- ing playfulness are interrupted by Omega's rather remarkable infidelities: Omega's desires varied. One day Alpha saw her sitting on the beach, kissing a donkey which was lying in her lap. . . . Omega felt tired and disappointed because she could not possess all the animals of the island; she sat down in the grass and cried bitterly. . . . One day her children came to [Alpha]; a new generation had grown up on the island, and they called him “father". They were small boars, small snakes, small monkeys, and other beasts of prey, and human hybrids. He was in despair; he ran along the sea. The sky and the ocean were the colour of blood. He heard shrieks in the air, and put his hands to his ears. Earth, sky, and sea quaked, and he felt a great terror.^° Omega’s unfaithfulness elicits Alpha’s anxiety. The prospect of boundless promiscuity suggests an equally boundless jealousy, one that shakes the sovereignty of self. Like the figure in The Scream, aban- doned by the two figures retreating in the distance. Alpha hears shrieks in the air (perhaps his own?) 27 and puts liis hands to his ears. The sky turns red, like the blood that Munch associated with both fertik it\ and death. Certainly. Munch understood se.xuality to he as threatening to female individuality as to male auton- omv. Munch's Madonna (nos. 54 and 55) renders palpable the proximity of life and death in the moment of conception. When men and women make themselves "a link in the chain that binds a thousand gen* erations," they are at that moment “no longer themselves.”” Whether through identification with the Madonna’s"smilingcorpse,”or through subjection to female unfaithfulness, Munch underlines the ego- destroying potential of sexuality. Munch's emphasis upon the encounter with sexuality and death seems at first glance opposed to Ibsen s lifelong preoccupation with the conflict of passion and conscience. Munch’s "fundamentally materialistic and physiologically based view of human life”^^ is no mere variation on Ibsen’s under- standing of the forces which drain human vitality. While Ibsen contemplates a humanity that is deeply, if mysteriously, implicated in its own captivity, Munch focuses on the eclipse of the individual by Nature’s larger purposes. In Ibsen’s plays, the requirements of bourgeois decency, the claims of Chris- tian conscience, even the demands of art are more formidable obstacles to human joy than the aware- ness of mortality or finitude. Nevertheless, the fact of Munch's lifelong fascination with Ibsen’s work prompts one to search for underlying sympathies. Early on, the young Munch identified with characters from Ibsen's dramas. Duke Skule of The Pre- tenders inspired the thirteen-year-old Munch’s artistic efforts. Later, he designed stage sets for Max Reinhardt's productions of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hedda Gabler. More significantly. Munch makes him- self the model for his sketch of Osvald, the ailing young'artist of Ghosts. What, we may ask, was so cap- tivating to Munch in Ibsen’s presentation of the human situation? The painter was said to have remarked, "I read mostly diagonally — but not Ibsen — him I read from cover to cover."^^ Both Ibsen and Munch weathered the censure of outraged bourgeois sensibility throughout their careers. Though Norway was by no means the only source of such criticism, both artists spent the bulk of their most productive years away from their homeland. Their self-imposed exile witnesses to a shared antipathy to an "unforgiving Nordic Lutheran deity"” and to the society that worshipped it. In Ghosts, Ibsen’s Osvald, returning to Norway from Paris, complains of the bleakness of northern life: Here everyone s brought up to believe that work is a curse and a punishment, and that life is a miser- able thing that we're best ojf to be out of as soon as possible. . . . But they won 't hear of such things down there. Nobody abroad believes in that sort of outlook anymore. Down there, simply to be alive in the world is held for a kind of miraculous bliss. Mother, have you noticed how everything I've painted is involved with this joy of life? Always and invariably, the joy of life [Livsgloedenj.” If the naivete of Osvald’s plea verges on the comical, the bitterness of his conclusion does not: "I'm afraid that everything that's most alive in me will degenerate into ugliness here."” Ibsen and Muncb shared their wariness of moralities framed without adequate attention to the natures they are to gov ern. The cry of Ibsen’s Julian the Apostate in Emperor and Galilean is a most direct response to a specifi- cally Christian ethic: "To be fully human has been forbidden from the day the seer of Galilee gained control of the world. ... To love or to hate, each is a sin. Has he then changed man's flesh and blood? Hasn't earthbound man remained what he always was? All that’s healthy within our souls rises against this . . . ! Thou shalt! Thou shalt! Thou shalt!"^^ Munch’s early rejection of his father’s Lutheran faith is similar in spirit: "He could not understand my desires. 1 could not comprehend what he valued above them.”^® Ibsen’s most characteristic protest against an ethic that does not do justice to earthbound nature 28 is to display its consequences — the waning resources of souls under siege by conscience and culture. Munch's, by contrast, is to revive and celebrate nature, particularly as manifested in the confrontation of fife and death. Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Munch share a fascination with moments in which tfie subject faces ecli[)se by conscience, passion or death. The forces tfiat are seen to encroacfi upon fmrnan f reedom form a for bidding panorama; the paralysis of anxiety and sin, the relentless pull of unrealizable or destructive passions, and the indifferent physiology of reproduction and death. The subject that struggles to main tain its coherence in the face of these forces is surely deserving of dignity, f n Munch's work, the remark- able fact is that this struggle is not only dignihed. ft is beautiful. For all the gravity and pathos of their subject matter, Munch's paintings are filled with exultation. Why dwell on the exceptional and anguish- filled moments in which mortal subjects are threatened witli extinction? Perhaps because it is at these moments when life presents itself most vividly. Rather than claiming an original autonomy of the will, as Kierkegaard did, or portraying the entan glement of the civilized will, as fbsen had, Munch strove to excavate the elemental, the finite, the unciv- ilized subject. Ffis Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (no. 2) reveals the skeleton's disconcerting presence beneath ephemeral flesh, while The Scream itself recalls, as Cernuschi persuasively claims, a shriek that precedes and potentially usurps language. Sexual attraction encompasses the heedless desire to con- sume and incorporate as well as an equally unwilled self-sacrifice. While Kierkegaard set himself the ethico-religious task of reclaiming human freedom. Munch attempts to reshape conscience in such a way that the proximity of life and death, and the consequent limitations of human freedom, are definitively established. In opposition to those who would locate human grandeur in the conquest of nature by freedom. Munch elevates those moments of existence when human life is most closely con- fronted with an indifferent, if ravishing, nature. Nature's dance of life and death is. Munch would per- suade us, as untamed and ungovernable in its essence as his Galloping Horse, which fairly storms off the canvas. 1 Manuscript N 154, Edvard Munch, quoted by Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 16. 2 Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 174-75. 3 Soren Kierkegaard, Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, vol. 3, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975, #3247, pp. 498-99. 4 Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 40. 5 Kierkegaard's father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, suf- fered under a pervasive sense of guilt, the origins of which are not fully clear. The elder Kierkegaard had, as a child, cursed God when he found himself hungry and alone on the Jutland heath, an eleven-year-old shepherd boy. In addition, Kierkegaard's oldest sister Maren Kirsten was conceived illegitimately. Michael Pedersen came to believe that his guilt was the cause of the deaths of many of his children — five of his seven children predeceased him. He went so far as to inform Soren Kierkegaard that it was his (the father's) fate to survive all his children. 6 William Shakespeare, Richard III, as quoted in Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, edited and translated by Howard V, Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Prince- ton University Press, 1983, p. 105. 7 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 104. 8 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, translated by Reidar Thomte, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 61. 9 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 95, 10 Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, Garden City, NY: Dou- bleday & Company, 1971, p. 13. 11 Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 10. 12 Ibsen's preliminary sketches for The Wild Duck, quoted in Halvdan Koht, Life of Ibsen, New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1971, p. 29. 13 Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 24. 14 Ragna Stang, Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art, New York: Abbeville Press, 1977, pp. 159 and 260. 15 Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 727. 16 Henrik Ibsen, Brand, translated by Michael Meyer, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, i960, p. 155. 17 Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, pp. 38-39, 177. 18 Henrik Ibsen, Brand, p. 80. 19 Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, edited and translated by Dounia B. Christian!, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1968, p. 28. 20 Henrik Ibsen, Emperor and Galilean, cited in Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 176. 29 1 21 Henrik Ibsen. Rosmersholm. translated by Michael Meyer, London: Metheun Drama. 19SS. pp. 62-63. 22 Ibsen. Rosmersholm. p. roi. 23 M. C. Bradbrook. Ibsen the Norwegian. London: Chatto & Windus. 1948, p. 109. 2-» Kierkegaard, The Concept of Ansiety, pp. 25 Bente Torjnsen, Words and Images of Edvard Munch, Chelsea, \T: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1986, PP ss-.sS. 26 Immanuel Kant. Critique of fudgment. translated by Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis; Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 119-21, 27 Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans- lated by Walter Kaufmaiin, New York: Random House Inc., 1967. P- 99- 28 Edvard Munch, diary entry of January 22, 1892, quoted in Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, New York: The Viking Press, 1972, p, 65. 29 Reiiihold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 130-131. 30 See ,'\rve Moen, Edvard Munch: Woman and Eros, Oslo: Forlaget Norsk Kunstreproduksjon, 1957, pp. 30-31. 31 See Edvard Munch, “The Frieze of Life," in Mara Helen Wood, editor, Edvard Munch: The Erieze of Life, London: National Gallery Publications, 1992, p. 12. 32 Kristie Jayne, "The Cultural Roots of Edvard Munch’s Images of Women,” Women's Art Journal 10, Spring/Sum- mer 1989, p. 30. 33 1 tiger Alver Gloersen, Lykkehuset: Edvard Munch og Aasgaardstrand, Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1970, p. 5: “Jeg leser mest diagonalt — ja ikke Ibsen — ham leser jeg fra perm til perm." This careful reading is apparent in the arguments Munch marshalls to support his belief that the female characters in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken were modeled on the former’s Three Stages of Woman (The Sphinx), no. 30. 34 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 20. 35 Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, in The Complete Major Prose Works, edited and translated by Rolf Fjelde, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1965, p. 257. 36 Ibsen, Ghosts, p. 257. 37 Henrik Ibsen, Emperor and Galilean, translated by Brian Johnson, Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1990, p. 84. 38 Heller, The Scream, p. 20. 30 “IN WILD EMBRACE”: ATTACHMENT AND LOSS IN EDVARD MUNCH KATHERINE NAHUM Munch's Scream appears on my mouse pad, a ready acknowledgement of my terror and helplessness in the face of cyberspace. I punch a life-size plastic toy that is printed with the Scream and it bounces back . . . and back. When 1 wear my Scream T-shirt, others recognize it, smile and then, unsettled, turn away. The Scream is an image to which we all respond. Munch knew. We know. What he shows us is true. Munch’s art galvanizes our recognition of truth. The whole of Munch’s art addresses salient themes of his time and ours: existential sadness, wrenching separations, anxiety, jealousy, illness and death, frustrated desire — all aspects of that dou- ble-headed monster, attachment and loss. Munch was convinced that he should depict such subjects as they issued from his own life. Although the anarchist writer Hans Jaeger had encouraged him in this pursuit. Munch would have come to an art of intimate expression sooner or later; he seemed destined to paint in an autobiographical manner. His art would honor “living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love,” and in response, viewers "would respect the power, the sanctity of it — they would take off their hats as they do in a church.’’^ While staying in the outskirts of Paris in December of 1889 Munch received news of his father’s death. This may well have been the event that set in motion the writing of autobiographical notes, Munch’s Saint-Cloud Manifesto which articulated his Symbolist aims for art, and, issuing from them, his pantheistic and evolutionary view that life and death emerge sequentially from each other. Loving couples are "merely one link in an endless chain that joins one generation to the next.”^ Above all, these notes record his memories of earlier deaths in the family and a gamut of feelings.^ Munch was so despon- dent with the recent, mournful news that he was unable to paint at first, but it was in Saint-Cloud and in response to his father's death that he consolidated his identity as an artist. It was there that he first conceived the Frieze of Life, "a series of decorative pictures, which, gathered together, would give a pic- ture of life.”'* The frieze was the means by which he would make sense of his life. It would contain themes and narratives that ran through, and could be read in many images; the paintings of the frieze, and really all his works, became symbolic parts of a psychological coherence he continually strove to weave and maintain. When he began executing these images Munch turned from naturalism to a Sym- bolist style of painting in which meaning was ambiguously hidden within observed phenomena. For Munch that meaning was personal, psychological and drawn from the past. Permutations of trauma distilled into a metaphysical coherence formed the content of these interrelated paintings. He said "I paint not what I see but what 1 saw.” Munch was referring to his own and other’s recurrent illnesses, and to deaths — losses — that he had witnessed and sustained. They became the subjects and informed the style of his paintings as Munch claimed, and all writers have noted. There are peculiarities of Munch’s style, however, that have not been accounted for, and that redound to childhood experiences of loss within life, before loss through death. Munch’s way of making art — his style — for all its primitively spare aspects, embodies a psy- 31 chological density that is the result of these early experiences, and that we might penetrate by turning to the perspective of developmental research.^ The stylistic consistencies apparent in several prints, paintings and retrospei tive sketches from the nineties will be examined in terms of infant research and attachment theory, through which 1 hope aspects of Munch’s art might be clarified. Then I will return to a discussion of the earlier painting. The Sick Child (1885-86, National Gallery, Oslo) and a print of it (no. 9 ), because the image embodies remnants of Munch’s self-regard, because it seems to represent a critical juncture in Munch’s artistic development, and because it is his first Symbolist work. Two woodcuts titled Melancholy (nos. 13 and 14 ) in our exhibition are re-workings of the 1892 paint- ing then called Melancholy: Evening (National Gallery, Oslo), one of the first essays in the Frieze of Life. Sdght in Saint-Cloud (1890, National Gallery, Oslo) might be considered the very first work in this Frieze because it acknowledges the loss of Munch’s father. Rendered in moody blues and a deep perspective, it shows a man slumped under the weight of depression. Placed at the end of a dark space, he is a sad figure leaning on his arm and staring out a window whose mullions form a double cross that is reflected on the floor. The two images of the cross, perhaps allusions to Munch's pietistic parents, wedge the figure in deep shadow. Melancholy: Evening adumbrates another kind of loss. Before a broad landscape at the edge of the sea a man sits desidtorily, his head in his hand. In this classical pose of melancholy^ echoing that of the mourner in Night in Saint-Cloud, the figure's downcast eyes look inward. Behind him the shore stretches to distant houses and trees where two small figures, a woman in white and a man in black, are about to depart in a yellow boat. The figure in the foreground is alone, separated from, yet linked to the couple by the curving line of shore moving off like a rope that binds all three. The meandering shore includes exposed rocks whose flattened and odd shapes conjure something other than geology, something like the monstrous forms swirling in a Goya print. ^ Gomprising part of the background that appears as a thought bubble, the rocks evoke ill-defined, troublesome notions suggesting that the man is thinking of these distant people important to him, although they are divided from him and lost in the subdued greens, taupes and blues of the landscape. The space of the painting reaches a yawning distance, yet the couple, or thoughts of them, are just there, brought immediately to our attention, while plaguing his. Such a rendering of space effectively suggests presence and longing, physical distance and distance in time. The painting alludes to the difficidt, jealous feelings aroused by several triangular relationships: his friend, Jappe Nilssen's with Oda and Christian Krohg, Hans jaeger’s with the Krohgs, but especially Munch's own with the slightly older "Mrs. Heiberg" (Milly Thaulow) and by implication, her husband Karl Thaulow, who like Munch’s father, was a military physician, and who thus raises the specter of another, and incestuous, triangle. These artists and writers of the Kristiania Bohemia had been engaged in the free love Jaeger recommended. But Munch soon found himself enslaved by feelings of jealousy, depression and self-reproach. “Everything was his fault. . . . She looked so sad. . . . Maybe she is the one who believes that he does not care for her, and that it is his own faidt. What a spineless wretch yon are, a yellow coward, a yellow yellow yellow yellow coward," Munch wrote in his Saint-Cloud Manifesto.* This passage presumably refers to the end of his affair with "Mrs. Heiberg"; but this was also a time he was thinking of many things — the death of his father, and by association, his mother’s and his sister's deaths. He memorializes a complex of feelings, including jealousy, in Melancholy and also in an ambigu- ous print of 1895 Kristiania Bohemia II (fig. 5 ) showing a heavy-set, mustachioed man fantasiz- ing about his former wife^ and her lovers. Munch among them.^° "The woman belongs to none of them 32 and all ot them belong to her," Heller trenchantly observes,^' and the print must represent a terse, lay ered truth of present circumstances and those of the past when Munch and his four siblings felt tfie same way about their beautiful mother'^ who "looked at us, f rom the one to the other, and stroked our cheeks with her hands, but whose presence was withheld from them not only l)y death hut also by her distancing preoccupations in life. Munch turned to printmaking because "he was almost pathologically unable to part with his paint ings.”^'' He made hve painted versions and many woodcuts of Melanchuly, allowing him to hold onto the image, perhaps keeping alive its conflictual nature. Multiple images also freed hitJi to play with — modify and control — the formal and emotional implications of the subject, and therel)y modulate per- nicious feelings like longing, guilt and helplessness. Yet it seems that the familiar stylistic components of Melancholy are made more stark, rigid and immutable in our exhibited woodcut (no. 13 ). The escaping lovers and the boat seem barely discernible, at a greater distance than they are in the painting. They are linked to the man more forcefully and directly, however, by the undulating shoreline that continues into the bounding line of his body; and paradoxically linked as well by the dramatic contrast of near and far. The rocks have become abstract linear elements that are mere formal parallels to the slumped, dejected figure. The figure's isolation is intensified by his position within the flat space below the horizon, while the two lovers exist beyond it. Munch's inclination to paint dichotomies, polarities and paradoxes appears both as theme and for- mal strategy. The sky, always a register of feeling, is rendered here in a clear, pale green, while elsewhere it appears blood red. Sadly curving lines course through the color exposing the expressive rough grain of the wood beneath. The same murky green joins the man to the changeable sea, as if he were emotionally flat- tened, overwhelmed by the green as by a grave depression, as by a helpless feeling of drowning. In the painting and in other images color divides the male figure from the sea.^^ The images called Melan- choly treat of loss, of death-in-life in a formal language that fits a labile state of depression. Melancholy (Woman on the Shore) (no. 14 ) resembles Melancholy in that a woman also sits in a classically melancholic pose at the edge of the sea, but a heavy shank of her hair falls forward and oblit- erates her face. The divergence allies Munch's print to images of the penitent Magdalene, who is tradi- tionally shown tearing out her hair, or covered by long hair, or wearing a simple cloak and sitting before her cave. The configuration of the landscape and shoreline is sufficiently indeterminate that it might include a cave, but Woman on the Shore, as a Symbolist work partaking of the same emotional truth as images of the Magdalene, necessarily remains only suggestive of such sources. Munch's print acknowl edges that women are also subject to states of melancholy.^^ The image is without narrative, iconic, so abstract that the woman's form seems absorbed in the patterns of color Munch uses. The sea and sky are green, the shore black, the dress red, and there are whitish shapes we read abstractly, just as the woman leans seaward, her cascading hair masking her face, another figure barely suggested in the dark outline of rocks seems also to point in the same direc- tion, out to sea. Her figure is not so much isolated as fractured, and Munch uses technique to further his meaning of her connection with the sea. He has used a creative "jigsaw" method of color printing. Rather than using a separate block to register each color. Munch sawed one block into shapes, inked each one with a different color and reassembled the woodblock like a puzzle. He could then make a multicolor print in one step. In this way Munch "cut meaning into the individual shapes," created distinctly Synthetist and Symbolist images,^* and symbolically arranged diverse elements to create his own psychological 33 truth. Munch's metliod contributes to our reading this woodcut abstractly. Because her dress is red while her head and hair are ot a piece with the blackened shore, the woman becomes abstracted into a meaning beyond the mere representation of her form; it has a Symbolist meaning of hidden truth: she is identihed with and absorbed by the sea. It is an image of death. The woman's whitish neck and arm, and the white lateral triangle at left all register what was the bare wood block and so create in these areas negative space, a sense of nothingness. Her hair obscuring her emotive features, the woman leans toward the open expanse of sea; the water reaches toward her. Her body is partitioned like a contested country in accord with the requirements of the artist’s abstract composition; she has been returned to nature and lost to the eye. Women are associated with the sea. The several images titled Attraction and Separation show women set before seascapes and men rooted to the ground. Men and women are drawn to each other and face each other warily in Attraction I (no. 21) and Attraction II (no. 22) of 1896 and 1895, two prints from a private collection. These represent the initiation of an unhappy relationship that will devolve in later prints and paintings. Munch's "handwriting," his characteristic stylistic and compositional devices, are in full array; the dichotomous pairing of woman and sea, man and earth; a shooting perspective marked out by the receding fence, the looming form of a linden tree. In these prints, the tree echoes the man’s head and contains the projected shadows of the two figures. As a halo around his head the tree seems the representation of the man's mind, and within it, the introjected, hopeful fantasy of an intimate rela- tionship, because the shaded figures seem nearly to kiss while the figures in the foreground stand stiffly apart. In the 1896 lithograph, strands of the woman's hair curl out and surround the man’s neck, draw- ing him to her, a surreptitious, inevitable attachment that underscores and contradicts the figures' aver- sive expressions and hooded eyes. Referring to his painting of Separation (1896, Munch Museum, Oslo), Munch said, "I symbolized the connection between the divided pair with the help of her long wavy hair. . . . The long hair is a sort of telephone wire’’^^ along which a symbolic exchange, presum- ably the give and take of a gratifying relationship, might occur between the pair, who must represent a recent relationship of Munch's, as well as a very old one. The figures' positions are reversed in another version of Attraction (no. 23). In rigid profile, their simplified forms are set in parallel before a landscape of Aasgaardstrand, where Munch spent his sum- mers. Pine trees form a grid behind them; Munch uses trees as metaphors of constraint in The Voice (Summer Night) (nos. 16, 18b and 19) as well, where the girl's burgeoning desire is held in check by her constrained body language and enforced by the verticals of trees. In Attraction a few pine branches bridge the gap between the figures and run over the reflection of the moonlight on the water, "the moon’s golden pillar"^” given its phallic shape to suggest the nature of the attraction. Paradoxically this shape serves also to divide the figures. The woman's hair, seeming to have its own will, and working counter to the stiff rectitude of the two profiles, reaches over the moonlight toward the man. Alongside elements suggesting attraction are those that suggest repugnance and fear; as much as these figures approach, they also avoid each other. Women's hair images the attachment between men and women. Strands of a woman’s hair link the figures in Eye in Eye (1894, Munch Museum, Oslo); they surround the head of the man in Man in Woman 's Hair {no. 37); they fall over a man’s shoulders in Vampire (nos. 40 and 41); and a woman’s hair intertwines to form a watery matrix for the Lovers in the Waves (no. 35). Here the figures float dreamily on a sea that is created by and continues from the woman's hair; the sea and hair form a blissful state of attachment. This and In Man's Brain (no. 36) seem conceived 34 as pendants. In Lovers in the Waves, the man’s head is subsumed and wrapped within the woman's hair; in In Man's Brain tlie woman's prone body is caught witliin a thouglit bnbl)le formed by strands of hair. These hlaments issue from l)oth male and female heads, as if both iTiinds conflnently expert ence longing to connect. The beatihc, if distant expression of the woman in Lovers in The Waves and the tense wariness of the man's fnll face shown in In Man 's Brain form a striking contrast between the prints, however, and presumably between how men and women experience attachment, experience being together — according to Munch. In a painted version of Ashes (1894, National Gallery, Oslo) an image of the depressing and anxious dissolution of a love affair, hair forms the last connection between the hgures. Originally titled After the Fall, and so alluding to "the period of love in Paradise that had ended,”^^ the painting presents the figures with equal sympathy. The woman is distraught, raising her bent arms to her head in an angular ges- ture that resembles the child’s in The Dead Mother (no. 11), and the gesture of the figure in The Scream (no. 7). She is locked in the rigid embrace of the trunks of pine trees behind; ghostly fragments of rocks are strewn about her. The woman has suffered a loss, but we surmise that she is still emotionally involved because strands of her hair caress the back and neck of the man who sits in Munch's familiar pose of melancholy. A form at the lower edge of the painting has been generally described as a smol- dering tree trunk, its smoke running up the left edge of the painting. The identification seems confirmed by the print Ashes II (no. 28 ), which, as a mirror-image shows the smoke at the right edge. Yet the smoke here seems more an attribute of the dejected man, and in fact, the tenor of the print has become entirely different. The woman stands in the same pose, but her hair falls calmly down around her, containing and echoing her own form. Her expression is one of smug indifference. "She stood straight and fixed her hair with the posture of a queen. There was some- thing in her expression that made him feel fearful — he did not know what it was — " Munch comments. In another print of Ashes (1896, Munch Museum, Oslo) rising smoke becomes the hair of a veritable gorgon's head centered in an upper panel and stretching the width of the image. The gorgon's face reit- erates the queenly visage of the woman depicted below. Here hair and smoke merge, as water and hair merged in Lovers in the Waves. This printed version of Ashes suggests the searing, hellish aspects of attachments; Lovers in the Waves describes a blissful union. Hair represents for Munch the compo- nents of a problematic, sensual and spiritual attachment; the figure in Woman on the Shore, with her hair an unmoving shank obscuring her face, no longer has attachments.^^ The prints called Separation, like the painting of Ashes, demonstrate that painful attachment endures after loss. The figures have pulled apart; sometimes the woman, her blank face empty of fea- tures'^ turns toward that familiarly formless unknown, the sea, while the strands of her hair pass over the man’s shoulder to his heart which bleeds into the ground, nourishing the flower of art. Art flour- ishes from the pain of severed and lost relationships with seductive women. This is a succinct, if par- adoxical register of Munch's view of relational involvement. As many writers have noted, art is the means to transcend loss; but Munch's experience of loss goes beyond death to the very nature of liv- ing relationships as well. Edvard Munch's art grew from his experiences of attachment and loss. We know about these experi- ences from his retrospective writings, from drawings of his early experiences and, as we have just seen, from his formal and thematic reworkings of his images. Images and writings often mirror each other in content.^"' In 1868, when Munch was five, his mother died from tuberculosis. She left behind her husband, a military doctor, and five children. Along with written memoirs, Munch made images of his paradoxi- 35 12 13 cal relationsliip with liis mother, as well as ones of her inifrending death. Six ot these remembered scenes titled Outside the Gate can be linked to Munch's Girl on the Shore and the Attraction and Separation images. All were executed in the 1890s; Munch might have used them as preparatory drawings to work up the emotional resonance tor the paintings and prints. One retrospective scene shows the mother with hooded eyes as she is shown in the Attraction images; more often her face is shown blank. Most use sharply receding perspectives that represent Munch's ideologi- cal perspective, his point of view, as well as the road toward death. Such steep perspectives also appear forcefully in the Attraction prints. And it is within these retrospective images that Munch makes manifest his associ- ation of his mother with the sea; It was dark and gloomy in the stairwell. I held her hand and pulled her, I could not get out fast enough. Then I asked her why she walked so slowly. She stopped at every tread and drew her breath. But out- side the gate the daylight blinded us — everything was so bright, so bright. She stopped for a while and the air was so strangely warm with a few cold gusts. The grass shot up among the cobblestones and light green grass; it was spring. She had a pale blue hat on and the band fluttered with every breath of air, hitting her in the face . . . then we went down Castle Street to the fort and looked out at the sea.^^ The drawings show Mnnch and his mother emerging into the light of a street drawn in sharply reced- ing perspective. For the most part Munch depicts himself as an assertive little boy, tugging his passive, tubercular mother by the hand. The outline of his figure is independent of the line of the mother’s figure, and in some of the drawings the child raises his arms enthusiastically, as if he were trying to mobilize his mother, to enliven her. In one (fig. 12), the four-year-old Munch seems to look down at his mother’s feet, as if he were encouraging her to put one foot in front of the other. Let's see you do it, he seems to say, reversing the usual mother-child relationship. In a few other drawings within the series, however, the boy himself seems near collapse (fig. 13). The outlines of his body are contained within his mother’s as he clings to her; he seems to have given up. The diary entry and these specific images memorialize the ritual visit to the Akershus headland just beyond the Oslo fjord where Munch and his mother went "and looked out at the sea," presumably to breathe the sea air for her diseased lungs. The f)ord, the headland and sea are not represented in the drawings, but they form the pair's destination reached along a road shown in harrowingly sharp per spective. Another retrospective drawing, Edvard and His Mother, shows the artist's mother sitting by a win- dow and possibly knitting or sewing (fig. 14). Her gaze is riveted to her hands that are brought close to her face. Edvard stands at her knee, reaching toward her; she is withdrawn and ignores him. A much later oil sketch. Sphinx, recreates the same scene but with an even darker mood (fig. 15), for the faint, but unmistakable lines of tbe head and arms of a small child reach up toward an anxious and distracted woman. Many writers have considered this [jainting, also titled Self Portrait for The Mountain of Mankind, to be androgynous, presenting Munch as the woman with bare breasts and long bair. The portrait is often linked with an earlier drawing. Self Portrait, Sphinx {igog, Munch Museum, Oslo), in which Munch is again represented as an androgyne, fusing the attributes and attendant associations of male and female. The ostensible reasons for so depicting himself were, no doubt, his awareness of androgyny's 36 12 Edvard Munch, Outside the Gate, drawing, early 1890s. Munch Museum, Oslo. MM T 2260. 13 Edvard Munch, Outside the Gate, drawing, early 1890s Munch Museum, Oslo. OKK M137. 14 Edvard Munch, Edvard and his Mother, drawing, 1886/1889. Munch Museum, Oslo. MM OKK T 2273. 15 Edvard Munch, Sphinx, oil on canvas, 1927. Munch Museum, Oslo, mm m8oi. appeal to turn of-the-century decadents, and its connections to a contemporaneous, dualistic theory of psychology.^^ These ideas were prevalent and of manifest concern to Munch. However, Sarah E|)stein's recognition of "Munch's sensitivity to the way both men and women feel . . . |as well as his ability to| identify with either gender"^* is itself sensitive, descriptive of both portraits, and approaches their true and deeper signihcance for Munch. Gosta Svenaeus, in detailing the complex linkages among Munch's self-portraits and his conflation of several female hgures within the androgynous sell portraits, also alludes to the psychological density of these works.^^We must keep in mind, however, that in Self Par trait for the Mountain of Mankind Munch represents himself doubly, as both the woman or mother, and as the ignored child.^° Identifying himself as both mother and son in the depicted relationship is a symbolic way of engaging his mother's attention, being with her in any way he can, even if that means assuming her female form and joining her in her anxious state. Sphinx/Self Portrait for The Mountain of Mankind is a study of a relationship that Munch in sym- bolic, visual terms is trying to understand and resolve. These two, the mother and the child reaching for her, appear in the foreground of The Mountain of Mankind (1926, Munch Museum, Oslo), which was rejected as one of the murals for the Oslo University Aida Hall. Having various titles, including Towards the Light and Pillar of Mankind, the painting "depicted a number of naked people striving towards the light and rising up towards the sun like a pillar"^^ radiating from behind a mountain top. The image was meant to convey coherence and unity. Once freed from the Aula context, it became "a sort of extension of the Frieze of Life,"^^ and so formed part of his painting campaign to create a holis- tic picture of life. The two foreground figures. Munch as his mother and Munch as a child, appear, however, as a visual disruption to the people's progress. The preoccupied woman faces outward, the child reaches toward her, and both figures, thrust into the foreground near the artist’s and our own space, appear excluded from the movement toward the vital, healing force of the sun. In contrast. The Sun (no. 81 ), another mural for the Aula decorations does achieve coherence, perhaps by eliminating the human presence altogether. One title of Munch's oil sketch is Sphinx, that Greek bare breasted she-monster with the winged body of a lion, that repository of arcane knowledge who poses the riddle of life to Oedipus. Munch identifies himself with this perplexing and hybrid animal, as perplexingly hybrid as an androgyne, to know himself and his mother in their relation. The sketch is also called Self-Portrait, a time-honored genre by which artists have striven to know themselves, and here the artist recognizes and represents himself as the yearning child. The painting poses Munch's riddle of life that the Frieze of Fife attempts to solve. His great concern of the 1890s persisted as late as 1926 with these images. Edward and His Mother and Sphinx are connected to Munch's Hands (no. 49 ), in which disembod- ied hands reach toward a nude woman who appears withdrawn and aversive, but whose figure is pre- sented as a classical Aphrodite, an object of beauty. Her body and gaze are self-contained; her mouth turned downward in a fashion remarkably like the mother’s mouth in Sphinx. Her hands are placed behind her head, invisible, suggesting that she is exposed, vulnerable and that she lacks personal con- trol. As shown, she is a woman without hands, an impassive object, toward which other hands, their hands — brilliant red, blue, green, agitated — stretch but never reach. Madonna (nos. 54 and 55 ) is also, in various ways, related to this painting and to the two sketches showing Munch as a child reaching for his mother. Now the viewer looms over a woman in sexual embrace. The reaching child has been displaced, transformed and split into an implied sexual partner as well as the little figure at left, variously interpreted as a fetus, a shriveled tubercular child, or a death’s head. The little figure cannot reach out to the monumental nude because his hands are crossed piously on his chest; paradoxically he has assumed one of several gestures of the Virgin at the Annunciation, 37 16 that ot acceptance of her destiny.^'* With peevishness and resentment he looks towards the monumem tal Madonna, whose orgasmic pose alludes as well to a classical, dying Niobid.^^ This woman is at once sexually powertul and mortally wounded. Posed with one arm raised behind her head, one behind her back and both hands im isihle, her form is echoed by a red halo and swirling colors and lines that make her hgure oscillate, make her tigure sacred within the boundaries of Munch’s metaphysics. At the moment ot sexual ecstasy her face is tilted away, her mouth and eyes cast aversively downward. The imaged frame within the lithograph contains sperm swimming clockwise, away from the lit tie hgure at left, suggesting that he may he the source of the sperm. Yet he is separated from that sperm, and exists in the same swirling, chromatic space as the monumental woman — with her, yet without her. ^^ac^onna is a later elaboration of an earlier painting called Hulda (1886, now lost) which celebrated "Mrs. Heiberg’s 'or Milly Thaulow's sensuality.^^ Because Munch’s painful, frustrating love relationship with "Mrs. Heiberg” ended near the time of his stay in Saint-Cloud, he associated it with the deaths of his father, sister and mother. All these concerns are recorded in the Saint-Cloud Manifesto. As a Sym holist image. Madonna synthesizes experiences and moments in time; ignored child, attracting, fright- ening, fragile mother; fearsome, powerful women; sensual and beautiful lover. There are visual and written memoirs of a time shortly before Munch’s mother’s death: By the lower end of the large double bed were two small children's chairs, placed closely; the tall figure of a woman was standing next to them, large and dork against the window. She said she was going to leave them had to leave them — and asked if they would be sad when she was gone — and they must promise her to stay with Jesus and then they would meet her again in Heaven — They did not quite understand — but thought it was terribly sad and then they both cried, — sobbed — . Both a drawing and a lithograph (figs. 16 and 17 ) show Edvard and his older sister Sophie crouching at the foot of the bed, their heads in their hands and sobbing. Their gesture, resembling that of tbe scream- ing hgure in The Scream, conveys their confusion and horror: they can barely contain themselves. The bed is placed below a curtained window in which the mullions form a cross, the visualization perhaps, of their mother’s injunction to stay with jesus. The motif is thereby linked to the mullions-as-crosses in Night in Saint-Cloud, which expressed Munch’s disconsolation upon learning of his father's death. The sickly woman leans against the bedstead, supporting herself. Although Munch knew well the numer- ous photographs of his mother, he shows her here without any facial features, without a depicted iden- tity. The drawing includes a personification of death that emerges from behind,^^ a stick doppelgcinger also without facial features. Long hair obliterates the face of the Woman on the Shore, the woman in one of the paintings of Separation (1896, Munch Museum, Oslo) has no features, and a sketch that appears on the reverse of the cardboard of the original painting of The Scream shows a blank face, devoid of features.^* Both feebly living and dead figures have no way of communicating with us or the world; dead or alive, they will not respond. From early infancy, we signal who and where we are emotionally through facial expression. Emo- tional states are communicated through an exchange of facial and bodily cues. A baby’s mimetic mus- culature is virtually fully developed at birth, giving him a range of expressive possibilities that he carries throughout life.” Very cjuickly he learns that facial communication has meaning; through the ongoing back and forth he learns about bis own state and that of the other. He learns what he must do to elicit a response from his mother. If, however, his mother is withdrawn or depressed and unable to respond to fiim, he must join her in her withdrawn state if he is "to be with” her.’*° Essentially this is what Munch accom[jlished by portraying himself as his mother in Sphinx/Self Portrait for the Mountain of 16 Edvard Munch, Childhood Memory (By the Deathbed), drawing, 1894. Munch Museum, Oslo. MM T2358. 17 Edvard Munch, Childhood Memory (By the Deathbed), lithograph, 1916. Munch Museum, Oslo. MM C510-2. 38 Mankind. Munch’s images of his distracted mother, and here liis depiction of her as altogether faceless, suggest that he experienced trauma not just in loss of her to death, hut in loss of her within life. With continuing deadened responses, and emotionless facial expressions,’” the child becomes dis- traught, and feels it’s "his fault, feels responsible for the mother's lack of interest. Munch's empty faces, a stylistic idiosyncrasy seen in Childhood Memory, Separation, and in the sketch for The Scream, may indicate that he could not "read” women/his mother. A more nuanced interpretation might be that he felt something he had done or failed to do in his exchanges with a woman caused her to withdraw. Relating to a face empty of features is impossible; featureless faces become stylistic remnants of remorse and frustration in a difhcult emotional exchange. Conversely, The Kiss (nos. 31 and 33) and Lovers in the Waves represent for Munch a skewed and impossible ideal of interaction with women. Hair, representing attachment in Lovers in the Waves, joins the two figures completely, and forms soothing waves that suspend them in a beatific state; while faces, bodies and identities are totally merged in The Kiss. Munch has created, as a consequence, a mon- strous form that is clarified or obfuscated by his record of the inspiration for the image: / pressed her to my body. Her head rested on me. We stood like that for a long time. A wonderful soft warmth passed through me. Softly 1 pressed her against me. She looked up, to one side. She had such remarkable, dark, warm eyes that seemed to appear as if behind a veil. We said nothing. She was warm and I felt her body against mine. We kissed each other for a long time. Total silence reigned in the large atelier. I pressed my cheek against hers, and stroked her hair. Her cheeks glowed. "Beloved, say something." But she did not answer. I felt a burning tear on my hand. 1 looked at her. Her eyes were brimming with tears. "What is wrong with you?" I asked. I took her in my arms as if she were a small child. She embraced me convulsively. "My little girl," L said, "what is bothering you?" And I stroked her long hair. "lam afraid you might be sick," L said. "Say something." But she said nothing. She stood on the floor, her hair in disarray. Her eyes sparkled through the tears. "I hate you," she said.‘'^ His excerpt conflates merger, unresponsiveness, illness, parental concern ("My little girl"), some skewed attachment ("her hair in disarray”) and hatred,’’’' all remnants of what it means "to be with” a woman. It should also be regarded as a narrative sequence that moves swiftly from the warmth of merger and well-being to perplexity, alarm and enraged estrangement. We might understand the woman's "I hate you” as a projection that Munch has ascribed to her. Munch’s narration contains striking parallels to particular stylistic features of his paintings, and more than that, it echoes his enterprise as an artist giv- ing visual form to a sequence of momentous events within his life-long project, the Frieze of Life. Munch explored his visual memories of his mother's physical death in several paintings and prints, including our etching called The Dead Mother. Here, a little girl, her hands raised to her flushed cheeks and perhaps screaming, turns away from her inert mother who lies supine, rigid, on her deathbed. The elaboration of memory reaches catastrophic proportions in The Scream ( 1893 , National Gallery, Oslo)’'^ where the screaming figure turns from the blood-red landscape and trains its gaze on us. Munch’s diary entry that is often coupled with this image provides a chilling narrative: / was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. 39 / stopped, leaned apainst the railiinj. dead tired (my f riends looked at me and walked on) and I looked at the flaininc] clouds that hunp like blood and a sword (over the fjord and city) over the blue-black fiord and citv. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream pierc- ing nature.^^ Tlie haunting repetition, "niy friends looked at me and walked on . . . my friends walked on," stresses the gull between Munch and others, as does the painting's yawning, insuperable space and the divide between the screamer and the figures in the distance. Near and far, the figures are paradoxically chained to one another by the bridge railing. ‘‘Over tbe fjord and city, over the blue-black fjord and city,” also repeated for emphasis, refers to a meaningful place, the Akershus headland and the city just beyond the Oslo fjord where Munch and his mother had gone to look out at the sea. The two sites, that of the scream and the ritual walk with his mother are the same."*^ The origin of the scream ("I felt a loud, unend ing scream piercing nature") is also haunting, for "it could be tbe figure or Nature, or even both,”'** and mirrors the effluent merger of the hgure with the fjord and headland that rises beyond it. Another story, portions of whicb have been cited earlier, rehearses Munch’s fleeting encounter with his estranged lover, Mrs. Heiberg. Appearing in the Saint-Cloud Manifesto, it anticipates the emotional disintegration embodied in Muncb’s Scream and better suits its mood; At the University clock, he turned around and crossed the street, intently looking ahead. — There she comes. — He felt something like an electric shock pass through him. — How much like her this one looked from the distance. — And then finally she came. He felt long before that she had to come. . . . He SOU' only her pale, slightly plump face, horribly pale in the yellow reflection from the horizon and (ujainst the blue (sky) behind her. Never before had he seen her so beautif ul. How lovely was the bear ing of her head, a bit sorrowful. She greeted him with a weak smile and went on. . . . He felt so empty and so alone. Why did he not stop her and tell her she was the only one — that he deserved no love, that he never appreciated her enough, that everything was his fault. She looked so sad. Perhaps she is unhappy. Maybe she is the one who believes that he does not care for her, and that it is his own fault. What a spineless wretch you are, a yellow coward, a yellow yellow yellow yellow coward. He worked himself into a frenzy. Suddenly everything seemed strangely quiet. The noise from the street seemed far away, as if coming somewhere from above. He no longer felt his legs. They no longer wanted to carry him. All the people passing by looked so strange and odd, and he felt as if they were all staring at him, all these faces pale in the evening light.‘'^ Of course this diary entry has direct connections with Anxiety (1894, Munch Museum, Oslo), and with Spring Evening on Karl fohan Street (1893, Rasmus Mayer Collection, Bergen), but tbe usual narrative coupled with The Scream does not convey as powerfully the sense of loss of boundaries, tbe sense of emotional disintegration read in the Heiberg narrative^” and seen in tbe paintings and prints of The Scream. In fact, tbe silence of tbe above narrative is a striking contrast to the scream of the painting; but even so this polarity is a device recognizably Munch's, and again stresses loss of boundaries. Mrs. Heiberg's "plumj), horribly pale face" and her "sorrowful" way of carrying her head as well as the elec- tric shock that passes through Munch, and his description of a state that we can only call dissociated ("everything seemed strangely (juiet. . . . the noise from the street seemed far away, as if coming from somewhere from above. He no longer felt his legs. They no longer wanted to carry him. People . . . looked strange . . . staring at him . . .") — all suggest elements of The Scream. The painting and the Heiberg 40 narrative also suggest that Munch experienced dissociated stales. Dissociated stales apj)ear to he the nature of Munch's responses to the loss ol his love aliair, and his losses ol his father and sister, and the loss in life and in death of his mother — all intertwined in Munch's tiiind. The Scream distills terror, helplessness and protest in an image that is universal because it merges male and female, living figure and dead mummihed body, figure and ground, as the four year old Munch might have felt that the Akershus Headland just beyond the Oslo Fjord — that place they ritu ally visited, and where she looked out to sea — had absorbed his mother and him at last and forever. The juxtaposition of near and far paradoxically linked by the bridge brings a correlate of yearning and panicky flight. The small Riickenfiguren in the background — Munch's two friends with their backs turned to us, who might comfortably mediate our experience of the troublesome landscape, is con- trasted with the screamer, a “Halted Traveler" who alarmingly has turned to confront our gaze^^ and who no longer protects us from the impact of nature’s scream, because scream, nature, space and hgure are one. Raw emotional disintegration is projected into the wobbling screamer, into the swirling lines that take up his form within the blood red sky. And blood red because it represents his flesh and blood, his loss of self in the sea beyond the Akershus Headland; mother, women, himself. Down here by the beach, I feel that I find an image of myself — of life — of my life. The strange smell of seaweed and sea reminds me of her ... In the dark green water I see the color of her eyes. Way way out there the soft line where air meets ocean — it is as incomprehensible as life — as incomprehensible as death, as eternal as longing. And life is like that silent surface which reflects the light, clear colors of the cur. And underneath, in the depths — it conceals the depths — with its slime — its crawling crea- tures — like death. We understand each other. It is as though no one understands me better than the 53 ocean. Such altered states are a marker of a category of attachment called disorganized/disoriented. Researchers who are studying attachment patterns emergent at the beginning of human life have distinguished four types. One, disorganized and disoriented behavior, was observed when some toddlers were reunited with their mothers after a brief separation.^”' These studies indicate, and his art confirms, that as a child Munch had a disorganized attachment. Mother as the haven of safety as well as the source of terror, mother who is sought for comfort but whom one tries in panic to avoid — characterize Disorganized/Disoriented Attachment. The parent is "at once the source of and the solution to [the child's] alarm"” and the child “cannot find a solution to the paradox of fearing the figure whom he must approach for comfort in times of stress."” This para- dox is expressed in The Scream. Parents of children with disorganized attachments exhibit frightened or frightening behavior that indicates they have not resolved their own loss or trauma, and they may be vulnerable to entering altered states of consciousness, such as trance-like states. These parents have said that, "I sometimes 'step outside’ my usual self and experience an entirely different state of mind," or "at times 1 feel the presence of someone who is not physically there."^^ Both Munch's faceless personification of death — “someone who was not physically there” — emerging from behind his mother in By the Deathbed, and the figure of The Scream immediately spring to mind. Altered states appear to be transmitted intergenerationally. Extreme parental misattunement to a needy, approaching child, contradictory signals that at once elicit and reject the child’s loving intimacy, parent's role confusion, intrusive behaviors, disorientation and withdrawal are all associated with the child's disorganized and/or disoriented mode of attachment. In turn, the child becomes vulnerable to 41 18 altered states or dissociative disorders.^® The wobbling figure of The Scream assaults us as the embod- iment of a depersonalized state in the process of forming — or disintegrating. The infant’s disorganized attachment behavior of approach to the mother as a safe haven, and avoidance of her as the source of fear (figured also in Munch’s Attraction and Separation images) shift by age six to a later behavior of controlling the mother who often assumes a helpless stance (seen in the artist’s retrospective Outside the Gate drawings). These children “seem to actively attempt to con- trol or direct the parent’s attention and behavior and assume a role which is usually considered more appropriate for a parent with reference to a child.”” For Munch, as evidenced by diary entries and the Outside the Gate images, it was necessary to be his mother’s parent as well as to surrender to her moods and needs. In neither case, it seems, did she satisfy his own emotional needs as a developing child. That hardly could be expected. Munch’s mother was overwhelmed by the care of five children born in six years — all of whom "belonged to her while she belonged to none of them”^° — and overwhelmed by her own debilitation as a consumptive. The tubercle bacillus destroys the lung's capacity to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide; this is experienced as the inability to get enough air. The tubercular is truly consumed by the disease and wastes away, a physical reality that became a psychological reality for her 61 son. Munch watched his mother die slowly of asphyxiation. To the five-year old and younger Munch her behavior must have been terrifying, and he fled or collapsed in the face of it. On the other hand. Munch must have had resources of empathy that enabled him to care for her as he did. But he made great efforts never again to be so tied to a woman.*^ Munch’s work registers the import and the impact of his childhood relationship with his mother. This dynamic is later carried into his adult relationships with women, and then represented in Attrac- tion, Separation and in other images. Munch never married. Believing that the dreaded entanglements of an enduring relationship were toxic and would inevitably end in loss, he enjoyed only serial rela- tionships with women. Serial relationships allowed him to recognize something familiar, something he had brought forward from his earliest days: repeated experiences of painful attachment and loss. Through serial relationships he could recognize himself in an old, familiar pattern he knew well. This paradox is embodied in his imagery: violent spaces separating men and women, looming shadows figuring wishes or fears, willful strands of women’s hair reaching toward men, stiffly separated figures, deadened women lost to the sea, seducing and repulsing women. Munch’s experience with his mother was not his only early experience with women. His life with his sister Sophie, undoubtedly much freer and happier, nevertheless reinforced many of its qualities. Of the siblings left behind when their mother died, Sophie, the oldest at age six, was the artist’s favorite. A retrospective drawing of Sophie and Edvard, fictionally called Berta and Karlemann (fig. 18), shows the two facing the world together as allies. They are like romantic wanderers, like Riickenfiguren, for their backs are turned to us as they contemplate a valley stretching out before them, and they mediate the scene for us. The ground rises on either side; there is the dead tree at left, the live one at right, as might be found in Christian images of such critical moments in time as the Resurrection.^^ Certainly the time just after their mother’s death was critical for Sophie and Edvard, and perhaps Munch is show ing us how the two defended themselves and met the world: Sophie holds her doll; Edvard holds his walking stick to show himself as a romantic wanderer. There is a space between them but they hold hands: their arms seem to run together as one arm. 18 Edvard Munch, Berta and Karlemann, drawing, c. 1888/1890. Munch Museum, Oslo. OKK T. 2761-6. 42 Arne Eggum has convincingly linked this drawing with the 1885-86 [lainting (National Gallery, Oslo) and the prints of The Sick Child (no. 9), comparing the landscape of the retrospective drawing with the landscape that appears at the bottom of onr drypoint. He finds the clouds and the two living trees comparable, but does not question why Munch would provide a landscape at the bottom of an image in which a sick child gazes out a window. Undoubtedly the landscape is meant to be tbe very one the girl is looking at, a landscape that, like the Berta and Karlemann setting of past comradeship with her brother, she longs for. Eggum sees the ambiguity of the linked hands in the Berta and Karlemann drawing as resembling the figures’ hands in The Sick Child. He also notes the system of hatched lines that surrounds Sophie in the drawing, in the first version of the painting which has been reworked perhaps to disguise them, and in the etchings. These lines oscillate around the girl, and we can infer that they allude to her fragility and ultimate death. The drawing appeared near Munch’s diary account of the children's learning of their mother’s death. The sick girl is Sophie. Munch used as a model a girl who was fifteen, near Sophie’s age when she died. For the bereaved mother he posed his aunt Karen Bjolstad who, in fact, must have cared for Sophie in her last days. A red-haired girl is shown in profile, looking beyond her mother’s bowed form toward a window as if seeking the sunlight that might cure her. The profile composition — the lost profile — is befittingly based on Renaissance medals and commemorative, posthumous portraits also shown in profile.®'' Her red head is boldly framed by the white pillow, and behind it, by the curved edge of the headboard, a segment of a halo. The mother might be thinking of her lost daughter, whose profiled form appears dematerialized, even ethereal in many of the images and in our exhibited print from a private collec- tion. The girl’s gaze out to an infinite space, her obliviousness to the world and to her mother, the com- positional source,®® the halo, and the ambiguity of the linked hands all support the idea that the two figures do not exist at the same time or in the same space and that the figure is not taken from the life, but is a commemoration of Munch’s dead sister. The flattened forms and space render the image of Sophie an icon to be venerated. The monumental size of the painting implies that this image was enormously important to the artist. But more telling is that Munch reworked the original painting more than twenty times — for over a year — to try to recapture "a certain mood."®® "What 1 wanted to bring out,” he wrote" — are things that cannot be measured — .’’®^The mood seems to have been associated with intended atmospheric streaks that ran down the surface of a rather grey painting. In repainting and trying to return to the original mood. Munch discovered that my own eyelashes had contributed to the impression of the picture. — / therefore painted them as hints of shadows across the picture. — In a way, the head became the picture. — Wavy lines appeared in the picture — peripheries — with the head as center.^^ Since they cannot be seen by the viewer’s gaze outward, "eyelashes" might encode Munch’s own tears through which he painted his sister, his ally. He might have wanted to incorporate, by a kind of abstract- ing atmosphere, his remorseful and loving feelings in his homage. Munch made a conflicted record, however, undoing his work as much as creating it, for the canvas surface is impacted with paint layers, erasures and deep scorings. This strange, if innovative technique of The Sick Child is repeated in the Self-Portrait { 1886, National Gallery, Oslo),®® linking the two paintings and indicating that the brother and dead sister were still allied 43 in the artist’s mind. Munch’s averted gaze is not so much disdainful/” as it is wary and guilty. He seems to he looking inward to mull over the meaning of the past, or warily looking at the painting of The Sick Girl itself and evaluating his relationship to it. Like L'Art Brut, both paintings are overwrought with gougings and tracks of Munch’s obsessive activity, rendering a spaceless, scabrous environment. Weav- ing might be a better metaphor, for there is a sense that Munch, in both paintings, is pulling together strands to form a tapestry of meaning concerning Sophie, her death and his relation to it; but then like Penelope he also unravels his work, scrapes out, starts again. The Sick Child served, successfully or not. as a means by wbicb Munch could deal with Sophie’s death, as well as all the deaths he had wit- nessed. As such it accumulates and distills meanings over time and stands, (want la lettre, as Munch's first Symbolist painting, his hrst in the Frieze of Life. Munch himself must have considered The Sick Child directly significant for him over a long career, and central to the Frieze of Life, for he is shown with it in a 1938 photograph on the occasion of his seventy-hfth birthday. Seated calmly with his painting hand exposed to us, he positions his chair clos- est to The Sick Child while other paintings of the Frieze of Life spread over the walls and floor of his winter studio at Ekely. Heller notes the anachronistic character of this photograph that documents paintings Munch executed for the most part in the 1890s, and not current work.^^ Paintings within the Frieze of Life, and particularly The Sick Child, constitute Munch’s life work. Because it was a painting critical to his oeuvre yet one he felt he had not resolved and would con- tinue to work on, and because it layered meanings and memories within its surface, it was appropriate to call this Symbolist painting "Study”, but the title did not obviate or deflect attack. In October 1886, Munch exhibited Study to scornful reviews, despite Hans Jaeger’s manipulations and Jaeger’s expecta- tions that since it conformed to his ideas of painting from life’s experiences, it would move the public. Thereupon Jaeger told Munch not “to paint pictures of this kind” again. Surprisingly, Munch acqui- esced, devaluing the painting himself and allowing his work of the next few years to revert to a con servative and weaker style absent of the affective charge and technical interest of the Self-Portrait and Study. He painted nothing as experimental and Symbolist until tbe later components of tbe Frieze of Life in the 1890s. The public reception of Study probably reawakened Munch’s profound sense of guilt about Sophie’s death, experiencing critics’ caustic jibes as retaliation for her death — for which he considered himself responsible. Her death is described in diary notes written at Saint-Cloud, where he learned of his father’s death, and where he conceived a new, emergent world view of death transforming into life and leading again to death. It was there that, after a hiatus of four years, he conceived the series of paint- ings called the Frieze of Life — although in The Sick Child he had already painted the hrst element. In the winter and spring of 1877 when he was fourteen, Edvard himself was sick, yet again, with tuber- culosis. "Tbe sun came with its hrst beams of light ... it grew larger and larger and he let the sun shine on him," Munch wrote in the Saint-Cloud diary; for miraculously by late summer and early fall be was recovering and flirting with a girl, a friend of his sister, and Sophie was interested in boys, too. Then ' Berta" \was\ coughing faintly . . . and she was red in her cheeks and irascible. One fall day she junjped up and threw her arms around her father's neck — She was spitting blood — Then she was put to bed — Heavy days 44 After Sophie died the artist inwardly railed over his fatlier's failure as a medical doctor to save his sis- ter. Dr. Munch had offered Sophie the consolation of religious belief in place of a cure, while telling her he wished he were the one who would die. No doubt the artist wished it too. Now in Saint Cloud his father was dead. The artist particularly railed over his own responsibility for Sophie's death, not merely as a sur vivor, but because he thought he had given her the tuberculosis that had killed her. Furthermore, Munch recorded in the Saint-Cloud diary that Sophie had asked "dear, sweet Karlemann to take this away from me, it hurts so, won't you do that? . . . Yes, 1 know you will."^^ Fie had been able to do nothing. These tremendous burdens of guilt must have caused Munch to feel that “to be with" is to harm or be harmed; as much as people, particularly women, were seductive, noxious and repellent, he, too, was singularly dangerous, even deadly. We might revisit Munch’s stylistic habits with this in mind. The means by which he distanced figures, through lunging perspectives, stiff postures, and averted glances may redound to men, to Munch himself, as much as to women, ft takes two to dance The Dance of Life (1899-1900, National Gallery, Oslo): I danced with my first love; it was the memory of her. The smiling, golden-haired woman enters and wishes to pluck the flower of love, but it will not let itself be picked. And on the other side is she dressed in black, gazing in sorrow at the dancing couple — an outcast, just as I was cast out by her dance. And in the background, the raging mob storms about in wild embraceJ^ The news of his father's death in Saint-Cloud rehred Munch's inspiration and set in motion the work he had started in The Sick Child. He returned to creating a whole art, an oeuvre spread over many years and within many paintings, prints and drawings whose coherence he constantly contributed to and maintained. Munch "considered his paintings his children"^^and if one were sold from the whole, he found it necessary to quickly remake the lost component. The Frieze of Life is Munch’s successful effort to maintain his coherence — after all, the quintessentially human aim.^* The paintings of the frieze became the means by which Munch told himself a story that, as traumatic as it was, made a kind of sense; he made it coherent for himself and for us. And his Frieze of Life rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the specific event of his father’s death, and from all the deaths that he had experienced. The imagery of the Frieze of Life is the life that emerges from the deaths in Munch’s history. How can we not feel gratitude? How can we not know implicitly that it is all true? 1 Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, New York: Viking Press, 1972, p. 22, 2 Quoted by Ragna Stang, Edvard Munch, New York: Abbeville Press, 1977, p. 74. 3 See Stang, Edvard Munch, pp. 33, 72, 73; and Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 55-58 and passim. Munch's dis- cussions with the Danish poet Emanuel Goldstein were undoubtedly important to this process. Throughout his early years Munch seems to have gravitated to what may be termed either alter-egos or father substitutes, including the writer Hans Jaeger and the poet Goldstein, who bear some resemblance to Munch's story-telling father. Munch's relationship to his father demands scrutiny, if that is possi- ble within the mythology that Munch constructed. See Reinhold Heller, "Response to the Reviews by Thomas L. Sloan and George Moraitis," in Psychoanalytic Perspec- tives on Art II, Mary Mathews Gedo, editor, Hillsdale, NJ : The Analytic Press, 1987, p. 339. 4 Quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p.103. 5 1 thank Jeremy Nahum warmly for his guidance through the labyrinths of developmental research. My missteps should not be attributed to him. His patient readings of this manu- script and his trenchant comments have been invaluable. 6 Ross Bresler is to be thanked for pointing out a classical source in Roman statuary and coins (a captured province was represented as a figure seated on the ground, his head in his hand), as well as a Renaissance source (the sleeping Joseph). 7 Munch certainly may have known Goya's prints, which since 1856 had been viewable in Paris at the Bibliotheque Imperiale as it was then called. See Tomas Harris, Goya: Engravings and Lithographs 1 , Oxford: 1964, pp. 11-12. Munch found Goya's forebear, Velazquez "very interesting" 45 and later wondered whv no one had noticed the connec- tion between his paintings and those of the Spaniard. The connection is ex ident in the Portrait of Karl jensen-Hjell, tSSs (prixate collection). See Munch et la France, Paris: Musee d'Orsay. 1991. p. 43. S Heller, .Munch: His Life and Work. p. 40, 9 The xvoman is Oda Lasson Krohg, and the staring, musta- chioed man at right is |orgen Englehart, according to Patricia Berman and lane x’an Nimmen. See Munch and Women. Image and Myth, Alexandria, VA: Art Serx'ices International, 1997, p. 27, Heller identifies him as "a whole- sale grocer.’ in ’Form and Formation of Fdvard Munch's Frieze of Life,’ in Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, London; National Gallery, 1992, p. 29. Fyes tightly shut, Fngelhart the 'grocer’ seems to reappear in the drypoint xariously called Harpy at Vampire (no, 42). If Munch x'iewed Fnglehart as a victim of the winged harpy Oda Lasson Krohg who preys on men, we might surmise that Munch x iexved her free, sexual behavior negatively — which is not to say that he did not admire Krohg's “strength, humor and confidence,’ as Berman and van Nimmen sug- gest in Munch and Women, Image and Myth, p.27. 10 Munch himself can be found on the left, looking downward. 11 Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, p. 38. 12 There are five men, including the husband, as there were fixe children. Heller counts six {Edvard Munch: The Scream, p. 38); and "staring adoringly up at his bohemian love,” may be Hans Jaeger, but his small head has seemingly been represented as a carved stopper emerging from the fore- ground wine bottle. The humor alone in this ambiguous print requires more investigation. 13 Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, p. 18. 14 Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor, The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch. New Haven: Yale University, 1996, p. 9. 15 Without any comment from the artist, we cannot know why Munch chose the colors he did. Munch’s color choices may be intuitive and personally expressive, may reflect the late nineteenth-century ideas of Michel Eugene Chevreul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Spiritualism, or may conflate all these sources. See Norma S. Steinberg, "Munch in Color,’ Harvard University Art Museum Bulletin, vol. Ill, no. 3, Spring 1995. 16 A more direct source might be Edgar Degas’ late coiffure scenes showing a woman having her hair brushed. Degas’ The Coiffure (1896), a painting now in the National Gallery, Oslo, shows a woman bending forward as her hair is pain- fully brushed by another woman. Munch, in Paris in 1896, could have seen this painting in Degas’ studio. Prelinger and Parke-Taylor, Symbolist Prints, p. 167, note that the few impressions of Munch’s Woman on the Shore were printed on inferior paper with tacky ink that produced a coarse surface, possibly not unlike the broken, smudged surface of Degas' Oslo painting. The Degas source could also have contributed to the Symbolist aspects of Munch's print. 17 Melancholic women are a staple of Romantic painting and sculpture at the beginning of the century. See Jacques- Louis David, Antonio Canova, Francis Danby, Marie Charp- entier, etc. 18 Prelinger and Parke-Taylor, Symbolist Prints, p, 19. 19 Quoted by Carla Lathe, “Munch and Modernism in Berlin 1892 -1903,’ in Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, Mara- Helen Wood, editor, London: National Gallery Publications, 1992. p. 43. 20 Quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p, no. 21 Arne Eggum, “Major Paintings," in Edvard Munch: Sym- bolf. and Images, Washington: National Gallery of Art, >97». P 59 22 At the least hair may symbolize fertility, the power of love, the issuing of longing from within the mind, bereavement; but what are the visual sources for Munch's distinctive use of hair? He may have known the Pre-Raphaelite broth- erhood and Rossetti whose Astarte Syriaca (1875-77) bears a resemblance. See Edith Hoffman, "Some Sources for Munch’s Symbolism,” in Apollo 81, Feb. 1965, p. 90. He may have known Whistler’s White Girl (1862) since he had already drawn on Whistler's moody colors for Night in Saint-Cloud and other paintings; and he certainly knew the Botticelli Venus, of all these figures the one whose long curling hair seems to move suggestively, even seductively. 23 1896, Munch Museum, Oslo. 24 See Bente Torjusen, Words and Images of Edvard Munch, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co, 1986. 25 Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, p. 59. 26 Eggum, "The Theme of Death” in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 157 cites Edvard Munch, Manu- script T 2761. 27 Patricia G. Berman, Edvard Munch: Mirror Reflections, West Palm Beach: The Norton Gallery of Art, 1986, p. 92. 28 Sarah G. Epstein, "The Mighty Play of Life: Munch and Religion," in The Prints of Edvard Munch: Mirror of His Life, Oberlin, OH: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1983, pp. 145-146. 29 Gbsta Svenaeus, Edvard Munch: Ini mdnnlichen Gehirn II, Lund: Skrifter Utgivna av Vetenskaps-Societeten, 1973, pp. 305-309. 30 I am grateful to Claude Cernuschi for suggesting this dynamic to me. 31 For a description of such states see E. Z. Tronick and The Change Process Study Group (Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, Alexandra M. Harrison, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Alexander C. Morgan, Jeremy P. Nahum, Louis Sander, Daniel N. Stern), "Dyadically Expanded States of Consciousness and The Process of Therapeutic Change,” in Infant Mental Health Journal, vol. 19, no. 3, 1998, pp. 290-299. 32 Quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 245. 33 Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 245. 34 1 am grateful to Jeffery Howe for bringing this to my attention. 35 Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, p. 53. 36 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 127, 37 Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 163. 38 See Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, pp. 113-114, note 30. 39 1 refer to the baby as "he" and the caretaker as “she" for narrative clarity and flow. 40 Louis Sander has shown that a central, ongoing paradox of existence is to learn how to "be with and yet distinct from" the other. See Sander, "Paradox and resolution: From the beginning," in Handbook of child and adolescent psychiatry, Vol. I, Infants and preschoolers: Development and syndromes, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998, pp. 153-160. 41 Such facial expressions absent of feeling have been stud- ied in "The Still Face," a laboratory study of affective inter- actions between mothers and very young infants. In this study the mother was asked to assume an expression entirely void of feeling after a period of warm interaction with her toddler. Predictably the toddler became upset and then alarmed because he could not elicit any response from his mother. (Video tapes of this study are unexpect- edly alarming to the viewer as well.) See Colwin Trevarthen, "Communication and Cooperation in early infancy: a description of primary intersubjectivity," in M. Bullowa, editor. Before Speech, London: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 321-347; and E. Z. Tronick, "Emotions and Emotional Communication in Infants," A friencriri Psychol- ogist 44 (2), February 1989, pp. 112-119. 46 42 Munch's self-castigation when "Mrs. Heiberg” barely acknowledges him on the street (". . . Everything was his fault. She looked so sad . . . Maybe she is the one who believes that he does not care for her, and that it is his own fault . . .”) is a true echo of such feelings of responsibility for relational failure and disappointment. 43 Quoted by Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 76. 44 Munch's narrative seems highly distorted. It can also be understood as Symbolist writing by a Symbolist artist. 45 A comparison of Woman on the Shore, so Symbolist in its mystery, abstraction and condensations, and The Scream, shows that the latter is a forceful embodiment of Munch’s expressionism. For a complete discussion of Munch’s importance to the German Expressionists see Claude Cer- nuschi’s essay in this volume. 46 Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream, p. 107. Heller trans- lates and includes all the versions of the narrative. This one is dated january 22, 1892. 47 Eggum also links the site of The Scream and the destina- tion of the figures in Outside the Cate. See Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 162. 48 Elizabeth Prelinger, "When the Halted Traveler Hears the Scream in Nature: Preliminary Thoughts on the Transfor- mation of Some Romantic Motifs," in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive. Presented on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Muse- ums, 1995, p. 201. 49 Quoted by Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 40, 50 The shift from within the mind of the narrator (" — There she comes — ”), to third person, and then to second person (“What a spineless wretch you are") also suggests shifting boundaries of identity. 51 The ambiguous gender of the screaming figure, frequently seen as female, might be the result of a similar ambiguity in the source for it, the Peruvian mummy at the Trocadero in Paris which Munch may have known directly or through Paul Gauguin’s images of it. See Robert Rosenblum, "Intro- duction: Edvard Munch: Some Changing Contexts,” in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 7. 52 See Prelinger, “Halted Traveler”, in Seymour Slive, pp. 198- 203. 53 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2782), quoted by Trygve Ner- gaard, "Despair,” in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 131. 54 Secure, Insecure/Avoidant, Insecure-Ambivalent/Resistant were the three other types of attachment patterns observed when the children were reunited with their mothers. See Mary Main, “Discourse, Prediction, and Recent Studies in Attachment: Implications for Psychoanalysis," /ourna/ of the American Psychoanalytic Association 61, 1993, pp. 209-243. 55 Mary Main, quoted by Karlen Lyons-Ruth and Deborah (acobvitz, “Attachment Disorganization: Unresolved Loss, Relational Violence and Lapses in Behavioral and Attentional Strategies,” in J. Cassidy and P. Shaver, editors. Handbook of Attachment Theory and Research, New York: Guilford Press, 1999, p. 523. Karlen Lyons-Ruth was the first to see the connection between disorganized attachment and The Scream. I owe her a large debt of gratitude. 56 Lyons-Ruth and jacobvitz, “Attachment Disorganization,” p. 523. Munch must have repeatedly witnessed his mother’s terror when she could not get enough air to breathe; he, in turn, must have become terrified. 57 Lyons-Ruth and [acobvitz, “Attachment Disorganization,” P- 539- 58 Lyons-Ruth and Jacobvitz, “Attachment Disorganization,” p. 539. These are fugues, trance states, dissociative identity disorders, experiences of depersonalization and derealization. and ideas of possession. There is no (juestion that Munch's father’s behavior contributed to the artist's psychological state. That, however, is another, large territory to cover. 59 Lyons-Ruth and jacobvitz, “Attachment Disorganization,” PP- 532-33- 60 As Heller said of the lovers surrounding Olga Lasson Krohg in Kristiania Bohemia II. 61 Might not the several images of the Red Virginia Creeper (see also no. 74 ), which shows a blood red vine spreading over a house facade, refer to diseased alveoli of tubercular lungs? In the painting called The Red Vine (1900; Munch Museum, Oslo) the red is an aggressive monochrome. In the foreground an anxious looking man, linked to the house by a roadway, seems to be recalling the scene in his mind's eye. 62 As an adult artist Munch must have been aware of the romantic mythologizing of the female tuberculosis patient — that she was by turns euphoric and sexually passionate, but withdrawn from life; that her translucent pallor con- firmed her spiritual status while placing her in the first ranks of the fashionable. As a child, however. Munch would hardly have experienced his mother's or his sister’s illnesses as part of this romantic myth. For an insightful and sensitive discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth- century attitudes toward illness see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. I thank Jeffery Howe for reminding me of this essay. 63 See Piero della Francesca, Resurrection, late 1450s (fresco), Pinacoteca, Sansepolcro, 64 See John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1963, pp. 35-41 and passim. I am grateful to Charles Colbert who confirmed my hunch for the source. 65 Having won a scholarship to study in Paris in May of 1885, Munch visited the Louvre where there were plenty of commemorative profile portraits to be seen, the red-haired Princess of the Este Family by Pisanello (c, 1440) being but one. 66 Hans Jaeger, 1886, quoted by Eggum, Edvard Munch: Sym- bols and Images, p. 144. Furthermore, Munch worked on variations of the painting over his entire life and made many prints and drawings of the motif. “To no other motif did Munch turn with such obsessive regularity,” Heller states in Munch: His Life and Work, p. 21. 67 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2771, quoted by Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 21, 68 Edvard Munch, 1929, quoted by Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 147. 69 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 39. 70 As Heller feels. Munch: His Life and Work, p. 39. 71 See Stephen A. Mitchell, “Penelope’s Loom: Psychopathol- ogy and the Analytic Process,” in Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 271-306. 72 Reinhold Heller, “Form and Formation of Edvard Munch’s Frieze of Life” in Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, Lon- don: The National Gallery, 1992, p. 25. 73 Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 144. 74 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2770, quoted by Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, pp. 170-171. 75 Quoted by Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 19. 76 Edvard Munch, Manuscript 2759 quoted, by Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 173. 77 Prelinger and Parke-Taylor, Symbolist Prints, p. 9. 78 Munch’s art is not a means to create a defensive shield that Munch hid behind, as Heller, and it seems George Moraitis suggest. See Heller, “Response to the Reviews . . .” Psycho- analytic Perspectives on Art, p. 341. 47 nocturnes: THE MUSIC OF MELANCHOLY, AND THE MYSTERIES OF LOVE AND DEATH JEFFERY HOWE Nature is not something tliat can be seen by the eye alone — it lies also within the soul, in pictures seen by the inner eye.' — Edvard Munch. 1907/08 Edvard Munch broke from his Norwegian contemporaries and their literal realism to create a new sym- bolic art that would express subjective states of mind and emotion. To depict not just the visible, but the invisible, he used color and the materials of art in bold new ways that were meant to be read sym- bolically. Paradoxically, his subjective approach allowed his private experiences to reveal a series of uni- versal images that he called the Frieze of Life.^ These works represented the gamut of human love and despair; Munch gambled that viewers would recognize the truth of these images and the parallels in their own lives. In this essay, 1 will explore a number of themes in Munch's work that evolved from the depiction of night visions and the search for spiritual truth. 1 will try to unravel the intertwined threads of per- sonal and universal concerns in his art, beginning, as he did, by exploring the challenge of painting a state of mind, and the aesthetic issues of representation and Symbolist art. The hrst section of the essay will focus on the problematic intersection of the inner world of the artist, and the outer world of soci- ety and nature as seen in the paintings and prints of Melancholy. Next 1 will examine some related mys- teries of sexuality and death in Munch’s art. Finally, Munch's search for transcendence and immortality will be analyzed in a number of overtly spiritual works. This investigation will consider a number of interlocking issues, including the psychological condition of melancholia and its meanings in the late nineteenth century, and the relationship of art and autobiography. 1 will briefly sketch the aesthetic principles of the emerging Symbolist movement, and contrast them with Realism. Various aspects of Munch’s attempt to find a visual language suitable to represent interior emotion, including the anal ogy of music, and the role of chance in art, will also be scrutinized. The salient visual themes will include the representation of melancholia, and images of sexuality and religion. melancholia: heartbreak and creativity Melancholy figures prominently in Edvard Munch's art, especially in a number of his better known paintings and j)rints in the early 18905.^ These works not only align Munch with the fashionaf)le pes- simism of the fin (le-siecle, they also signify a new emj)hasis on mood and emotion, and were recognized at the time as reflecting a new awareness of Symbolist ideals."* Munch's Melancholy, a color woodcut of 1896 (no. 13 ), shows a man sitting alone by the sea shore, watching the horizon and listening to tfie waves, in a jjose traditionally associated with the psychological condition of melancholy. The term 'melancholia" was loosely defined in the nineteenth century, and can range from contemplative sadness 48 19 20 19 Albrecht Diirer, Melancolia I, engraving, 1514. Private collection. 20 Edvard Munch, Night in Saint- Cloud, oil on canvas, 1890. National Gallery, Oslo. 21 Max Klinger, The Artist in the Garret (C. Krohg), etching and aquatint, late 1870s, Private collection. to paralyzing depression. Melancliolia is also coiulncive to reflection and philoso{)hical meditations. I’erhaps the most famous [irecedenl for this pose is Albrecht Diirer's print Melnncliolid I of 1514 (fig. 19). Since Diirer's time, the melancholic temperament has been identified with artists.^ in the late nineteenth century this [)ose and the associated condition of melancholia enjoyed new stature as the [ihysiognomy and psychology of the artist became a matter of intense interest. Munch’s personal identification with the image of melancholia shows signihcantly in his paintings and prints of Night in Saint-Cloud of 1890 (National Gallery, Oslo, fig. 20). The composition is based on sketches Munch made of Emanuel Goldstein. Reinhold Heller has 21 traced the relationship of the melancholic mood in this image to the spiritual crisis caused by the death of Munch's father, which occurred while the artist was in France, and the unresolved conflicts that con- tinued to haunt him.* Other members of Munch's family suffered from severe mental illness. Munch's sister Laura was subject to depression, and was bospitalized in the 1890s. She is the subject of one of Munch's most poignant portraits, titled Melancholy, of 1898 (Munch Museum, Oslo). She is depicted in this work with a trance-like gaze, turned away from the window and lost in private thoughts. Both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, many have long believed that there is a special relationship between artists and melancholics. Besides Munch, the most famous modern example is probably Vincent van Gogh, whose portraits of Dr. Gachet (1890) also recreate the classical melancholia pose. Rudolf and Margot Wit- tkower charted the early history of the association of artists and melancholy in their book Born Under Saturn; the character and conduct of artists . . ^ Erwin Panofsky used his analysis of Albrecht Diirer’s print Melancholia 1 of 15 14 as a key to the artist's character and sym- bolism.* Ancient Greek medical theory generally attributed melan- cholia to an imbalance of the bodily humors; a preponderance of black bile from the spleen supposedly caused the "Saturnine” character. The theory of the humors was accepted as science in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and continued to be a powerful metaphor in the nine- teenth century, as evidenced by Charles Baudelaire's poem "Spleen" in Les Fleurs du Mai (1857). The central figure of Auguste Rodin's The Gates of Flell (Rodin Museum, Paris), is a man seated in the pose of melancholia, known in separate casts as The Thinker. Among the extensive commentaries on the causes of melancholy, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy of 165 1 was the most notable.^ Bur- ton exhaustively catalogued the varieties of the condition, and particularly highlighted the role of unhappy love in its onset. According to Panofsky, Diirer's Melancholia figure suffers from a creative block. Max Klinger's etch- ing of The Artist in the Garret of the late 1870s, a portrait of Christian Krohg, a Norwegian painter who shared a studio with Klinger in Germany, may suggest the same problem (fig. 2l).“ A copy of Manette Salomon, a French Realist novel by the de Goncourts published in 1867, lies at Krohg's feet. This novel, which described artists' lives and melancholia, was a favorite with painters; van Gogh included the same book in one of his melancholic portraits of Dr. Gachet. 49 1 Many nineteentli-century writers explored melancholia and its relationship to insanity, as well as its parallels to creativity. In 1863, Cesare Lombroso argued that genius and madness were inextricably linked in his book Tfw Man of Genius}^ The question of the nature and source of the creative faculty intrigued the intellectuals and artists of Scandinavia and central Europe. The Romantic era had ush- ered in a new emphasis on imagination and creativity, as part of a trend elevating idealistic concep- tions over craft standards as the basis for judging art. Artists and psychologists converged in the late nineteenth century in their efforts to define and locate the source of creativity. The consensus was that the ultimate source of creative imagination lay in an uncharted region of the mind — the unconscious. The primarv manifestations of the unconscious were thought to be the mental phenomena of dreams, hvpnotic trances, and creativity, and the physical forces of sexuality. The discovery of the unconscious part of the mind generated broad scientific and public interest in Europe in the 1880s. At the time, both materialists and mystics shared a curiosity about the work- ings of the mind. The materialist viewed the unconscious component of mental activity as a zone, the workings of which had yet to be understood. Tbe mystic sought in the unconscious the revelation of the divine, and hoped to discredit the positivist scientist with his own tool: the human mind. In the wake of the conceptual revolution led by Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, wherein the very nature of the world came to be seen as subjective, the issue of how the mind works assumed a new importance. Books such as Carl Gustav Cams’ Psyche of 1846, and Eduard von Hartmann’s monumen- tal Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868) had enormous impact in Germany and elsewhere as they went through multiple editions and were widely translated. Both Carus and von Hartmann were deeply indebted to Schopenhauer's concept of the unconscious aspects of life as expressed in The World as Will and Idea (1819).^^ Jean Paul and others spoke of the "inner Africa” of the mind, a new continent that, like the unconscious, awaited its explorers.^'' In the first book on Munch, published in 1894, Franz Servaes asserted that Munch had no need to travel to Tahiti to explore new worlds; he car- ried his "inner Tahiti” within him.^^ The complex nature of the mind was widely recognized in the late nineteenth century; Munch’s friend Richard Dehmel asked rhetorically in 1893: Are the results of modern psychophysiology ... so little known that an educated person does not know how several totally different personalities can operate effectively in one and the same individual, be it simultaneously, in phases, consciously, “unconsciously"; compare the extremely minute works by Richet, Bielt, Forel, Bernheim, Moll, etc}^ Historical studies, such as Lancelot Whyte's The Unconscious Before Freud (i960) and Henri Ellen- berger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), bave shown that the discovery of the unconscious had begun as early as the late seventeenth century.^^ Mid and late nineteenth-century studies made the concept fashionable and laid the foundation for the discoveries of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Frank j. Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind has traced Freud’s conceptual roots with particular precision and insight. Sulloway notes that "the history of psychology in the nineteenth century may be viewed as essentially a development away from philosophy and toward biology,”^^ Still, the philosophical admixture in the works of the pre-Freudian psychologists attracted Symbolist artists and writers, since it corresponded to their own creative blending of art and [ihilosophy. Muncb, the son of a physician, often associated with medical men later in life; his friend Stanislaw Przybyszewski had studied neurology. Before Munch, one of the artists most associated with the new psychological developments was the German Max Klinger, whose print cycles sometimes prefigure 50 22 22 Max Klinger, Night, etching and aquatint, from the series On Death, Part 1, 1889. Private collection. Surrealism with their depiction of dream like imagery.^’ There is a striking resemhlance between Munch’s Melancholy and Klinger's Night of 1889 (hg. 22), which is from a series of etchings entitled On Death. These works share a nocturnal setting, with a single figure in a contemplative pose. Recent research has shown that Munch was introduced to Klinger's works hy Christian Krohg as early as 1880.^° The melancholic condition and night seem to go together. Reacting against the sundrenched period of Impressionism, and the strong clear light of socially conscious Realists such as Christian Krohg, Munch and his Symbolist colleagues explore the nuances of night and shadow. Munch used the melancholia pose frequently; this woodcut essentially repeats the composition of his painting of 1892, titled simply The Yellow Boat (National Gallery, Oslo). A dejected hgure sits on the shore at Aasgaardstrand, while a man and a woman walk away in the distance. The seated figure on the shore is Munch's friend Jappe Nilssen, who was involved in a romantic triangle with Christian Krohg and his wife Oda Lasson Krohg at this time.^^ Most commentators assume that the couple in the distance are Christian and Oda Krohg, and that the work represents the theme of jealousy, as well as melancholy. The flattened forms, abstract use of color and symbolic pose render the picture more iconic, and less readable as a Realist narrative. Christian Krohg praised this painting when it was shown in Oslo in 1891, noting that it was one of the earliest Scandinavian paintings related to Symbolism.^^ Instead of criticizing Munch for his turn from literal realism, Krohg praised his friend's new idealist aesthetic and emphasis on mood: A long shoreline that moves inwards over the picture and becomes a delicious line, which is remark- ably harmonic. This is music. Curving gently, it stretches downward towards the quiet water with a few small, discrete interruptions. . . . It may even be true that this is related most closely to music and not to painting, but in any case it is brilliant music. Munch should be given credit for being a composer. ... It is an extremely moving picture, solemn and severe — almost religious. . . . All this relates to Symbolism, the latest tendency of French art.^^ The curving line of the shore extends in space, and may thus be analogous to the passage of time, since representing spatial distance is one of the few ways that a visual artist can imply temporal duration. Krohg equated the sinuous curvature of this line with music, such analogies or correspondences con- vinced him that Munch had become a Symbolist. In 1892, Munch expressed the complexity and ambiguity of his ideas about art and the represen- tation of life in a quotation that seems clearly related to his images of Melancholy: Down here by the beach, I feel that I find an image of myself — of life — of my life. The strange smell of seaweed and sea reminds me of her. ... In the dark green water I see the color of her eyes. Way, way out there the soft line where air meets ocean — it is as incomprehensible as life — as incomprehensible as death, as eternal as longing. And life is like that silent surface which reflects the light, clear colors of the air. And underneath, in the depths — it conceals the depths — with its slime — its crawling crea- tures — like death. We understand each other. It is as though no one understands me better than the 24 ocean. His imagery calls up memories of love and loss, fear and comfort in the face of the mystery of life. It surely reflects his understanding of love and attachment at this time, without directly representing the events of his life. 51 23 The relationship between Munch's images and his biograpliy is less transparent than is frequently assumed. Admittedly, the first command ment of the Bohemians in Kristiania (now Oslo) was "Thou shalt write tin o\vn life. Munch's art and writings repeatedly echo themes of yearn ing and passion, and their roots in the struggles of his own life are abun- dantlv documented.^^ Moreover. Munch seemed to sanction a biographical reading of his art with remarks such as: “In my art I have tried to explain life and its meaning to myself. I also intended to help others to under- stand life better. He also said, “My pictures are my diaries.”^* However, Munch took care to caution a friend about interpreting his writings too literally, and we should apply this caution to his paintings as well: "The notes that I have made are not a diary in the accepted sense of the word; they are partly extracts from my spiritual life, partly poems written as prose . . . He was well aware of the constructed nature of his personal image, and his fond- ness for theater should warn us not to take his images too literally.^° His works are symbolic equiva- lents for his ideas and emotions, rather than merely images that seem to transparently render episodes from his life in the manner of a realist narrative. If there is one central tenet held by Symbolist artists, it is that life is fundamentally mysterious, and the artist must respect and preserve this mystery.^^ Thus they insisted on suggestion rather than explic- itness. symbols or equivalents rather than description, in both painting and poetry. Choosing music as their model. Symbolists found the creation of a mood to be as important as the transmission of infor- mation, and sought to engage the mind and entire personality of the viewer by appealing to the emo- tions and the unconscious mind as well as the intellect. The analogy of music was chosen to highlight the subjectivity of the artist's vision; both were felt to leave considerable scope for the viewer's inter- pretation. Kristiania's bohemian culture prized freedom of expression in the i88os, Munch’s formative years. Symbolists were anti-materialist and anti-positivist as well; many of them found a path to mean- ing in mysticism. The Symbolist movement first emerged in literature; poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stephane ■Mallarme and others began writing mysterious and elegantly polished verse shortly after mid-century. Baudelaire outlined the foundation for the Symbolist theory of art with his poem "Correspondences,” which urged that visual images, sounds, touch, tastes and perfumes all correspond to interior states of mind and higher realities. Baudelaire's theory of correspondences was rooted in the ideas of the eigh- teenth century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.^^ The Symbolist goal was to find objective means with which to communicate the artist's subjective vision or meaning. The "Symbolist Manifesto" in lit- erature was published in 1886 by Jean Moreas, drawing new adherents to this method. Visual artists were less likely to publish such theoretical charters in the nineteenth century, and the emergence of Symbolist painting is therefore somewhat harder to trace. Nonetheless, the movement quickly became multi-disciplinary and international. Munch's close associate in the early 1890s, the critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski, regarded Munch as a Symbolist, observing that Munch's abandonment ol Realism allowed him to substitute color equiva- lents for mythological symbols.^^ Munch's new Symbolist orientation is clear in the variation oi Melan- choly that the artist prepared for a frontispiece to a book of poetry by the Danish poet Emanuel Goldstein (fig. 23 ).^'’ Goldstein (1862-1921), was one of Munch's closest friends in the early 1890s; they shared an apartment in Saint-Cloud outside Paris in the winter of 1889-90. Goldstein had anonymously published a book of poetry in 1886 titled The Interplay (Psychological Poems), and in 1892 he repub- lished this under his own name as Alruner (Mandragoras, or Mandrakes). According to medieval leg- 23 Edvard Munch, frontispiece to Alruner (Mandrakes), by Emanuel Goldstein, 1892. Munch Museum. 52 24 end, the mandrake plant was used to cure love-sickness. When picked, however, it uttered a scream terrible enough to kill, so dogs were recruited to pull it from the ground. Thus, the legend creates another association of sound with Munch’s melan cholic image. Furthermore, mandrakes were thought to grow from semen dripping from hanged men,^^ hrmly linking the herbs to sexuality. Munch asked Goldstein to send him a drawing of a mandrake, but in the end he depicted a young man tor- mented by love instead. The closed eyes of the hgure in the Alruner illustration under- scores the emphasis on an internally focused state of mind and memory in this work, and links it to other key works of Symbolist art such as Odilon Redon's Closed Eyes of 1891.^^ Although an imbalance in the chemistry of the humors was thought to cause melancholia, for cen- turies music was prescribed to draw relieve depression. Aristotle and many Renaissance writers knew the curative power of listening to music. In the fifteenth century, music was used to draw the artist Hugo van der Goes out of a deep depression. Hugo van der Goes’ saga (as depicted in a haunting paint- ing by Emile Wauters; see fig. 24 ) particularly affected Vincent van Gogh, who found unsettling paral- lels to his own condition. Vincent confided to his brother Theo in 1888: As a matter of fact, I am again pretty nearly reduced to the madness of Hugo van der Goes in Emile Wauters's picture. And if it were not that I have almost a double nature, that of a monk and that of a painter, as it were, I should have been reduced, and that long ago, completely and utterly, to the afore- said conditiom^ Although it gave comfort to some artists, the nexus between genius and insanity postulated by Lom- broso provided the basis for many attacks on modern artists as "decadents" and "degenerates.” The critic Andreas Aubert wrote in 1890: Among our painters. Munch is the one whose entire temperament is formed by the neuresthenic. He belongs to the generation of fine, sickly sensitive people that we encounter more and more frequently in our newest art. And not seldom they find a personal satisfaction in calling themselves "Decadents" the children of a refined, overly civilized age.^^ Max Nordau was a physician and cultural critic who assailed nearly all modernist artists, writers and musicians in his monumental diatribe Degeneration of 1893. Although he never mentioned Munch, Nordau was particularly critical of the Symbolist artists and writers, the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and the musician Richard Wagner. Nordau ’s terminology of "degeneration" would be used against Munch frequently throughout the years."*” In 1937 the Nazi cultural apparatus and his works declared Munch’s works and those of many other modernist artists to be degenerate and removed them from German national collections.^^ “ALL ART CONSTANTLY ASPIRES TO THE CONDITION OF MUSIC” 24 Emile Wauters, The Madness of Hugo van der Goes, oil on canvas, 1872. Royal Museums of Art, Brussels. Krohg’s 1891 comparison of Munch’s painting to music follows a deeply rooted trope in late nine- teenth-century art criticism. The parallel between music and painting had become increasingly impor- tant in aesthetics since the Romantic era when artists as disparate as Gaspar David Friedrich and Eugene 53 Delacroix endorsed it.^^ German Romantics thought landscape to be particularly close to music, since the spatial dimension ot landscape could he seen as analogous to the temporal dimension of music.”*^ Artists and poets ot the Aesthetic Movement, such as James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Ros- setti, inspired and exemplified Walter Pater’s prescription, "All art constantly aspires towards the condi- tion of music.'"’'* In an exhibition in 1892, Munch used titles such as Color Mood in Blue, Harmony in Black and \ ’iolet (a portrait of his sister Inger in the National Gallery, Oslo) and Harmony in White and Blue iThe Lonely Ones), which echo the musical titles of Whistler’s Nocturnes and Harmonies.'*^ Even though Munch could be casual about his titles, and would occasionally use those suggested by friends, he was clearly attracted to the provocative parallel of art and music. Much later, he compared the effect of an exhibition of his paintings to a symphony: / placed them together and found that various paintings related to each other in terms of content. When they were hung together, suddenly a single musical note passed through them all. They became com- pletely different to what they had been previously. A symphony resulted.'^^ The bond between content and form in Munch's art does not preclude considerable latitude for the viewer's personal interpretation. The concept of empathy {einfithlung, or "feeling into"), which was fun- damental in late nineteenth-century aesthetics'*^ explains how a work of art communicates the inner thoughts and feelings of one person to another. Empathy can not create a complete unity of viewer and artist, however, nor was it desired. Paul Gauguin noted that "you can freely dream while you listen to music just as when you look at a picture.”''* Symbolist artists preferred a suggestiveness and the possi- bility of multiple meanings, which is clarified by closer examination of the example of music. Richard Wagner was a towering figure in music in Munch’s time.'*’ Munch admired him greatly.*" Charles Baudelaire used the music of Wagner as an example of the way that meaning was expressed in the world and art in 1861: For what would be really surprising would be if sound were incapable of suggesting colour, colours incapable of evoking a melody, and sound and colour incapable of translating ideas; for things have always expressed themselves through reciprocal analogy, since the day God decreed the world a com- plex and indivisible whole.^^ Not surprisingly, one of the most influential Symbolist art journals in Paris in the mid- 1880s was named la Revue Wagnerienne. In an essay for this journal, the Polish critic Teodor de Wyzewa highlighted the Schopenhauerian idealism that was common in Symbolist aesthetics: For it so happens that the world in which we live, and which we call real, is but a pure creation of our soul. The mind cannot get outside itself, and the things it imagines external to it are merely its own ideas. To see, to hear, is to create appearances within oneself, and this is tantamount to creating Life. . . . *^ The artistic image, whether visual or literary, is an abstract representation of the world, which is as real as any other perception in this idealistic [ihilosophy; the work of art is a sign, which recreates the world, and the role of the artist as creator is elevated. The world of art is a virtual reality, de Wyzewa continued: Therefore art must consciously re-create, by means of signs, the total life of the universe, that is to say the soul, in which the varied drama we call the universe is played. . . . 54 Although most artists follow a traditional descriptive Realist mode, the new Symbolist artist will use colors and lines in a mode that is: emotional and musical, which necjlects the object these colors and these lines represent, utilizinc) them only as emotional signs, marrying them to one another with the sole purpose of producing within us, through their free play, an impression like that of a syrnphony.^^ The break with optical realism is now definite; by concentrating on the expressive potential of color and line, artists can approximate the suggestiveness of music, and the work of art becomes a symbolic ‘‘hieroglyph.”^^' By the late nineteenth century. Symbolist artists such as Paul Gauguin shared the idea that painting and music were fundamentally similar: Color being enigmatic in itself, as to the sensations it gives us, then to be logical we cannot use it any other way than enigmatically every time we use it, not to draw with but rather to give the musical sen- sations that flow from its own nature, form its internal, mysterious, enigmatic power. By means of skill- ful harmonies we create symbols. Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most undefinable in nature: its inner power. . . Krohg was well informed about European developments, and was intimately acquainted with Munch’s artistic career.^^ Krohg’s suggestion that "Munch should have the national grant for composers" under- scores Munch’s striking and innovative use of color: And the over all color! A violet charm with a few poisonous green spots in it, which inspires devotion. Spots that one can lose oneself in and become a better person by looking at, that move one like a story of young love, that remind one of something fine and soft in one's own life, and that foreshadow almost ominously a new view of art. Serious and severe.^^ Melancholy was one of the first pictures by Munch to use the image so explicitly as a representation for an inner state of mind, a mood, with color and line corresponding to nuances of emotion in a musi- cal fashion. The power of color to evoke ideas and emotions was rooted in the physiological phenomenon of synaesthesia, which is the ability of one sense to elicit sensations and even feelings generally associ- ated with another. Tbe study of "color-music" and the understanding of the connection between sen- sation and emotion were primary goals of scientists and philosophers who sought to define a "psy- chophysical aesthetic.” This interest is one bridge between the art of the late nineteenth century and the abstract art movements of the twentieth century. Jean-Martin Charcot and his clinicians at the Salpetriere clinic tested hypnotized patients to see if specific gestures and emotional reactions could be provoked by colors.^* Spiritualists and theosophists wrote extensively on color symbolism and their theories of auras may have influenced Munch.” Correlations between color and musical tones have fascinated musicians and philosophers for cen- turies. In 1730, the Jesuit Father Louis Bertrand Castel built an Ocular Harpsichord, which included sixty colored glass panes that would be illuminated as the keys were pressed.^” In the 1860s, the noted German scientist H. L. F. von Helmholtz even drew up a concordance of matching colors and sounds, Rene Ghil and other Symbolist poets tried to match the vowels to musical notes, and mechanically ori- ented musicians tried to build instruments that could simultaneously play notes and project colors.®^ 55 25 Such s\ naesthetic researclies had particular relevance for artists seeking a new stvle in the iSSos, such as the Neo-Iinpressionisin of Georges Seurat and Paul 62 Signac. The parallels of color and rhythmic line with psychological expression also underlav the decorative theory of Art Nouveau, with which Munch has intriguing connections.*^ This style emerged in the early 1890s in all the visual arts; painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, graphic arts, posters, jeweliA, clothing, and furniture. The leading sources for Art Nouveau were lapanese art. the medieval revival, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which was shaped hy the design philosophies of William Morris and Walter Crane. The Aesthetic Movement, fiarticularly Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and James .McNeill Whistler, contributed the theoretical and practical examples of the interrelationship of music and abstraction. Art Nouveau artists and designers attempted to break down the barriers among the arts, as well as those between art and life; thus there was an important psychological dimension to Art Nouvean.*** The movement combined national traditions and international influences. In Norway, it was preceded in the 1890s by a nationalistically inspired revival of Viking period decorative designs known as the Dragon Style. In Germany, the style was known as jugendstil (Youth Style), ft took its French name from the gallery L’Art Nouveau, which was opened in Paris by Siegfried Bing in 1896; its third exhibition featured the works of Edvard Munch.** In the twentieth century, the combination of music and color became an important quest in music and film. Futurists and other abstract artists experimented with musical instruments and projected col ored lights. A. Wallace Rimington synthesized much of this earlier research in bis book Colour-Music. The Art of Mobile Colour in 1912 (fig. 25 ). Serious works grew out of these investigations; Alexander Scriabin premiered bis symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire in 1915 accompanied by an electric cofor organ. In its abstractness, music was a symbol of the limitless power of art. Music has long been linked to spiritual expression, both for its power to conduct the listener to a state of contemplation, and for its ability to convey abstract thought. The suggestive aspect of music also harmonized with the image of the sea in Munch's art. The sea was an image of infinity and mystery for Munch; in late 1891 he wrote another note on ocean and melancholy: Waves rush toward the shore in endless succession. The ocean opens its mysterious, green-blue abyss as if it wanted to show me what lives down there in the depths. . . . But out there, — out there — beyond that azure blue line — behind the sparkling clouds — is the end of the world. What is there — Once 1 believed it was the end of the world — Now I don t know what 's there. Now I know nothing!^^ The prospect of infinity can be terrifying, as many studies of the Sublime attest.** Although he wrote that . . no one understands me better than the ocean," the abyss of the sea could also instill fear. Munch was fascinated by the way in which his state of mind literally transformed his vision: The truth of the matter is that we see with different eyes at different times. We see things one way in the morning and another in the evening, and the way we view things also depends on the mood we are in. That is why one subject can be seen in so many ways and that is what makes art so interesting^^ Color, which had been mistrusted by Neoclassical theorists b(‘cause of its instability^° — the appearance of a single hue can vary greatly (lef)ending on the light was prized by Romantics for this very muta 25 Plate from A. Wallace Rimington, Colour-Music. The Art of Mobile Colour, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1912. 56 26 bility. As the nature of life began to seem more and more based on diange and evolution, the variability of color seemed even more a()propriate as a symbol. The intensity of color bit its peak with the artists of the 1890s and the Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century, an era of unprecedented social and cul tural transformation. The sul)jectivity of Munch's approach is grounded in the aesthetic [)recepts of Realism and Impressionism, which also stressed personal perce|)tion and interpretation. However, Munch's goal is not to merely capture a visual image. As did Whistler and Gauguin, he relies on memory to simplify and condense his impressions: / wait some time before completing a work so that I have to rely on my memory for its impressions. I find Nature somewhat overwhelming when I have it directly in front of me^^ His method combined memory images and his analysis of optical sensation: / painted picture after picture of the impressions I had had in my mind in emotional moments — painted the lines and colours I had imprinted there at my inner eye — the cornea. — / just painted what I recalled without adding anything — without the details I no longer kept in mind . — Thus arose the simplicity of the paintings — the apparent emptiness!^ Memory thus led to simplification and a more abstract sign replaced the naturalistic image. With their broad, abstract marks and random spatters or streaks, the materials of Munch’s paintings and prints deny illusionism. They call attention to the constructed aspect of the work of art,^^ emphasizing the symbolic nature of his art. Unfortunately, an uncomprehending public saw this raw quality of Munch’s work as proof that he was lazy or even insane. Munch was aware of and feared the possibility of insanity. “Sickness and insanity and death," he remarked, "were the black angels that hovered over my cradle and have since followed me throughout my life.”^”* His honest confrontation with his inner fears is a primary source of the power of Munch's art, and the artist recognized the value of his struggle: A German once said to me: "But you could rid yourself of many of your troubles." To which I replied: "They are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and it would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings."^^ 26 Edvard Munch, Professor Jacobsen electrifies the famous painter Edvard Munch, bringing positive masculine and negative feminine power to his crazy brain, drawing, T 1976, 1908/1909. Munch Museum, Oslo. Only much later, in 1908, when his drinking caused him severe difficulties, did Munch seek a cure for his problems from Dr. Daniel |acobsen in Copenhagen, even submitting to mild electroshock therapy. In a drawing of these treatments, he notes that the physician is trying to create a balance between his male and female natures (fig. 26 ): "Professor Jacobsen electrifies the famous painter Edvard Munch, bringing positive masculine and negative feminine power to his crazy brain."^^ THE FLOWER OF PAIN Art gave Munch a means to communicate with others, and to understand himself better. Suffering nourished his art, and he insisted on sincere and deeply felt expression: 57 I do not believe in on art which has not forced its wa\> out through man s need to open his heart. All art. literature, as well as music must be brought about with our heart blood. .\rt is our heart blood. This aesthetic doctrine is embodied in a number of works, but especially the woodcut The Flower of Pain of iSqS (no. 12).^* This motif was also used for the cover of a special issue of the journal Quickborn in iSqq, which featured the works of Munch and August Strindberg. In this image, a nude man in the pose of Rodin's Age of Bronze (1876) tips his head back as blood pours from his chest, streaming out to nourish a large flower that grows in front of him. The flower is undoubtedly connected to the image of the mandrake discussed earlier. This image of beauty arising from pain is also an image of self- sacrifice, of an artist giving his life to bring a message of beauty to the world; the parallels to Christ are obvious and certainly deliberate. Munch was not alone in portraying himself as the suffering Christ; in their self-portraits, James Ensor, Paul Gauguin and other Symbolist artists identified themselves with the image of Christ as a passionate outcast, offering redemption, but misunderstood by the public. Perhaps the most famous image of modern anxiety is Munch’s painting of The Scream of 1893, which was rendered as a lithograph in 1895 (no. 7). This work echoes other attempts to fuse visual art with sound, as the curving lines in the sky and fjord suggest eerie tones, a continuation of the auditory equivalents of Melancholy. The spatial distortion in the exaggerated perspective of the railing isolates the figure in space and time, and the ghost like character faces the viewer and cries out with an open- mouthed scream. Munch anticipated his critics, and acknowledged the disturbed quality of the vision by writing on one version "Can only have been painted by a madman."*° The experimental nature of the painted version of this work is heightened by an innovative technique in the application of the pig- ment, which includes broad loose brushstrokes, with areas where the paint has dripped and run. There are even spatters of wax on the surface of the version in the National Gallery of Norway, Oslo, the results of an accident in snuffing out a candle, which Munch left, perhaps pleased with the effect of a random gesture. Munch was notoriously careless with his paintings in later years, saying that to be finished, they had to toughened up by weather, even rain or snow.®^ Although unusual, his behavior indicates not indifference to his art, but his belief that a work of art should be a part of the world, and open to natural forces, even destructive ones. August Strindberg held a similar belief; in an 1894 essay on the role of chance in the making of works of art, he celebrated the imitation of nature in creating though accident.*^ Munch’s works are both personal statements and open signs; although they grew from his experience, he encouraged viewers to bring their own interpretations to the works, following the anal- ogy of music, and he allowed the works to be open to accident in their creation and in their conserva- tion. Paradoxically, he felt an obsessive need to keep recreating his images, particularly if they were sold, but no need to preserve them in a pristine condition, as if the process of creation went on even after he stopped working on them. Munch wrote a number of notes about the origins of The Scream, which trace the connections of the work to his own experience, and suggest that the distorted figure is a self-portrait: / was walking along a road one evening — on the one side lay the city, and below me was the fiord. I was feeling tired and ill — / stood and looked out over the fiord. The sun went down-the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming — it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed. The result was The Scream in the Frieze of Life.^^ 58 Fear of madness troubled Munch; his sister Laura suffered breakdowns in tbe early 1890s, and was admitted to the Oslo Hospital. Arne Eggum has also suggested that The Scream may be related to his lingering anxiety over his mother’s death.*’’ Writings by his friends and colleagues reinforce the [ler- sonal c]uafity of Munch's vision. Christian Skredsvig wrote in 1943: For some time Munch had been wanting to paint the memory of a sunset. Red as blood. No, it actucdly was coagulated blood. But not a single other person would see it the same way as he had; they would all see nothing but clouds. He talked himself sick about that sunset and about how it had filled him with great anxiety. He was in despair because the miserable means available to painting were not sufficient. "He is trying to do the impossible, and his religion is despair," I thought to myself, hut nonetheless I advised him to try to paint d.** Yet this work shoufd not be seen as a direct transcription of a panic attack; The Scream is as much a symbolic image as Melancholy, ft is a carefully constructed representation of a moment of anxiety, rec- ollected and depicted in tranquility. Rooted in Munch's memories from Oslo, The Scream was reworked and perfected over months in Germany. The origins of The Scream may not even be entirely personal; some scholars suggest that this work was inspired by Sigborn Obstfelder's poetry.** The Scream is not an image of chaos, but of a new, searing, dissonant harmony, as raw and as elegant as the new music of Stravinsky later would be. The work took on a life of its own after it was exhibited. Other authors emphasized their own fin- de-siecle preoccupations with sexuality and despair in their descriptions of The Scream. Stanislaw Przybyszewski wrote in 1894: On a bridge, or something like it — it really does not matter exactly what is depicted — there stands a fantastic creature with mouth agape. The hero of love must not exist anymore: his sexuality has crawled out of him and now it screams through all of nature for a new means of manifestation in order to do no more than live through the same torture, the same battle all over again. There is something horri- bly macrocosmic in this picture. It is the closing scene of a horrible battle between mind and sex out of which the latter came triumphant. . . . The mind has been destroyed, and sex, the primevally eternal, screams out for new victims.^^ As Przybyszewski describes it, the figure in The Scream is almost a modern mandrake, screaming as it torn from the earth by someone in search of a cure for the pains of love. Munch responded favorably to Przybyszewski’s description, and changed the title from Despair to The Scream after this.** Munch iterated variants of the anxiety depicted in The Scream throughout the 1890s, manifesting social phobias, perhaps even agoraphobia,** in paintings and prints simply titled "Anxiety.” The litho- graph of Anxiety of 1896 (no. 8) calls to mind a passage in the notes Munch wrote in Saint-Cloud in 1892: Everybody who passed by looked at him, stared at him, all those faces, pallid in the evening light. He tried to concentrate on some thought, but he could not. All he felt was an emptiness in his head . . . His whole body trembled, and sweat ran down him. He staggered, and now I am falling too. People stop, more and more people, a frightening number of people . . .*° Crowds disturbed Munch, and his alienation led to startling poetic visions of alienation and anxiety: 59 27 I can see behind everyone s masks. Peacefully smiling faces, pale corpses who endlessly wend their tor- tuous wm’ down the road that leads to the grave^^ Stiangers could easily provoke anxiety in Munch in these years; even his own family was a both a refuge and a source of tension. THE MYSTERIES OF LOVE AND DEATH Religious faith can cure melancholia, hut an excess of religious zeal can lead to mental imbalance. Robert Burton identified religious fanaticism as a variety of love-melancholy in The Anatomy of Melan- choly.^^ Religion was a source of conflict between Munch and his father, particularly in his teenage years, when disagreements erupted into stormy arguments.’^ Many of Munch s works reflect the trauma of early deaths in his family, notably The Sick Child of 1S94 (no. 9) and Death in the Sickroom of 1896 (no. 11). Death in the Sickroom has frequently been linked to the Symbolist theater of Maurice Maeterlinck, whose play LTntruse (The Intruder) focuses on a group of people waiting for Death to come for a family member.’^' The plays of the Belgian dramatist were among the touchstones of European Symbolism; LTntruse was first performed for a benefit to raise money for Paul Gauguin’s voyage to Tahiti, and Munch was at one point involved with a project to illustrate a Danish translation of Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande.^^ Munch recognized The Sick Child as a breakthrough in his struggle to capture the inner truth of his perception in his art. For years, he sought a visual analogue for his personal emotions and sensa- tions. In the end, he framed the picture as literally seen through his own eyes: / also discovered that by looking through my eyelashes I had a better impression of the picture . — / therefore hinted at them as shadows at the top of the painting. — In a way, the head became the pic- ture. Wavy lines appeared — peripheries — around the head. — Later, I often used these wavy lines. . . . In The Sick Child / broke new ground — it was a breakthrough in my art. — Most of my later works owe their existence to this picture.^^ Impressionists had stressed the personal quality of vision, and Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec frequently called attention to the contingent nature of vision by blocking the main subject with peripheral motifs, but no one had ever included the shadows of their own eyelashes in the painting as Munch did in this work. The wavy peripheral lines are seen in several works in this exhibition, such as Loving Woman, or Madonna (nos. 54 and 55 ) and Lovers in the Waves (no. 35 ). These undulations are susceptible to other readings, since they could also indicate sound waves or psychic auras. in his 1893 painting Death at the Helm (fig. 27 ), Munch depicts his father, who had died a few years before, aboard a sailboat being steered by a skeleton. This is a revision of the traditional theme of the ship as a symbol of the "voyage of life" which was popular in the nineteenth century.’* Eugene Delacroix’s Barque of Dante (Louvre, 1822) and Arnold Bocklin's Island of Death (1880, Kunstmuseum, Basel), are just two examples of ships rowed by the traditional oarsmen of the underworld, conveying souls through the realm of death. Sailing, which uses the natural forces of wind and water for motive power, and which is used as an image of freedom and [)leasure in Impressionist art, or as an image of labor in the Realist [)aintings of Christian Krohg and Winslow Homer, is here given a macabre twist. .Munch emphasized his personal cx)nnection to this theme when he wrote: 27 Edvard Munch, Death at the Helm, 1893. Munch Museum, Oslo 60 when I embarked on the voyage oj life I felt like a boat made of old rotten wood, whose builder had launched it on an angry sea with these words: “If you go under, it will be your own fault and you will be consumed by the everlasting fires of Hell."^^ The brilliant yellow and bine colors in this picinre are startlingly beautilul, in juxtaposition with the grim skeleton; death is Inlly in command, even in the hdl sim. The paradoxical beauty ol Munch's rep resentations of themes of death and even terrible agony, such as Death in the Sickroom, suggest a kind of wild joy in the struggle of life against death. Munch celebrates the life lorce as he rejoices in the act of painting; his luscious colors and evocative surfaces call attention to the beauty ol life and art, even if the subject is tragic. Death at the Helm was very well received in the Symbolist climate of the 1890s, but Munch never exhibited it after 1900; the symbolic skeleton may have seemed too obvious after his style settled on more natural imagery.^°° Munch completed a Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm in 1895 3). His face and the bony arm are luminous against a deep black background: Death is pitch black. Colors and light are one. To be a painter is to work with rays of light. To die — per haps that's like having your eyes poked out. You can’t see anymore — perhaps like being thrown into a cellar. Everyone has left you. They have slammed the door shut and gone away. You can ’t see a thing — you feel only the clammy odor of death itself. There 's no light.^°^ Life and vision are synonymous for Munch. Light held an almost mystical force, which shows in his later images of The Sun, which he painted for the Aula of the University of Oslo. Munch also confronted his fear of death in the 1915 lithograph of the Dance of Death, a self-portrait with a skeleton (no. 5). The dance of death is a theme deeply rooted in medieval art. A fascination with skeletons was also a hallmark of the Decadent movement in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s; morbid imagery was a device to distance the artist from the bourgeoisie, as well as a sign of the alienation of the artist. Numerous prints by James Ensor and Eelicien Rops exemplify this.^°^ The disturbing image of the skeleton may suggest a hope for resurrection and eternal life. At this point, it is useful to widen the scope of this inquiry to discuss works that represent rela- tionships with others and societal concerns. Munch's art has broad appeal, even though it begins with a narrow inward focus. Ambivalence, fear and desire marked Munch’s relations with women, and this could also be said of his approach to religion. Munch always took religion very seriously; even his images of insecurities and sexuality were invested with something of the sacred. Among his earliest notes on art is a state- ment written in Saint-Cloud in 1889 that joins sexuality with the sacred: / would like to create it as I saw it, right there, but in a blue haze. The two of them at that moment when they are no longer themselves but only a link in the chain that binds a thousand generations. People would respect the power, the sanctity of it and they would take off their hats as they do in a church. I would produce a number of these pictures. We should no longer paint interiors with people read- ing and women knitting. We should paint real people, who breathe, feel, suffer and love.^°^ 61 28 He later insisted tliat: "In all my work people will see that 1 am a doubter, but 1 never deny or mock reli- gion/ Munch lauded the ability ot art to create images both of the sacred and of the inner world of the artist, as opposed to photography, which renders only the external world: “The camera cannot com- pete with brush and palette — as long as it cannot he used in Heaven or Hell.”^°^ Around 1910, under- scoring his conviction that his works had a sacred quality. Munch drew several designs of a “chapel for art. a museum patterned after an Italianate church, to house his paintings and prints. The mystery of life and death is the focus of Munch’s Death and the Maiden, an etching of 1894 ino. 53). This composition revises the traditional theme of the dance of death, depicting a nude young woman passionately embracing a skeleton. Traditionally, the conjunction of a young woman and a skeleton represented the theme of vanitas, a reminder that the flesh is mortal, and that beauty is fleet- ing. Examples of this abound in northern Renaissance art, such as Hans Baldung-Grien's early sixteenth- century Young Woman and Death in the Royal Art Museums, Brussels. In the nineteenth century, artists such as Felicien Rops and Antoine Wiertz emphasized the morbid and even necrophilic under- tones of juxtaposing sensuous females with animated skeletons.^°^ In contrast, Munch’s picture is nei- ther exploitative nor misogynistic. His work suggests the essential union of sexuality and death, and the sacrificial aspects of sexuality for women, who embrace death at the moment of bringing forth new life. The border of Munch's print is decorated with magnified sperm cells at the top and sides; the lower part of the border contains the depictions of three embryos. The dance of life and death is thus a circle dance; the act of lovemaking provides a glimpse into the abyss of death as well as a hope for the future. The essential positiveness of Munch’s imagery can be seen when contrasted with one of the clas- sic images of Decadent art: Felicien Rops' undead aristocrats posed atop a relief of a skeletal Romulus and Remus suckled by a gaunt wolf. This undead, yet elegant couple, depicted in Le Vice Supreme, a frontispiece for the novel by fosephin Peladan in 1884 (fig. 28 ), stand for the nihilistic decadence of Western culture, especially the Latin race. The work is bitterly satirical, and is unrelieved by any tokens of new life or regeneration. The cosmic power of sexuality is also embodied in the image that came to be known as Madonna of 1895 and 1902 (nos. 54 and 55 ). Munch called this work alternately “Loving Woman" and “Madonna,” and Strindberg called it “Conception."^”* An oil painting preceded the lithographic versions; it was first displayed in a frame that included sculpted forms of the embryo and sperm cells. This frame, though lost, is reproduced in the border of the lithographs. This work depicts the chain of generations that are linked through conception; Munch described it in terms that emphasized the union of love and death: The pause as all the world stops in its. path. Moonlight glides over your face filled with all the earth's beauty and pain. Your lips are like two ruby red serpents and filled with blood, like your crimson red fruit. They glide from one another as if in pain. The smile of a corpse. Thus now life reaches out its hand to death. The chain is forged that binds the thousands of generations that have died to the thou- sands of generations yet to come.^^° It is an extremely sensuous work, which is at the same time both very intimate and symbolic. The com- position combines the Naturalism in the image of the woman with a symbolic border. The woman is seen from above, as if the viewer were in the position of her lover. The border combines present and future, showing simultaneously a microscopic view of sperm and a developed embryo looking some- what anxiously at the woman. Munch has combined the profane and the sacred in a manner that may seem shocking in order to highlight the transfiguring power of sexuality. His friend Sighorn Obstfelder praised the seriousness of this work in 1896: 28 Felicien Rops, frontispiece to Le Vice Supreme, Le Decadence Latine I, by Josephin Peladan, Paris: Librairie des Auteurs Modernes, 1884. 62 For me his Madonna picture is the quintessence of his art. It is a Madonna of the earth, the woman who bears her children in pain. I believe one must go to Russian literature in order to find a similarly religious view of woman, such glorification of the beauty of pain.'^^^ Obstfelder’s sensitive response stands in stark contrast to August Strindberg’s sneering misogyny, pub- lished in La Revue Blanche in 1896: Conception: Immaculate or not, it comes to the same thing: the red or gold halo crowns the accomplish- ment of the act, the sole end and justification of this creature devoid of existence in her own right.^^^ Strindberg may have correctly identified an underlying anxiety about conception, however: the fear that it leads to loss of individuality. Munch feared that marriage would distract him from his art, and frequently referred to his paintings as his real "children”; the Loving Woman/Madonna image may reflect his own ambivalence. The powerful force of sexuality overwhelms one's conscious control. Fin-de-siecle thinkers took this aspect of sexuality as proof that the ego was subject to biological forces that could obliterate one's iden- tity at the same time as it led to the creation of new life. Obstfelder recognized the sacred nature of this existential mystery, in all of its "beauty and terror": That which lies at the bottom of life is not clearly seen by our eyes, either in form, color or idea. Life has surrounded itself with a mysterious beauty and terror, which the human senses cannot, therefore, define, but to which a great poet can pray. The desire to concentrate on this human quality, to under- stand in a new way that which our daily life has relegated to a minor position, and to show it in its orig- inal enigmatic mystery — this attains its greatest heights here in Munch's art and becomes religious. Munch sees woman as she who carries the greatest marvel of the world in her womb. He returns to this concept over and over again. He seeks to depict that moment when she first becomes conscious of this in all its gruesomeness}^"' Munch’s Berlin circle in the 1890s included writers known for their misogyny and anti-religious views, but his own attitudes toward women and religion are more complex. His fear of losing his indi- viduality in relationships is a recurring theme in the paintings of the Frieze of Life. Yet though he cre- ated images of romantic union in which men are drained of free will and power. Munch also had a remarkable ability to identify with individual women and their cultural roles. His images of Puberty of 1894 (fig. 118 ), and numerous portraits of his sisters and other female friends show sensitive, mul- tidimensional characters. Acutely aware of gender roles. Munch recognized the complexity of individ- ual lives: The woman who gives herself, and takes on a madonna 's painful beauty — the mystique of an entire evolution brought together: woman in her many-sidedness is a mystery to man — woman who simul taneously is a saint, a whore and an unhappy person abandoned.^^^ Earlier studies exaggerated Munch's hostility to women, although a more balanced view has begun to 116 emerge. Sexuality proved to be Munch's most potent metaphor for spiritual union. The erotic union of two people can be taken as a symbol for the union between the soul and god, the communication link 63 l>et\veeii artist and viewer, and also as a bridge across generations in time. Encounter in Space, a woodcut of 1899, further exemplifies Munch s vision of the chain of generations (no. 57). The green figure of a woman reclines, her head on her arm. A bright red male figure lies prone near her thighs, holding his head in his hands. The figures seem to be floating against a night-black background; they are surrounded by giant sperm, which resemble stars or comets. The image unites the microcosm and the macrocosm, and simultaneously implies the present, past and future. Scholars have compared the lovers to figures by William Blake and Auguste Rodin.^^^ Suggesting the cosmic nature of their union, Munch wrote: People s souls are like planets. Like a star that appears out of the gloom and meets another star — they shine brightly for a moment and then disappear completely into the darkness. It is the same when a man and woman meet — they glide towards each other, the spark of love ignites and flares up, then they van- ish. both going their own separate ways. Only a few come together in a flame that is large enough for them to become one.^^^ .Munch makes clear his fundamental vision of the unity of all things in this passage from the manu- script he called "The Tree of Knowledge": .Nothing is small nothing is great — Inside us are worlds. What is small divides itself into what is great the great into the small . — A drop of blood a world with its solar center and planets. The ocean a drop a small part of a body — Cod is in us and we are in Cod. Primeval light is everywhere and goes where life is — everything is movement and light — Crystals are born and shaped like children in the womb. Even in the hard stone burns the fire of life Death is the beginning of life — of a new crystallization We do not die, the world dies away from us Death is the love-act of life pain is the friend of joy. Munch’s symbolic use of sperm cells is highly original, although other artists had earlier depicted the apparition of fetal shapes. Max Klinger incorporated embryonic shapes in The Apparition (fig. 29), a part of his series of prints titled A Love, and Aubrey Beardsley depicted fetuses in several designs, including his Incipit Vita Nova (Dante), a drawing of 1893 (^g- 30).^^° In 1900, the Czech artist Frantisek Kupka portrayed a haloed embryo rising above a pond of lily pads and lotuses in a composition steeped in Theosophical imagery titled The Beginning of Life (fig. 31). The association of procreation and cre- ativity was common in the fin-de-siecle, and Munch's habit of referring to his paintings as his "chil- dren” suggests a degree of self identification in these images of love, death and immortality.^^^ In the Madonna in the Churchyard (c. 1896, fig. 32), Munch depicts the abandonment that he believed would befall every woman. The watercolor shows a sorrowful Madonna in a graveyard, fully clothed, her long skirt embellished with pictures of falling leaves, echoing the autumnal branches above her. The leaves, symbolizing the transience of life, have been sbed by the trees, just as she has been discarded. A skeletal cupid armed with a bow and arrows creeps up on her from the left; the link 29 Max Klinger, The Apparition. from the series A Love, etching and aquatint, 1887. Private collection. 30 Aubrey Beardsley, Incipit Vita Nova (Dante), drawing, c. 1893. From The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley, London and New York; John Lane, 1901. 31 Frantisek Kupka: The Beginning of Life, aquatint, 1900. Private collection. 32 Edvard Munch, Madonna in the Churchyard, watercolor and drawing, c. 1896. Munch Museum, Oslo. 64 33 Fernand KhnopfT, Avec Josephin Peladan: Pallentes Radere Mores, frontispiece to Femmes honnetes, Paris: Dalou, 1888. Private collection. 34 Franz von Stuck, Sensuality, etching, c. i8gi. Private collection. 35 Jean Delville, The Love of Souls, 1900. Musee d'lxelles, Brussels. between them is reinforced by the tact that bolli have haloes. It is a peculiar vision of the bond between love and death, and seems closest to the morbid visions of Felicien Rojts' etchings, who included skele tal cujiids in his etchings. Arne Eggum has noted that the tombstone with a wreath is the same shape as the stone jilaced over the grave of Muncii’s brother Andreas in 1895.^^^ The private grief that Munch felt for his dead mother, father, sister and brother certainly inform this work. The many permutations of desire can be seen in the kaleidoscopic lens of Munch's art in the 1890s. Munch makes emblematic the blind force of male lust in Hands (1896, oil on cardboard, no. 49 ), which shows a nearly nude woman surrounded by disembodied hands grasping for her. The compositional device of the cropped grasping hands was anticipated in the Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff 's fron- tispiece for Peladan's novel Femmes honnetes of 1888 (hg. 33 ), but the bold surface texture, with its abstract accents and spatters and bleach marks, is uniquely Munch's. Munch explores traditional Bib- lical imagery of Eve as a sexual temptress in his lithographs of Sin in 1901, and Jealousy II in 1896 (nos. 44 and 29 ). Sin shows a red headed temptress with piercing green eyes; Jealousy II juxtaposes the haunted face of Stanislaw Przybyszewski with a sensual image of his wife, Dagny and another man beneath an apple tree, a clear reference to the theme of temptation. Woman with Snake, a lithograph from his Alpha and Omega series of 1908-09, transposes the Eve-like hgure called Omega to a mythic Nordic island (no. 45 ). There, she mates indiscriminately with all the animals on the island, rekindling the passion of jealousy in her companion. Alpha. The embrace of woman and serpent is clearly based on the works of German Symbolist artists Max Klinger and Franz von Stuck. In the 1890s, von Stuck executed eighteen oil paintings of Eve and the Serpent titled either Sin or Sensuality, as well as several prints (fig. 34). Munch's negative depiction of women in both of these images is part of a reaction to his disastrous relationship with Tulla Larsen in these years. Munch gives mystical form to the cosmic union of man and woman in The Flower of Love (no. 32 ) and Lovers in the Waves (no. 35 ), both from 1896. The Flower of Love is a counterpart to The Flower of Pain, and shows a full-length embracing couple, whose floating forms are encased in a flame-like flower. In their mystical union, the two lovers offer an interesting parallel to the idealized Neoplatonic realm invoked in )ean Delville's image of spiritual union in The Love of Souls of 1900 (fig. 35 , Musee d'lxelles, Brussels). Although Delville's Rosicrucian-inspired art may seem foreign to Munch, much of Munch's art reveals a decidedly spiritual aspect. Arne Eggum has shown that Munch was close to Spir- itualists in Berlin in the 18905.^^'’ Marcel Reja, a physician who worked with Jean Martin Charcot, wrote a poem about this work which stressed that the man and the woman are unconscious of the forces of biological destiny and fate that draw them together.^^^ Lovers in the Waves shows the heads of a man and woman juxtaposed, as if they are floating in the water; in the narrow band of sky visible above the horizon, stars are clearly marked. The model is the same woman whom Munch hired in Berlin for the Madonna. At the time there was some speculation that Dagny Juel Przybyzewska was his model, but Munch attempted to dispel that confusion, although he admitted that there was some resemblance.^^^ The rippling waves of water and hair suggest equivalents of sound and psychic energy; the figures fuse with their environment. Some of Munch's friends called this print Death in the Waves, underscoring the recurring theme of Liebestod, or love and death. 65 36A 36B VISIONS OF TRANSCENDENCE — NATURE MYSTICISM Spiritual and cosmic themes emerge in a number ot works that are rooted in Munclt's own life, but are made symbolic of universal principles. One of Munch's most obscure paintings, Metabolism (Munch Museum, Oslo) ot 1S99 addresses the unity of nature and the mysterious forces of life and death. He described this painting as the key to the entire Frieze of Lite series (Hg. 36 a): The Frieze was planned as a poem on life, on love and death. The theme 0/ the largest picture, of the two people, the man and woman in the for- est. is perhaps somewhat unrelated to the ideas expressed in the other paintings, but it is as necessary to the Frieze as a whole as the buckle is to the belt. It is the picture of life drawing sustenance from the dead, and of the city growing up behind the crowns of the trees. It is the picture of life s power to endure.^^^ In this picture a nude couple, recalling Adam and Eve, are positioned on either side of a tree in a forest. The tree roots continue down into the frame, where they are carved intertwining with a human skull and an animal skull. Death grows from life, as the tree takes nourishment from the decaying bodies; matter is transformed, but conserved and remains eternal. Munch once wrote: "Flowers will grow up from my rotting corpse and 1 will live on in those blooms.”^^^ Similar imagery is found in Munch’s poster for his 1902 exhibition at the Hollaendergaarden in Oslo (no. 57 ). The two figures in Metabolism are based on Munch and Tulla Larsen, a woman with whom he had a passionate but stormy relationship during the late 1890s and early 1900s. A photograph of the paint- ing taken at the time of its exhibition in Leipzig in 1903 shows that it originally included a human embryo growing from the flowering leaves of the tree (fig. 36 b). The picture was repainted, probably around 1918, according to Reinbold Heller.^^° A complex synthesis of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with Greek myths of the birth of children born from plants may be indicated here, with the under pinnings of Munch’s vision of life growing from death. Trees are frequently associated with fertility and are often seen as counterparts of the human soul in niythology.^^^ As repainted by Munch, the tree is less obviously a fertility symbol, but now reaches between heaven and the depths of the earth, to fulfill another symbolic function of the tree, which mediates between the earth and sky. Considering the intensity of August Strindberg’s interest in alchemy in the 1890s, one wonders if the presence of this "homunculus” perhaps had alchemical symbolism as well. Several paintings and drawings of traditional Biblical subjects reflect Munch’s struggle with faith. He painted a picture of the crucifixion, titled Golgotha, in 1900 (fig. 37 ), when he was undergoing treat- ment for nervous exhaustion in a sanatorium. His identification with the scene of suffering and redemption shows in both the crucified Christ and the pale figure in profile, who may represent the Evangelist Saint )ohn, in the foreground; both are self-portraits. The face in the crowd directly below Christ may be that of his father. Dr. Christian Munch. The name Munch is an obvious pun on "monk” in Norwegian, and the artist [lainted himself as a monk in the watercolor The Empty Cross around 1900 ■fig. 38 ). By portraying himself as a monk. Munch declares that creating art is a sacred vocation. Both Romantic and Symbolist artists often identified themselves with members of religious orders.^^^ This scene is not Golgotha — the historical site of the crucifixion — there is only one symbolic cross, not three. Rather, it is the modern world, and the setting sun perhajjs suggests an approaching Last )udg- 36 A Edvard Munch, Metabolism, oil on canvas, 1899. Munch Museum, Oslo. B Photograph of Metabolism taken at 1903 exhibition, Leipzig. 17 Edvard Munch, Golgotha, oil on canvas, 1900. Munch Museum, Oslo. 38 Edvard Munch, The Empty Cross, drawing and watercolor, c. 1900. Munch Museum, Oslo. 66 ment. Temptations of the flesh are shown in tlie eml)racing couples at left, and other figures are drown- ing in the sea at right. On the heights in the background the cross stands empty and weeping women pray to the empty cross — lovers-whores-drunkards-and criminals fill the terrain below — and to the right in the picture — a steep slope goes down to the sea — the human beings fall down the steep slope — and terror-stricken [sic| — they hug the edge of the precipice — In the center of the chaos stands Munch, staring ahead, bewildered and with the frightened eyes of a child at all this — and says why why — It was I here — Passion and the vices are raging all over the city — the terror of death lurked behind — a blood-red sun shines down on everything — and the cross is empty . . The cross is an empty symbol; Munch wanders in a world of confusion and lack of faith. Although he could not accept his father’s fundamentalist religious faith, Munch formed his own ideas about immortality. Besides the personal immortality that would come to him through his pic- tures, he believed in a general immortality through union with nature; he described a vision of such natural immortality in his diary in 1892: I felt it to be a rapture to pass into, be united with — become this earth which always, always fermented, always shone upon by the sun — and lived, lived — and there were to grow plants up and out of my rot- ting body — and trees and flowers and the sun were to warm them and I was to be in them and noth- ing was to come to an end — that is eternity}^^ The pain of his mother's death and the later losses of family members weighed heavily on him. Munch's diary records his continuing struggle to find answers to the riddle of existence and faith: The breath of life is, if you wish, the same as the soul or the spirit. It would be foolish to deny the exis- tence of the soul, and one cannot deny the existence of a life-force. We must all believe in immortality, and also, for that matter, that it is possible to claim that the breath of life, the spirit of life, lives on after the body is dead . . . What becomes of the spirit of life, the power that holds a body together, the power that fosters the growth of physical matter? Nothing — there is no evidence in nature to suggest that anything does. A body that dies does not vanish — its sub- stance is transformed, converted. But what happens to the spirit that inhabits it? Nobody can say where it goes to — to try and assert its nonexistence after the body has died is as ridiculous as insisting on trying to demonstrate how or where that spirit will continue to exist.^^^ Munch was intrigued by the new currents of mysticism in the 1890s, which wedded the idealistic phi- losophy of Schopenhauer to occult beliefs in hidden realities. The rapid pace of scientific discoveries in the late nineteenth century seemed to confirm the belief in invisible realities, with the novel visions of x-rays presenting the skeletons of living beings, and astronomy expanding the vision of the cosmos. (X-rays were discovered in 1895, the same year he painted his Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (no. 2), but were not introduced to the public until 1896, so a direct influence cannot be established.) To many scientists of the day, it seemed that every mystery of nature would soon be explained, but for an artist such as Munch, this overly-confident positivism provoked an opposite reaction towards mysticism: Mysticism will always be with us. The more we discover, the more unexplained things there will be. 67 The ne\e movement, whose advances and fires can be detected everywhere, will express all those things that have been repressed for a generation, everything that mankind will always have in great abun dance: ntvsticism. It will find expression for what now is so refined as to be recognized only in vague inclinations, in experiments of thought. There is an entire mass of things that cannot be explained rationally. There are newborn thoughts that have not yet found form. Munch s pantlieistic vision ot the cycles ot life and afterlife took on a cosmic scale, and he expressed this vision in poetic, rather than scientific terms. He envisioned a unity between the microcosm and the macrocosm, a unity based on the vital force of desire: / was standing on a high mountain and I saw the whole world below me — the world after thousands of years — / saw the small and the large planets which, obeying the laws of nature followed their fixed orbits — I saw the small planet Earth — which circled the sun. I saw how the transubstantiation began — how the air corroded the earth — how the desire first arose in the hard mass of the earth to be united with the air — and the transitory forms between the stones and the air were created: the living: men, animals — plants — There was a desire for procreation — for combustion, and the animals, men — the plants mated — Obeying the laws, the male loved the female — / saw men multiply — and were gath- ered in masses — they spread over the earth and where the mass became lumpy and encountered other masses, they fought in order that the stronger would win — so also did the animals, men, and so also the plants.^'^^ Munch sees even air and rocks driven by desire for union, recapitulating mythic legends of the earth goddess mating with the sky god. He sees a universal diffusion of the desire to mate, which leads to a Darw'inian struggle for existence. Considering his pantheistic view of nature, and his artistic tendency to use the image as an analog for emotional expression, it is not surprising that Munch's landscapes have such spiritual power. His painting Starry Night (1923-24, no. 82 ), which returns to a theme he first depicted in 1893, have been inspired by Vincent van Gogh, and has also been connected to themes of death in the plays of Ibsen.^'*^ This gloriously Romantic vision of infinity, painted from the terrace of his studio at Ekely, is a worthy match to the night visions of van Gogh. The stars pulse with radiant energy above the snowy landscape, and his shadow traces its furtive outline in the snow, a subtle reminder of mortality with its fleeting presence. The Sun of c. 1912 was painted as a study for the great public murals that he created for the Aula in the University of Oslo (no. 81 ). The centerpiece of the mural decorations, the sun is an image of heal- ing and eternity, which Munch believed was present throughout his works: A straight line leads from Spring to the Aula Paintings. The Aula Paintings are humanity as it strives towards the light, the sun, revelation, light in times of darkness. Spring was the mortally ill girl's longing for light and warmth, for life. The sun in the Aula was the sun shining in the window 0/ Spring. It was Osvald's sun [in Ibsen's Ghosts]. In the identiccd chair in which I painted the sick girl, I and all those I loved, beginning with my mother, once sat winter after winter, sat and longed for the sun — until death took them away.^‘^^ The Sun is an incandescent vision of the light that Munch sought throughout his career, even though he is more widely associated with liis images of nocturnal melancholy and the anxieties inherent in the abysses of love and loss of faith. 68 Munch’s art is rooted in the pliilosophical and religious concerns of his time, and lie identified most with those artists and writers who searched for original answers to the troubling questions of life and death. In 1892, his friend Hans Dedekam noted; One day when I talked to Munch about the art that had impressed him most deeply, he named Edgar Allan Foe's Tales of Fantasy [Tales of Mystery and Imagination] and Dostoyevsky 's Prince Myshkin [The Idiot] and The Brothers Karamazov. These two deeply poetic writers are also his kindred spirits. No one in art has yet penetrated as far as they have into the mystical realms of the soul, towards the meta physical, the subconscious. They both view the external reality of the world as merely a sign, a symbol of the spiritual and the metaphysical.^'^'' In the Symbolist era, belief in external realities was undermined by the philosophic idealism of Schopen hauer, modern psychology, and the scientific revolution. Mysticism offered a validation of traditional mythic wisdom that seemed more spiritually fulfilling. Mysticism also validated the work of artists, who were otherwise marginalized in the new age of science and technology; as shapers of images, which were signs of intuited reality and inner states of mind, they could interpret the world rather than just describe it. Munch’s evolution from Realism to Symbolism also prepared the foundation of Expres- sionism, which carried the concept of the work of art as an analog of inner experience even further. Edvard Munch’s art never became completely abstract, however; it was always grounded in his own lived experiences and his direct perceptions of nature. His most overtly symbolic works were created in the 1890s and the early twentieth century when he was most in the grip of his inner conflicts, and the role of Symbolist art was most powerful. After 1909, his work became increasingly naturalistic as he became more concerned with public commissions, and came to a greater peace with his emotions. The role of communication was always fundamental to Munch; he rejected comparison with exces- sively literary Symbolism and abstruse Germanic "thought-painting" (Gedankenmalerei), which he found trivial.^''^ Munch compared his pictures to his diaries, but as we have seen, these "texts” are densely layered symbolic representations, not literal transcriptions. His private sorrows were signified in his images of Melancholy, The Scream and Anxiety, but these works embody a wild joy in creation and discovery. As did Goya, Munch depicted even his darkest subjects in a manner that celebrates the act of painting and the desire for life even in the face of death. His skepticism made it impossible for him to be satisfied with the pious fundamentalism of his father’s religion, but he fastened on a concept of life after death through his artistic legacy, and a final union with nature. After years of struggle, he wrote in 1937: Prayer and religious thought — the idea of God, of eternity — take us out of ourselves; unite us with the universe, with the origins of light, with the origins of life, with the world. It soothes, thus does faith make us strong. It allows us to distance ourselves from the body}‘'^ This excerpt of a late letter weaves together the themes of faith that had always been a part of his fam- ily and his individual quest for transcendence. The connecting thread through this essay has been Munch’s quest to represent the invisible rather than the visible: the emotion of melancholy, the passions of love and death, and his individual view of spirituality and nature. I have followed Munch as he shifted his focus concentrically outward from his inner world to social and universal concerns — in other words, from psyche to symbol to expression. His "pictures seen by the inner eye" combined the personal and the abstract in a way that still speaks today. He has attained the immortality he sought. 69 1 am grateful to mv colleague, Katherine Nahum, for her thoughtful assistance in the preparation of this essay, 1 Ed\ard Munch, 1907/8: quoted hy Ragna Stang, Edvard Munch. New York; ,'\hbe\ ille Press, 1977, p. 11. 2 Edvard .Munch: The Frieze of Life. Mara-Helen Wood, editor, London: National Gallery, 1992, 3 Trvg\ e Nergaard, "Despair," in Arne Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, Washington, DC: National Gallery of ,\rt, 1978, pp, 113-141. ■» Reinhold Heller, "Ed\ ard Munch's Night, the Aesthetics of Decadence and the Content of Biography," Arts Magazine, 53. 2. October 1978, pp. 80-105, See also Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 87 5 Envin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Diirer’s Melancholia I, Leipzig-Berlin, 1923, 6 Heller. "Ed\ ard Munch's Night, the Aesthetics of Deca- dence . . . pp. 80-105. 7 Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn; the character and conduct of artists: a documented history from antiquity to the French Revolution, New York: Random House, 1963. 8 Envin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dilrer, Princeton, N|: Princeton University Press, 1971. 9 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1651], New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1941. 10 ). Kirk T. Varnedoe, with Elizabeth Streicher, The Graphic Works of Max Klinger, New York: Dover, 1977. 11 Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius, London: W. Scott; New' York: C. Scribner's Sons, i8gi, 12 Lancelot L. Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud, New York: i960, p. 169. C. G. Carus, Psyche [1846I, translated by R. Welch, New York: 1970. Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious [1868], translated by N, C, Coupland, London: 1950. 13 Carus’ Psyche is particularly interesting to the art historian, because in addition to being a physician, Carus was also a painter who had been a pupil of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. He was thus also an associ- ate of )ohan Christian Dahl, who is often called the "father of Norwegian landscape painting.” 14 [. P. F. Richter, known as )ean Paul, quoted in Lancelot Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud, p. 132. 15 Franz Servaes, Das Werk des Edvard Munch, 1894, p. 37ff. : "Im gegensatz zu alien diesen Leuten (von Stuck, Hofmann, Liebermann, Gauguin) steht, obwohl im innersten Kern mit ihnen verwandt, Eduard Munch, der Norweger. Er braucht nicht Bauern und nicht Kentauren und nicht Par- diesesknaben die Primitivitat der Menschennatur zu erblicken un zu durchleben. Er tragt sein eigenes Tahiti in sich, und so schreitet er mit nachtwandlerischer Sicher- heit durch unser verworrenes Culturleben, ganzlich unbeirrt, im Besizt seiner durchaus culturlosen Parsifal- .N'atur. Der reine Thor in der Malerei — das ist Eduard .Munch.” 16 Richard Dehmel, letter of August 26, 1893, in Ausgewdhlte Briefe I, Berlin: 1923; quoted in Carla Lathe, "Edvard Munch and the Concept of Psychic Naturalism'," Gazette des Beaux Arts 93, March 1979, p. 143. 17 L, Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud, pp. 168 169. Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York; 1970. 18 Frank ). Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend I1979], New York: 1983, p. 251, 19 Hans-Ceorg Pfeifer, Max K/irif/ers /J857 igzoj Graphik- zyklen. Subjektivitdt und Kompensation im kiinstlerischen Symholismus als Parallelentwickling zu den Anfangen der Psychoanalyse, Giessener Beitrage zur Kunstgeschichte, Band V, 1980. 20 Marit Lange, "Max Klinger og Norge," Kunst og Kultur (Norway), vol, 80, pt, 1, 1997, pp. 2-40. 21 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, pp. 78-82. See also Patricia Berman and Jane van Nimmen, Munch and Women, Image and Myth, Alexandria, VA; Art Services International, 1997, p. 7. 22 Quoted by Trygve Nergaard, "Despair,” in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 130, 23 Christian Krohg, Nov. 1891, quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 82. 24 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2782); quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 131. 25 "Bohembud” (commandments for the Bohemians), Impres- sionisten. No. 8, February 1889; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 52. 26 Biographical studies first dominated Munch scholarship: Rolf Stenersen and Ragna Stang produced well informed and valuable commentaries. Later scholars such as Rein- hold Heller, Arne Eggum, and Patricia Berman focused on interpretation, and Elizabeth Prelinger and others have made important contributions to the technical study of Munch's printmaking techniques. 27 Edvard Munch, Manuscript N 45; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 107. 28 Edvard Munch to Ludvig Ravensberg; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 11. 29 Edvard Munch, letter to Ragnar Hoppe, 1929; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. rr. 30 A point effectively made by Carla Lathe, "Edvard Munch's Dramatic Images, iSgz-igog" Journal of the Warburg and Gourtauld Institutes, vol. 46, 1983, pp. 191-206. 31 In a sense Paul Gauguin's relief carving Soyez Mysterieuses (1890) sums up this goal of the Symbolist movement. See H. R. Rookmaaker, Gauguin and Nineteenth-Century Art Theory, Amsterdam; 1972, pp. 220-224, 'Vojtech jirat- Wasiutynski, Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism, New York: 1976. 32 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 66. The Scandinavian connection with Swedenborg may have made the theory of correspondences even more appealing to Munch. 33 Stanislaw Przybyszewski, "Psychischer Naturalismus," Die Neue Rundschau, February 1894, pp. 150-156; reprinted in Stanislaw Przybyszewski, editor. Das Werk des Edvard Munch, Berlin: S, Fischer, 1894: "Munch, to put it briefly, does not want to project a psychical, naked process through mythology, i.e., through sensual metaphors, but directly in his color equivalents, and from this consideration Munch is the naturalist of the phenomena of the soul par excellence, just in the same way that Lieberman is about the most ruthless naturalist of the external world." Quoted by Lathe, "Edvard Munch and the Concept of 'Psychic Naturalism'," Gazette des Beaux Arts, p. 136. 34 Bodil Otteseri, "The Flower of Pain: How a Friendship Engendered Edvard Munch's Predominant Artistic Metaphors," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6, 124, October 1994, pp. 149-158. 35 Maria Leach, editor. Funk B Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, New York: Harper & Row, 1984, pp. 671-672. 36 Trygve Nergaard, "Despair," in Eggum Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 132. 37 Brooks Adams, "The Poetics of Odilon Redon's Closed Eyes,” Arts Magazine, )an. 1980, pp. 130-134. 38 Vincent van Gogh, Letter 566, 1888, The Complete Letters 70 of Vincent von Gogh, Boston, Toronto, London: Bulfinch Press, 1991, vol. 3, p. 90. Emile Wauters (1846-1933) com- bined the Romantic interest in psychology and the role of insanity in artistic creativity in his haunting vision ot The Madness of Hugo van der Goes (1872, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels). Hugo van der Goes (d. 1482) was a very gifted painter who retired from the world in 1475 and entered a monastery in search of a cure for his mental ill- ness. He was stricken while returning from a trip to Rome, according to an account written by Caspar de Ofliuys, of the Roode Clooster, a monastery near Brussels which shel- tered van der Goes. The author of this report had been a young novitiate at the time of van der Goes' illness. He speculated that the illness may have been sent by Divine Providence, or may have stemmed from natural causes, such as "the malignity of corrupt humors that predominate in the human body.” Ofhuys noted that van der Goes was “deeply troubled by the thought of how he could ever finish the works of art he wanted to paint," and also per- haps drank too much wine. Wauters' brother A. J. Wauters, was a noted art historian who had written a biography of Hugo van der Goes in 1864; he undoubtedly brought the chronicles of the artist's madness to the attention of his brother. Emile Wauters portrayed van der Goes in the monastery, in the grip of his melancholic depression, while young boys sing to ease his spirits. This picture, with its subject of artistic madness, has fascinated many later observers intrigued by the relationship between artistic creation and insanity. 39 Andreas Aubert, 1890, quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 69. 40 Notably by a doctor of psychology, Johan Scharffenberg, in 1895, the aftermath of a lecture on Munch's art. See Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 155. 41 Stephanie Barron, editor. Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991. 42 Hugh Honour, "Frozen Music,” Romanticism, New York: Harper & Row, 1979, pp. 119-155. George Mras, Eugene Delacroix’s Theory of Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1966, pp. 37-35. Gunther Metkin, "Music for the Eye, Richard Wagner and Symbolist Painting,” in Jean Clair, editor. Lost Paradise. Symbolist Europe, Montreal: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995, pp. 116-123. 43 Elizabeth Prelinger, "When the Halted Traveler Hears the Scream in Nature: Preliminary Thoughts on the Transfor- mation of Some Romantic Motifs,” in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive Presented on his Seventy-Pifth Birthday, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Muse- ums, 1995, p. 385. 44 Walter Pater, The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry [1873], London, New York: MacMillan, 1893, p. 106. See also Ron Johnson, "Whistler's Musical Modes: Symbolist Symphonies,” Arts Magazine, April 1981, pp. 164-176. 45 Roy Asbjbrn Boe, "Edvard Munch: His Life and Work from 1880 to 1920,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. New York University, 1971, p. 160. 46 Draft of a letter of c. 1932, quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 103. 47 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, A Contri- bution to the Psychology of Style [1908], New York: Inter- national Universities Press, Inc., 1967. 48 Paul Gauguin, quoted in H. R. Rookmaaker, Gauguin and Nineteenth-Century Art Theory, Amsterdam: Swetz & Zeitlinger, 1972, p. 321, 49 One evidence of the strength of Wagner's influence is the length of Max Nordau’s attack on him in "The Richard Wagner Cult,” Degeneration I1892I, translated by G. L. Mosse, New York, 1968, pp. 171-213. 50 Regarding German art, Munch wrote: "For example, Bbcklin, whom 1 would almost rank above all other modern painters. Max Klinger, Tliorna. Among musicians, Wagner; among philosophers, Nietzsche. France has an art that is greater than Germany's, but no artists greater than these I named." Quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 109. 51 Charles Baudelaire, "Richard Wagner et Tannhauser," Curiosites esthetiques. L'art rornantique, 1861; quoted in Gunther Metkin, "Music for the Eye, Richard Wagner and Symbolist Painting,” in Lost Paradise. Symbolist Europe, p. 118. 52 Teodor de Wyzewa, “Notes on Wagnerian Painting (1886),” translated from the Revue Wagnerienne, II, May 8, 1886, pp. 107-108, in Henri Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, Berke- ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 147-149. 53 de Wyzewa, “Notes on Wagnerian Painting (1886).” 54 Elizabeth Prelinger, "Halted Traveler," Seymour Slive, p. 385. 55 Paul Gauguin. The Writings of a Savage, edited by Daniel Guerin, New York: Viking Press, 1928, pp. 146-147. 56 Kirk Varnedoe, "Christian Krohg and Edvard Munch,” Arts Magazine, April 1979, pp. 88-95. 57 Quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 130. 58 Deborah L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Ein-de-Siecle France. Politics, Psychology, and Style, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 84-85. 59 Norma Steinberg, “Munch in Color," Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 3, Spring 1995, pp. 8-54. 60 This device “. . . consisted of a 6-foot square frame above a normal harpsichord; the frame contained 60 small win- dows each with a different colored-glass pane and a small curtain attached by pulleys to one specific key, so that each time that key would be struck, that curtain would lift briefly to show a flash of corresponding color. Enlighten- ment society was dazzled and fascinated by this invention, and flocked to his Paris studio for demonstrations. The German composer Telemann traveled to France to see it, composed some pieces to be played on the Ocular Harpsi- chord, and wrote a German-language book about it.” Animation World Magazine, Issue 2.1, April 1997, p. 1. 61 Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-94), Treatise on Physiological Optics (1867), p. 237, quoted in Arthur Jerome Eddy, Recollections and Impressions of Whistler, PhiJadelphia and London: Lippincott, 1908, pp. 195-196. Eddy tried to lay a scientific foundation for Whistler's harmonies of color, see especially pp. 186-200. Helmholtz's chart: F# End of the red G Red G# Red A Red A# Orange-red B Orange C Yellow C# Green D Greenish-blue D# Cyanogen-blue E Violet Early examples of color organs are shown in A. Wallace Rimington, Colour-Music. The Art of Mobile Colour, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1912. 62 The relationship of color to mathematics, as well as music. 71 \\ js a coniern of Georges Seurat and the Neo Impression ists. Robert Herbert, editor. Georges Seurat iS‘;g-iSgi, New "tork: Metropolitan Museum of .’\rt. 1991, pp. 391-393, discusses Charles Henry's contribution to Neo-Impression- ist theorc. 63 See Stefan Tschudi Madsen. Sources of Art Nouveau, Oslo ancf New 'fork: 1956. .■Mso Robert Scbmutzler, Art Nouveau, \ew ^■ork: 1978. 64 See Deborah Silv erman. Art Nouveau in Fin de-Siecle France, chapter 5. "Psychologie Nouvelle," pp. 75-106. Silverman concludes on p. 106: "The cfiscovery that the interior of the human organism W'as a sensitive nerv’ous mechanism, prone to suggestion, visual thinking, and imagistic projection in dreams — these elements of a new psychological knowledge would alter the meaning of interior decoration in the fin-de-siecle.” 65 Gabriel P. VVeisberg, "S. Bing, Edvard Munch and I'Art Nou- veau." Arts Magazine, 1986, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 58-64. 66 Scriabin's Prometheus was partly inspired by the Belgian Symbolist artist jean Delville; it was written while Scriabin was staying with Delville during the period when the artist was creating a mural of Prometheus for the Universite Libre in Brussels. See Olivder Delv'ille, Jean Delville, Pein- tre 1867-1953, Brussels: Laconti, 1984, p. 26. A "Clavilux" was featured at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, and Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) was the most popular example of synaesthetic art. Synaesthesia is a major goal of much contemporary computer and video art. 67 Edvard Munch. Manuscript T 2760, December 12, 1891, p. 36; quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 131. 68 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful, University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, links the terror of the sublime to Freudian castration anxiety; see Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 66. 69 Edvard Munch, 1891, Manuscript T 2761; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 16. 70 Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth- Century Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 179. 71 Munch to Ragnar Hoppe; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 174. Working from memory was an important tool for many artists to simplify their images; Edgar Degas praised the memory training of Francois Lecoq de Boisbaudran, and later declared: "It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't any more but in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say the necessary. That way, your memories and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny of nature." Richard Kendall, Degas Landscapes, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 212. Even Vin cent van Gogh began working from memory during the fall of 1888: "I am going to set myself to work from mem ory often, and the canvases from memory are always less awkward, and have a more artistic look than studies from nature . . Letter 561, November 1888, in I he Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Boston, Toronto, London: Bulfinch Press, 1991, vol, 3, p, 103. 72 Munrh, Livfrisens tilblivelse (On the creation of the Frieze of Life), Oslo: 1929; quoted in Arne Eggum, Munch and Photography, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 52. 73 Reinhold Heller, "Concerning Symbolism and the Structure of Surface," Art lournal, v'ol, 45, no, 2, Summer 1985, pp. 146- 153- 74 Edv'ard Munch; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 31, 75 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2748; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 107. 76 Patricia Berman, Edvard Munch: Mirror Reflections, West Palm Beach, FL: The Norton Gallery, 1986, p. 92. 77 Edvard Munch, Manuscript N 29; quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 154. 78 Ottesen, “The Flower of Pain . . pp. 149-158. 79 See James Ensor's Ecce Homo, private collection, 1891, and his Self-Portrait as Crucified Christ, drawing, private collection, 1886, and Paul Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives, Norton Gallery, West Palm Beach, 1889 and Self- Portrait near Golgotha, Museo de Sao Paolo, Brazil, 1896. 80 Arne Eggum, "Major Paintings,” in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 39. 81 Munch called such treatment of his pictures his "horse cure"; aspects of this were explained to me by Jan-Thurman Moe, former conservator at the Munch Museum in an interview at Munch’s studio in Ekely, May 2000. See Jan Thurmann-Moe, "Edvard Munch’s Kill or Cure Treatment: Experiments with Technique and Materials." Edvard Munchs "hestekur”: Eksperimenter med teknikk og mate- rialer, exhibition catalog, Oslo: Munch Museum, 1995. (Norwegian and English text.) 82 August Strindberg, "The New Arts, or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation,” in Inferno, Alone and Other Writings, Evert Sprinchorn, editor. New York: 1968, pp. 98-104. 83 Edvard Munch, Livfrisens tilblivelse (Origin of the Frieze of Life), p. 12; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, 1977, p. 90. 84 Arne Eggum, Munch and Photography, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 49. Arne Eggum makes the connection to Munch’s mother in his essay "The Theme of Death," in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 162. 85 Quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, pp. 82-83. 86 Carla Lathe, “Edvard Munch and the Concept of ‘Psychic Naturalism',” Gazette des Beaux Arts, p. 141. Also, Rolf E. Stenersen, Edvard Munch, Close-Up of a Genius I1944I, Oslo: Sem & Stenersen, AS, 1994, p. 101. 87 Stanislaw Przybyszewski, quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 129. Przybyszewski had been a medical student in 1890 at the University of Berlin where he stud- ied neurology and the microscopic anatomy of the cerebral cortex. 88 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, pp. 130-131. 89 A. McElroy Bowen, "Munch and agoraphobia: his art and his illness," RACAR: Revue d'Art Canadienne, 1988, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 23-50. 90 Munch, quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 107. 91 Edvard Munch, The Tree of Knowledge, Manuscript T 2547; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 107. 92 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Section 4, subsection 1, p. 866ff. 93 Sarah G. Epstein, "The Mighty Play of Life: Munch and Religion," in The Prints of Edvard Munch: Mirror of his Life, Oberlin, OH : The Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1983, pp. 131-147. Stenersen, Edvard Munch, Close-Up of a Genius, p. 11, recounts an episode of Munch storming out of the house after an argument with his father over the duration of purgatory. 94 Arne Eggum, "The Theme of Death," in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 179, and p, 183, note 126. 72 See also Lathe, "Edvard Munrh's Dramatic Images," pp. igi-206. 95 Eggum, Munch and Photography, p. too. See also Patricia Berman and Jane van Nimmen, Munch and Women, Image and Myth, Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1997, p. 182. The Danish translation was by Anna Mohr Leistikow, wife of Munch’s friend and fellow artist Walter Leistikow. A copy of her translation of Maeterlinck's play De Blinde (Les Aveugles, 1890), Copenhagen: 1891, is still in Munch’s library. See also Genevieve Aitken, "Edvard Munch et la scene francaise,” in Munch et la France, Paris: Editions de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1991, pp. 222-239. 96 Extract from the catalog Munch produced to accompany his 1918 exhibition at Blomquist’s gallery in Kristiania. Quoted in Wood, Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, pp. 11-14. Munch told )ens Thiis: "As far as the sick child is concerned I might tell you that this was a time which 1 refer to as the 'pillow period.’ There were many painters who painted sick children against a pillow — but it was after all not the subject that made my sick child. No, in the sick child and 'Spring' no other influence was possible than that which of itself wells forth from my home. These pictures were my childhood and my home. He who really knew the conditions in my home — would under- stand that there could be no other outside influence than that which might have had importance as midwifery. — One might as well say that the midwife had influenced the child. — This was during the pillow era. The sick bed era, the bed era and the comforter era, let it go at that. But 1 insist that there hardly was one of those painters who in such a way had lived through his subject to the last cry of pain as 1 did in my sick child. For it wasn’t just 1 who sat there, it was all my loved ones.” Manuscript N 45; quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 146. The model for this work was the fifteen year old Betzy Nielsen, who was the same age as his sister Sophie had been when she died; see Edvard Munch, exhibition catalog, Peter W. Guenther, editor, Houston: University of Houston, 1976, p. 62 97 Eggum, Munch and Photography, pp. 60-64. 98 Lorenz Eitner, "The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat, an Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism," Art Bulletin, vol. 36, 1955, pp. 281-290. 99 Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 15. 100 Eggum, "The Theme of Death,” in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 168; also Boe, “Edvard Munch," p. 191. 101 Stenersen, Edvard Munch, Close-Up of a Genius, pp. 65-66 102 James Ensor, Self-Portrait in igSo, etching, 1888, and Felicien Rops, Dancing Death, 1870s, are just two exam- ples. Decadent literature is also replete with images of death. See Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981, and Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, for examples. 103 Wood, Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, pp. 11-14. 104 Edvard Munch, Manuscript OKK 2734; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 120. 105 Edvard Munch, Livfrisens tilblivelse (On the creation of the Frieze of Life), quoted in Eggum, Munch and Photogra- phy, 1989, p. 124. 106 Arne Eggum, Edvard Munch: Paintings, Sketches and Studies, Norway: J. M. Stenersens Forlag AS, 1984, p. 260 107 Felicien Rops, Dancing Death, 1870s. Antoine Wiertz, La Belle Rosine, 1847, Wiertz Museum, Brussels. 108 Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor, The Symbolist Prints of EdvanI Munch, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 102. It was exhibited under the title of "Loving Woman" in 1897. See also Berman and van Nimmen, Munch and Women, Irtiage and Myth, p. 118. 109 Eggum, Edvard Munch: Paintings, Sketches anti Sluilies, p. 169. 110 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2547; quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 105. 111 Quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, 1978, p. 165. 112 Quoted in Guenther, Edvard Munch, p. 117. 113 Edvard Munch, quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 174: "I have always put my art before everything else. Often I felt that women would stand in the way of my art. I decided at an early age never to marry. Because of the tendency towards insanity inherited from my mother and father I have always fell that it would be a crime for me to embark on marriage.” 114 Sigborn Obstfelder, 1896, in Samtideiv, quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 105. 115 Edvard Munch, Manuscript N 30; quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 136. 116 Munch is cast as a misogynist in many earlier works; see Martha Kingsbury, The Femme Fatale and her Sisters," in Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, editors. Woman as Sex Object, New York: Allen Lane, 1973, pp. 293-314; and Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. The recent catalog on Munch and Women, Image and Myth, by Patricia Berman and Jane van Nim- men provides a more balanced account of his relationships with and attitudes toward women. 117 Berman and van Nimmen, Munch and Women, Image and Myth, p. 147. See also J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, "Munch und Rodin,” in Henning Bock und Gunter Busch, eds., Edvard Munch. Prohleme — Forschungern — Thesen, Munich: Prestel, 1973, pp. 99-132. 118 Edvard Munch, Manuscript OKK T 2782c; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 148. 119 Munch, The Tree of Knowledge, Manuscript A 31; quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 252. 120 Malcolm Easton, Aubrey and the Dying Lady, A Beardsley Riddle, Boston: David R. Godine, 1972, pp. 178-81. 121 van Gogh worried that excess in physical love would drain his paintings of their potency; in a letter to his younger colleague Emile Bernard in August, 1888, he advised him (in crude terms) to transfer his sexual energy to his paint ings. Letter B 14 [9], November 1888, in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, vol. 3, p. 509. 122 I thank Katherine Nahum for this observation. 123 Eggum, "The Theme of Death," in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, pp. 163-164. 124 Eggum, Munch and Photography, pp. 61-64. 125 For more on Marcel Reja, who was actually a physician named Paul Meunier, see John M. MacGregor, The Discov- ery of the Art of the Insane, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1989, p. I72ff. This poem was never published, and it was quoted for the first time in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 222. 126 Edvard Munch; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 86: "In connection with the picture Lovers in the Waves (the lithograph), which D has bought, I should like to make it clear that the subject or the inspiration for that picture is a model that 1 had in Berlin in the 1890s. 1 also used her for the big lithograph. Madonna. 1 let Przybyszewski have one of the sketches to illustrate a collection of poetry. It bore a certain resemblance to Dagny . . . When we dis- 73 cusseii whether it was in tact Dagny or the girl 1 had used as a model, we were completely mistaken. On the other hand, there is a dehnite likeness . . ." 127 Letter from Dr. Linde to Gusta\ Schieller: cited in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 166. 12s Quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 204, 129 Ed\ard Munch, Manuscript T 2547: quoted by Stang, Edvard .Munch, p. 26. 130 Heller. Munch: His Life and Work, p. 143. 131 One example of a v egetable birth is the story of Attis, who was the lover of Cybele; his mother was made preg- nant by a either a ripe almond or a pomegranate from a tree which grew from the severed genitals of Agdistus; The Oxford Classical Dictionary, N. G. L. Hammond and H. H, Scullard. editors, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970, pp. 146-147- 132 [. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, New York: MacMillan, 195'. PP- 790-92- 133 Strindberg s alchemical obsession is recounted in his Occult Diary and Inferno. See Michael Meyer, Strindberg, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 328-346. Munch visited Strindberg in his apartment in Paris, where he con- ducted his occult experiments. After Strindberg’s mental collapse in Paris and return to Ystad, Sweden, Munch wrote to his aunt Karen Bjolstad: “He is under treatment for mental illness — he had so many strange notions — made gold, and found that the earth was flat and the stars were holes in the vault of heaven. He had persecution mania and once thought 1 wanted to poison him with gas," Meyer, Strindberg, p. 346. 134 Sarah G. Epstein, "The Mighty Play of Life: Munch and Religion," p. 133. 135 Epstein, "The Mighty Play of Life: Munch and Religion," p, 133, identifies the figure as Munch’s father. Wood, Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, p. 104, less convinc- ingly proposes that it is Stanislaw Przybyszewski. 136 The German Romantic Nazarenes modeled themselves on monks, and even occupied a monastery near Rome for a while. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood borrowed tbe reli- gious title of 'brotherhood’’ at least, and in the Symbolist era, the identification of the artist as priest was most explicitly given by the Rosicrucian )osephin Peladan, who proclaimed: "Artist, you are priest; Art is a great mystery and as soon as your effort is rewarded with a masterpiece a divine ray descends as if on an altar. O presence of glori- ous divinity, shining forth from the splendour of supreme names: Vinci, Raphael, Michaelangelo, Beethoven and Wagner. Artist, you are king: Art is a veritable empire, when your hand traces a perfect line the cherubims them- selves descend and take delight, as if looking into a mirror." [osephin Peladan, Introduction to catalog of first Salon de la Rose-Croix, quoted and translated by F.-C. Legrand, Symbolism in Belgium, translated by Alastair Kennedy, Brussels: Laconti, 1972, p, 42. 137 Quoted in Berman, Edvard Munch: Mirror Reflections, P- 90- 138 Quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, P- 239- 139 Edvard Munch, Violet Book, Manuscript T 2760, January 8, 1892; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 120. 140 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2760; 1892; quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 62. 141 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2782 — bi; quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, 1978, p. 239. 142 Louise Lippincott, Edvard Munch. Starry Night, Malibu, CA: Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1988, p, 88ff. 143 Quoted in Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 209. 144 Hans Dedekam, 1892; quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 111. 145 Munch wrote to Ragnar Hoppe, “It has interested me greatly that you wish to hold a lecture on the subject of the exhibition, and that you want to draw attention to the spiritual aspects of my art. Nowadays, to my irritation, it is often described as literary, and, with even less justi- fication, it has also been called German 'Gedankenmalerei’ (‘Thought painting') — remarks that are not intended to be complimentary. 1 have an extremely high opinion of good German art, but not the sort that is quite rightly reviled as ‘Gedankenmalerei’.” Quoted by Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 108. 146 Quoted by Qivind Storm Bjerke, Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg, Landscapes of the Mind, New York: National Academy of Design, 1995, pp. 22-23. 74 FROM SPIRITUAL NATURALISM TO PSYCHICAL naturalism: catholic decadence, LUTHERAN MUNCH, MADONE MYSTERIQUE STEPHEN SCHLOESSER, 5.J. 39 Edvard Munch, Madonna, oil on canvas, 1893. 40 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1645-52. In the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. How can he stand to comprehend the hard, pitiful Unrelenting cycles of coitus, ovipositors, sperm and zygotes. The repeated unions and dissolutions over and over. The constant tenacious burying and covering and hiding And nesting, the furious nurturing of eggs, the bright Breaking-forth and the inevitable cold blowing-away? — Pattiann Rogers, The Possible Suffering of a God During Creation Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that all of creation has been groaning in birth-pangs until now; and not only creation, but we ourselves as we wait for the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved. Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? — Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans 8:20-24 In 1893, Edvard Munch exhibited six paintings entitled Studies for a Series: Love.^ This series, intended to represent the close interconnec- tions between love and death, ^ included not only the erotic Kiss (no. 31), but also the unnerving kiss of a vampire (first titled Love and Pain, later. Vampire; nos. 40 and 41) and the eerily evocative The Scream (no 7).^ Munch’s most explicit invocation of the supernatural, however, was Madonna (hg. 39) — easily read as an allusion to the ancient trope of the Madonna and Child. With her closed eyes suggesting the moment of erotic transcendence, Munch's Madonna, suspended in a thickly-textured swirl of ecstasy, shares little in common with a traditional mother and child. For an early religious analogue, we would do better by comparing it with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s masterwork of the Catholic Reformation, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (fig. 40). Both Bernini and Munch fuse the religious and the erotic into a single moment of self-transcendence. Two years later. Munch re-worked the piece as a lithograph (nos. 54 and 55). In this bolder 1895 ver- sion, the Madonna remains solitary in her suspended moment of self-transcendence — but now the biological materials of human love have invaded the margins. Spermatozoa, swimming around the emphatic swirling lines of the woman, frame the figure on three sides. Moreover, the result of the union of Madonna and sperm is now explicitly represented: an embryo, crouched in the corner in a fetal posi- tion, stares hieratically at the viewer, skeletal facial features suggesting death even as life has only just begun. In his juxtaposition of this Madonna and sperm, the sacred and the profane. Munch has also united love and death — the limits of human finitude as well as the natural possibilities for a kind of self-transcendence. 75 \\ hv did Muncli risk possible imprisonment, not only for the candid representation of biological sexnalitv. but for charges of sacrilege as well? Assuming that sacrilege was not intended, why would Munch, raised in a strict and puritanical Lutheran household, turn to a form so closely related to Catholic and Latin culture? In the following attempt to answer these questions, I will situate my effort within the wider historical project proposed by the medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum: "we all — schol- ars and ordinary readers alike — must ask about how society constructs, uses, and eclipses the won- drous.'"’ Nineteenth-century Europe witnessed a concerted effort to eclipse the wondrous. This effort, begin- ning with the Realist reaction to Romanticism in the 1830s and sustained in the areas of science, poli- tics. and the arts, has been particularly well studied in France. Republican and Socialist movements against political and class privilege gave such Realism a progressive moral valence. Scientific advances and technological applications made the eradication of mystery — in the form of organized religion, metaphysical speculation, or simply the unknown — seem within reach. Realism and Naturalism in lit- erature and painting, having vowed to represent only the visible surface with the mimetic precision of a scientist or journalist, re-mapped the artist’s terrain. In short, a culture war was waged on many fronts over contested claims to what constituted the really real. Edvard Munch came to the shores of France during the high tide of this contest. The sudden death of his father coincided with Munch’s exposure to the Symbolist struggle against Naturalism; the coin- cidence sent the young artist in search of new answers. Although he no longer believed in his child- hood Lutheranism, he still did not embrace Catholic mysticism — as did Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Joris-Karl Huysmans in France, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater in Britain. Unable to adopt Huys- mans’ mystical double vision of a Spiritual Naturalism, Munch nevertheless proposed his own dialec- tic: Psychical Naturalism. In response to the Naturalists' suffocating eclipse of mystery, he constructed and used his own vision of the wondrous. Spermatozoa — those terrifying carriers of human heredity, passing on the miseries of madness, tuberculosis, syphilis, and other familial degenerations with a mer- ciless determinism — were juxtaposed with the Madonna and embryo, the New Eve, the re-generation of the race. Within the firi-de-siecle French context of anxiety over heredity, hygiene and generations. Munch suggested the irrational, the unpredictable, the possibility of metaphysical rupture. I. naturalism: the eclipse of wonder Yes, yes, manure! I insist on the word. Hold your nose if it offends you. Everything comes from manure in what feeds and clothes us, and we ourselves are nothing more than manure, according to chemistry and the Bible. — Max Buchon, Recueil de dissertations sur le realisme, 1856 During the nineteenth century, technological marvels eclipsed the experience of wonder in the face of the unknown. For the bourgeoisie at least, advances in medicine, hygiene and city-planning had progres- sively reduced infant mortality and lengthened the average life-span.^ The newly-invented sewer sys- tems in the great cities (beginning with London) stood as exciting icons of modernity's magical promise tf) combat cholera and plague, bringing health and uiqrrecedented longevity to city-dwellers (fig. 41 ).^ Newly-imagined capacities for conjuring away the specter of death are suggested in the proliferation Today the world is without mystery. — Marcelin Berthelot, 1885 76 41 43 41 Bourgeous patrons take a pleasure cruise through the new Paris sewer system. Sewer Cruise below the Rue Laffitte, engraving, 1870. 42 From Town Talk, July 18, 1885.^“' 43 Orthopedic device to prevent masturbation. Paris, Biblio- theque de I'Ancienne Faculte de Medecine.'^ ()1 diary keeping and [trivale eolleeting ol every kind, intimate [trac'tices that grew tremendoiksly in [)o[)tilarity tlironghotit the late eighteentli and early nineteenth centtiries.^ The hold promise ol longer lives led in turn to "mythologies ol hered ity,”* middle class anxieties about the [tassing on ol inherited wealth to healthy new generations. An older view of the Victorians has imagined them to he reticent about sex; but as Michel Foucault has suggested, the Victorians talked about little else (fig. 42 ).^ In 1859, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species irrevocably altered the way Euro peans thought about sexuality, illness, and heredity. They worried about the inheritance of mental illness; the deple- tion of vital sources via masturbation; passing on weak sus- ceptibilities to cholera and tuberculosis; tbe newly-invented category of homosexuality ("inversion"); and of course, pros- titutes, the carriers of venereal diseases (fig. 43 ).^° Thus, the late Victorians employed new technologies — hygiene, con- traception, eugenics (including racial segregation) and sur- veillance of all kinds — as means of making sure that sexual reproduction did not degenerate the bourgeois family’s genes and dissipate its fragile fortunes. The Realist artistic movement grew out of these cul- tural anxieties as well as out of contemporaneous political and social upheavals. After the political revolutions in France of 1830 and 1848, literary Realism assumed moral signifi- cance as it aligned itself with a progressive Republican social agenda. This fascination with representing the external world truthfully in all its brutal violence received added impetus in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin oj Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Along with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto published a decade earlier, Darwin’s work shaped a cultural vision. A traditional religious vision had once seen the world as a place of providence and supernatural intervention. The Enlightenment removed providence and naturalized the supernatural, imagining the world as a place of eternal, cosmic clockwork order.^^ The visions of Marx and Darwin challenged this optimistic vision, imagining life as an arena of contest in which individuals, races, and classes competed for scarce resources. In this darkly competitive world. Romanticism was conceived of as a deformation that mis-re- presented harsh truths, while Realism was imagined to be a faithful mirror of life, a mimetic copy with complete verisimilitude.^^ Realism, of course, was no less a semantic system of codes than Romanticism. But as an ideology that claimed to represent reality in a transparent way. Realism carried highly specific cultural meanings. The post-1859 Naturalist movement, of which Edouard Manet and Emile Zola stood as masters, sought to translate this social and scientific vision through literary and artistic means. Gone were the Academy’s official heroes of ancient mythology, the saints of the scriptures, bucolic pas- torals and still-lifes. Naturalists of all stripes (Realists, Impressionists, and Post-Impressionists) cele- brated the new subjects of mundane life: washer women, miners, prostitutes, betrayed revolutionaries, and the ubiquitous working-class plague of absinthe and alcoholism. Extracts t.'ora the “Pall Mali Eacette" Town Talk 77 44 45 In Emile Zola's novels, the Darwinian vision achiex eil its perfect literary expression. Tracing the fortunes of a single family through the twenty- volume Chronicles of the Rougon-Macquart Family, Zola focused his evolutionary concerns on genera- tions and the role of heredity in determining human li\es.*^ The plights of impoverished coal miners ‘Cerminall. the dilemmas of prostitution (Nana), the social diseases of alcoholism (L'Assomoir) and even kleptomania (The Ladies Faradise)^^ — all received Zola’s journalistic attention to the minutest detail. However, Realism had more than a progressive moral appeal. It also acquired a titillating allure for a new market of mass consumption, spilling over into a popular voyeurism of spectacular realities.^® By using wood engravings of photographs, tabloids coidd reproduce life-like scenes with lurid details. They thric ed on bringing realistic images of bruised bodies to the public (hg. 44). Not content with pic- tures, crowds thronged to view the corpses themselves, exhibited in windows at the morgue dressed like department store displays.” For verisimilitude, however, nothing matched the new wax Hgures at the Musee Grevin. The newspaper LTllustration noted that the new museum's statues were "the tri- umph of Naturalism."^° In these wax dioramas, Zola's progressive social vision satisfied the hunger of a new market of consumers for lurid detail (fig. 45). The museum’s founder, writing to Zola, promised that The Musee Grevin will be Naturalist or will not be.”^^ The social agenda of a Realist like Zola found its political carrier in Liberalism. Although such republican ideas swept across Europe (including Norway) during the second half of the century, they assumed a new meaning in France of the 1870s, the age of the Sorbonne in the newly-formed Third Republic. Here a new laicism was born in the intersection of three elements: an ideology of modern liberty stretching back to the Enlightenment philosophes; modern science, which strictly delineated the limits of experience and reason, and gave birth to a technical universe without any reference to reli- gion; and a republican political state.^^ This state suppressed religious educational institutions with the public school system, inculcating the values of an all inclusive and enduring laicist culture.^^ Laicist ide- ology was totalizing in its territorial claims. As the chemist Marcelin Berthelot wrote in 1885, Today the world is without mystery. Rational conception claims to clarify and comprehend everything. It works hard at giving everything a positive and logical explication, and it spreads its fatal determin- ism all the way to the moral world.^"' Five years later, Ernest Renan, the mid-century author of the disenchanted Life o//esns,^^ celebrated the future absolute triurn[)h of Science over Religion: Everything that the State has extended in the past to religious exercise will rightfully return to science, the only definitive religion . . . Science, in fact, will only he valuable insofar as it replaces religion.^^ In sum. Scientism, artistic Naturalism, and socially progressive Liberalism found an ideal center in the Third Republic's colonizing efforts. At home and abroad, French republican institutions worked to rationalize and centralize local cultures: primitive, peasant, and religious.^^ What began as a bleak vision 44 "Le mystere de la rue du Vert- Bois," from Le Journal lllustre, August 15, 1886.^® 45 Tableau from Germinal. Musee Grevin archives.^® 78 of the competitive natural world was transiormed paradoxically into a fin de-siecie logic of progress. The historian )acqnes Barznn described it thus: All events had physical origins; physical origins were discoverable by science; and the method of sci ence alone could, by revealing the nature of things, make the mechanical sequences of the universe wholly benevolent to man. Fatalism and progress were as closely linked as the Heavenly Twins and like them invincible.^° The determinist logic of progress assumed suffocating proportions as scientihc wonders eclipsed the wondrous and fertilizer replaced fertility rites.^^ Norway embraced this Liberal vogue. In the i88os, artists returned from abroad to sleepy Oslo (at that time Kristiania), replacing a parochial nationalistic Romanticism with the more cosmopolitan Realism imported from France and Germany. Manet and Camille Corot stood as the Norwegians' artis- tic models, Flaubert and Zola as literary ones.^^ Christian Krohg was Norway's foremost Naturalist painter. We see in Krohg’s 1880-81 study, The Sick Girl, why Munch was attracted to study with this Naturalist. Munch’s father was a doctor. In 1868, when Munch was five, his mother died of tuberculo- sis; his sister Sophie died of the same disease nine years later. His brother Andreas died at the young age of thirty in 1895. His sister Laura suffered from mental illness. Munch himself was hospitalized for nervous breakdowns and alcohol abuse, first in 1900 and again in 1905. As a consequence. Munch had a life-long fear of illness in general and of the suspected degenerate blood in his particular family. "Ill ness, insanity and death," he wrote, “were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accom- panied me all my life."^^ In Krohg's work. Munch would have found the ideal artistic vehicle for representing such "black angels.” Krohg reproduced the details of the young girl’s illness — an illness not unlike Munch’s sister's three years earlier — in the manner of a doctor or a journalist with a Naturalist’s precise photographic record (fig. 4 ). Newly-imported Naturalism — like photography, journalism, and science itself — seemed to epitomize all that was modern. However, Socialist-inclined Liberals in Norway would soon see — as their French counterparts had fifteen years earlier — just how illiberal Liberalism could be.^’* Hans Jaeger, at the center of the Kristia- nia Bohemia (and whose influence lured Munch away from his father’s Lutheranism), published his novel. From the Kristiania Bohemia, in 1885. Tame by today’s standards, the novel was banned, confis- cated, and destroyed for both its anti-Christian rhetoric and its explicit sexual accounts. (Jaeger talked about sex as a tool for revolution; seducing a banker’s young daughters was one proposal.) Jaeger him- self was jailed. In 1886, Christian Krohg, Munch’s Naturalist artistic mentor, published his own novel, Albertine. Its discussion of proletarian social ills and explicit references to prostitution earned Krohg a fate similar to Jaeger's. As Carl Naerup would write about the disillusionment of Norway's younger generation: Thus was revealed in the most ugly manner how lacking in character and how cowardly the reigning "Liberalism" was . . . One day it became apparent that the dream was over . . . What we now found fac- ing us was the identical drab existence of before, appearing twice as repulsive after our visions had ceased. This socio-political disillusionment led Naerup to a new post-Naturalist estimation of art’s function, one that would turn its eyes away from surface realities to deeper psychic ones; 79 n t> fun] been taught bitterly of what little value all temporary movements and tendencies were in the world of the spirit. I W began to understatid that art, like all the ideals of mankind, is a revelation from the innermost, unspeakable, sacred depths of the personality, from the personal realm of an individ- uals most private life . . Perluips it was this kind of disillusionment with the fates of his friends that drove Munch to re think his own style. Or perhaps it was simply that, due to increasing economic and political stal)ility under Liberal governments in Scandinavia, “the problems revealed by Naturalist paintings and novels were seemingly in the process of being solved by the state, thus reducing their artistic attractiveness and via- bility.”^* Whatever the reason. Munch began to deviate from Naturalism. In r885~86 he painted his own ver sion of The Sick Child, which he revised as an etching in 1895 (no. 9 ). A comparison with Krohg's own Sick Girl painted five years earlier (see above, 1880-81) demonstrates Munch’s expressive departure from his mentor’s mimetic style. Not interested in photographic verisimilitude. Munch instead attempted to express the psychic state experienced in the sick room. Looking back on it, Munch later thought of The Sick Child as a turning point and considered it to be the first painting of his massive Frieze of Life. In April 1889, Munch was featured in the first one-man show ever held in Norway, at the Kristia- nia Student Organization. Critics were generally negative, but Munch's mentor Krohg wrote a review prescient in its vision of a third-way synthesis. The "first generation” of Norway’s painters, wrote Krohg, had been German-trained Romantic artists, parochial in their efforts to create a Scandinavian Kultur. The “second generation" had been trained in Paris as plein air Naturalists. A "third generation” was struggling to be born — and only one young painter had survived the birth process. Munch, exclaimed Krohg, "is an Impressionist, our only one so far!”^^ Certainly Krohg's deployment of a mythic generational evolution was a fictive construct, albeit an increasingly popular one as the modern nineteenth century progressed. Generally used to obliterate other distinctions such as class, race, and gender, the idea of a generation represented an inverted authority pyramid: once wise men ruled by nature; youth now displaced them with an ec|ually natural force.^* By using the term "third generation" just three years after the condemnation of his Naturalist novel, Krohg’s intent was clear: the generation of Liberal legitimacy was passing into old age. More importantly though, the language of two generations demanding dialectical synthesis into a superior third way gave Munch and his circle a hint of double vision. They were somehow to synthe- size in a single act of the imagination two earlier schools. On the one hand, they must clearly turn to the emotional interior, that truest place of reality for the Romantics. On the other, they could not aban- don the lessons forged in the Naturalist period; they had to retain Naturalism’s radical technical inno vations as well as its fundamental moral concern to paint mundane experiences. By framing the problem as the need for a third way uniting two past generations, Krohg's call prefigured the double vision Munch would encounter in Decadent France — Spiritual Naturalism. In the October following his disastrous s|rring show in 1889, Munch left for France. One month after his arrival in Saint Cloud (on the outskirts of Paris), he received news of his father’s sudden death — and only after his father’s Inirial. The death was momentous, for Munch’s spiritual journey (like his fel- low Scandinavian Soren Kierkegaard's) was dominated by the deep despair of his father.” Munch wrote that his father was given over to "periods of religious anxiety which could expand to the very limits of rnadness.”*'° I^erha|js Munch felt his own deej) anxieties for having rejected his father's intense Lutfieranisrn and fiaving embraced flans jaeger's free thinking atheism.''^ Or [)erhaps, unable to share 80 his family's hopeful Lutheran faith iu the afterlife, Munch had to search elsewhere tor a new kind of immortality."*^ Whatever the reasons, the winter of 1889-1890 that Munch sfient at Saint-Cloud with the writer Emanuel Goldstein proved to be a definitive turning point. Munch's diary entries from those months served as small manifestoes for his turn away from Realism and towards the interior realm: No longer shall interiors be painted with people reading and women knitting. . . . There shall be living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love. Painting needed to come to terms with the inner life of sentiment: love and suffering. Munch's vision was not explicitly concerned with organized religion or Lutheran orthodoxy, but he clearly considered his vision sacred: “People will understand what is sacred in them and will take off their hats as if in church.”"*^ In this expansion of the boundaries of the sacred, Munch would hnd fellow-travelers in the Decadent movement. Co-opting the language of the Naturalists and inverting it for their own purposes, these pioneers also sought to re-invent the sacred so as to restore the possibility of wonder. II. SYMBOLISM AND DECADENCE: A REACTIONARY REVOLUTION The reaction of inner humanity against the superficial All I have to do is think of Naturalism and Realism and all that objectivity of Naturalism ... is a departure from the impudent other manufactured art and 1 get nauseous, despotism of things dead and the return of the living man. — Emanuel Goldstein — Hermann Bahr (1890)'''' to Edvard Munch (1891)^^ Twenty-five years before Munch arrived in France, Charles Baudelaire had proposed his theory of The Painter of Modern Life and, in doing so, redefined the term "modern.” Before Baudelaire, Flaubert seemed to have settled modernity's boundaries in a definitive way with his 1856 novel, Madame Bovary. Aim- ing for a dispassionate Realist description of the bourgeois, Flaubert tried to represent (without inter- pretation or evaluation) their dullness, their stupidity (e.g., an unnecessary amputation), and their collective suicide. Three years later, Darwin's account of a world in which “favoured races” competed for preservation in the struggle for life gave such grotesqueness a cosmic cast. In 1863, relentless Real- ism seemed the very definition of the modern. Thus, Baudelaire's revolutionary linkage of modern beauty with the supernatural went against the grain."*^ Baudelaire's alternative double vision of modernity insisted that beauty necessarily involves two elements: that which is always changing, or the modern; and that which remains unchanging, or the eternal. Beauty is always and inevitably of a double composition, although the impression that it produces is single — for the fact that it is difficult to discern the variable elements of beauty within the unity of the impression invalidates in no way the necessity of variety in its composition. Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, cir- cumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature.''^ 81 From one perspective, Baudelaire had to account for the keystone of modernity: ever-changing fashion had taken on a qualitatively new' importance in the commodihcation of artistic production after the Revolution of as well as in the face of technological revolutions.''^ But for Baudelaire, ever-hckle fashion and the perceived sense of rapid change represented only one side of modernism’s dilemma. From another perspective, Baudelaire felt that the modern artist must represent the unchanging and eternal. In attempting both to overcome Academic painting’s fetish of the antique and to legitimize painting scenes drawn from everyday urban life, Baudelaire formulated his theory of correspondences. The world for Baudelaire was a ‘‘forest of symbols” in which scjunds, scents and colors acted as echoes and corresponded to another world of infinite things; The pillars of Nature s temple are alive and sometimes yield perplexing messages; f orests of symbols between us and the shrine remark our passage with accustomed eyes. Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere else into one deep and shadowy unison as limitless as darkness and as day, the sounds, the scents, the colors correspond. . . . possess the power of such infinite things as incense, amber, benjamin and musk to praise the senses' raptures and the mind's.^° fn seeing the correspondence between this forest of symbols in which we live and the eternal world which they symbolize, an intuition of the aternporal or spiritual could suddenly illuminate that rapid passage of surface forms that dizzies us in hectic modern life.^^ Thus, Baudelaire fashioned a double vision. Like all Realists, Baudelaire’s artist would reject the Academy’s archaic interest in gods and ruins and instead look to mundane modern life for subject mat- ter. Ffowever, unlike the Realists, the artist would hud there not more evidence of the cosmos’s aimless- ness, but rather ephemeral flickers of eternal truths. ‘ The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present,” wrote Baudelaire, "is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essen tial quality of being the present.”^^ Baudelaire’s 1863 revolutionary re mapping of the modernist terrain demonstrated deep internal fissures in the discourse of modernity — a conflict between eternal values and passing phenomena. On the one hand, the Enlightenment "project of modernity" was fundamentally a secular movement that sought to demystify and desacralize knowledge.^^ Rational modes of thought, valuing empirical obser- vation of passing phenomena, promised liberation from the murky irrationalities of myth, religion, and superstition.^'' On the other hand, the Enlightenment would not have been satisfied with nineteenth century positivism's exaltation of the ephemeral aj)pearance. The eighteenth century philosophes had aimed at revealing universal, eternal, and immutable cjualities. Baudelaire’s Symbolist double vision exposed modernity’s conflicted origins and paradoxical embrace of both [)articular and universal, con- tingent and eternal. Although the movement that became Symbolism would have coni[)licated origins,^^ it had a single sim[)le aim: to oppose Scientism’s and Naturalism’s claims to provide adequate repre- sentations of reality. Against all the claims for light and clarity as the path to modernity, Baudelaire reclaimed a place for dark and mysterious defjths at the very heart of the modern. 82 I 46 47 d«» kUiUidai pMtionncIlet 4® Pertcd* y transform ing the word decadence into a positive virtne.^^ The following year, 1 hdiphile Gautier repaid the coin[)liment in his introductory essay to the 1868 edition of Baudelaire's poems, blowers oj Evil. Gautier celebrated Baudelaire's style de decadence, for here modern art had: arrived at that point of extreme maturity to which aging civilizations give rise as their suns begin to set: a style that is ingenious, cornpli cated, learned . . . listening, in order to translate them, to the most subtle confidences of new roses, the confessions of aging passions enter ing depravity, and the bizarre hallucinations of obsession changing into rnadness.^^ The human motor, sent into overdrive by the frenetic crush of modernity, succumbed to neurasthenia, a favorite mental illness of the fin-de-siecle.^^ Like the Decadent movement in general, Gautier delighted in inversions. He took the very elements that fast-paced modern culture feared most — neurosis, sickness, and madness — and exalted them as signs of a civilization reaching an "ingen- ious” and "complicated extreme maturity." The most important inversion of the Decadents came, however, with the attention to the body of the hysteric — usually female but not always — as the contested site between two visions of reality. Here the main figure was the French psychologist Jean Martin Charcot. Charcot, a professor of neurological pathology at the Salpetriere clinic (where Freud sat at the mas- ter's feet), specialized in psychical research. In this epoch, both female hys- teria and male homosexuality (associated with neurasthenia) were being invented — not in traditional religious or metaphysical terms (i.e., as demonic possession or “sinful activity”), but rather as materialistic "inversions” subject to scientific explanation and manipulation.^” Hysteria came to be imagined as a malady of the nervous system, the symptoms of which could be fully explained by accurate descriptions of surface phenomena. The totalizing char- acter of Charcot's detailed iconography of the hysteric — remarkably similar to a chemist’s periodic table — demonstrated his own attempt to fully map and categorize the states of the inner psyche (figs. 46, 47 and 48). Moreover, this malady of the nervous system required treatment by a newly-invented psychiatric profession which would scientifically displace the old religious practitioners (i.e., priest- confessors and exorcists; see figs. 49 and 50). Thus, the hysteria diagnosis took on Liberal political significance: it was used by anti clerical groups under the Third Republic to discredit religious beliefs and institutions.®^ The wars may have been political, social, and cultural in nature, but the battle-lines were drawn on 50 K;HI II.N flK PI * KKMUhU IMtCI HOI H\|]V ILU: SortaKHU' 83 51 52 tile privileged site ot the female body. Charcot set the [ihysiog- nomv ot the hysteric side hy-side with traditional religious iconography in order to demonstrate (in the words of the broth ers de Goncourt) that ' religion is a part of the female sex.”^”' The self-e\ ident implication was that religion, notoriously feminine, was not only irrational and anti modernist hut also a species of neurosis {nevrosite: see hgs. 51 and 52). The ferociously anti clerical novel L’Hysterique (1885) by Camille Lemonnier (considered a kind of "Flemish Zola”) provides an instructive example of these asso- ciations.*^ Here, the phenomena inscribed in the unmanageable body of Sister Humility (Soeur Hurnil- itel present a question of two possible and conflicted readings: is she a “mystic" (as the fiendish clerics insist), undergoing an interior event not accessible to scientific observation? Or, rather, are these phe- nomena rather thoroughly explainable manifestations of the hysterical attack, a purely physiological eruption of the female body easily classified within the new psychological clerics’ categories? Such rep- resentations drove home the ideological message that allegedly mystical manifestations were in fact a psycho-materialistic disorder. In this Naturalist and anti clerical ideology of the hysteric, total descrip- tion led inevitably to total explanation. The Decadents co-opted what bourgeois culture most feared. They celebrated the neurasthenic and the hysteric as positive icons. Scientific and artistic positivists, imagining nature as ruled by an observ- able, descriptive, and predictive reality, had refused to recognize the irrational and the absurd in human experience. In opposition, Decadence exploited, to the point of the grotesque, representations of the irrational and the absurd as the truly real. By liberating the imagination from social and psychological determinism. Decadence can perhaps best be interpreted simply as the restoration of mystery by the perversion of the logic of Naturalisim^ The Parisian (oris-Karl Huysmans played a commanding role in this strategy to liberate the spirit by perverting nature and its law. Huysmans had first fashioned himself as a disciple of Zola. His 1877 study of Zola's novel on alcoholism among the working poor (L'Assomoirf^ has been variously described as "one of the most important manifestoes of the Naturalist movement," "an expose and apology for Naturalism," and "one of the best statements of the Naturalists' aims.”** In 1879, Les Soeurs Vatard, his own novel in the style of Zola, was published. No less an authority than Flaubert himself praised its lack of "falseness of perspective” (la faussete de la perspective) — that is, Huysmans had not allowed his own perspective to deform his faithful representation of reality.*^ However, in 1881 Huysmans began to drift, choosing a middle-class, would be writer as his pro- tagonist in En Menage. His aim, he said, was a detailed description of the "minuscule district of a soul” (minuscule district dme)^° In choosing the sonl as his subject, he had begun to reject not only Zola’s proclamation that Naturalists devote themselves to studies of working class subjects (le peuple), but also the external world itself. While writing his 1884 landmark novel, A Rebours, Huysmans "grew tired once and for all of writ- ing in a polemical Social Realist vein about overworked seamstresses, exploited washerwomen and unemployed burly salt-of the-earth laborers.’’^^ Although the title has been translated into English var- iously as Against the Crain or Against Nature, the term a rebours translates most simply as "on the con trary” or "the wrong way." Thus, the novel’s contrarian turn against Naturalism towards Decadence’s delight in decline implied an impish question: Was decline and the perversion of nature’s laws the "wrong way"? Or was it a rediscovery of the right path? As Zola himself acknowledged, A Rebours delivered "a terrible blow to Naturalism.’’^^ Its neuras- thenic hero of modernity, Des Esseintes, had the stereoty[)ical highly refined sensitivities of the nrhan 51 Charcot's model Augustine demonstrates the Crucifixion pose for the scientist’s camera. Desire-Magliore Bourneville, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere (2 volumes), Paris: Aux bureaux du Progres medical, V. A. Delahaye & Compagnie, 1877-78. 52 Augustine demonstrates the Supplication pose. Bourneville, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. 84 .FULL DISCOVERY iipBAKGi: PRACTICES Ir.BUiOTSOM On Ihe hoiUea of M* fPEMALE PATIENTS! ^IIS IKU'StlN rO.VUOIT STREET. HANOVtK S(1 •tm ill TUI tccNir t'EKIMENTS HE MAKES UPON THEM, i' rloniPoalurea they are pot Into hlle alttlne or standtiie when awake or asleep t • PhUrot buti^ kliiuKolded, lo under]^ »n opeiitioo. THK WIIOU AS SEEN T AH BTr-WITHSSS, S3 Pamphlet, London; E. Handcock, 1842. dandy/^ including erotic fetishes tliat liinted at liysteria.^"' In a later ftrelace lo A Kehours, llnysmans (who later became a Benedictine monk) would define his conversion to Decadence as an essentially Roman Catholic revolt against the materialism of his age.^^ In this association ol Catholicism with Deca deuce he became the rallying point^^ for that "reactionary revolution” called the renouveciu c(itfi()li(ju(> (Catholic Revival). What was it about Decadence that lured Huysmans to the mystical, and by implication, Catholi cism itself? In A Rebours, Huysmans' protagonist Des Esseintes exj)resses his admiration for Baude laire, who left the surface and "descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine,” who "penetrated those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.” Baudelaire wrote pages that were "magnificent” precisely because they were "exasperated by their powerlessness to express the whole truth.” The more Des Esseintes reread Baudelaire, the more he admired this writer who, in days when verse had ceased to serve any purpose save to depict the external aspect of men and things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible, thanks to a sinewy and firm bodied diction which, more than any other, possessed the wondrous power of defining . . . the most fleeting, the most evanescent of the morbid conditions of broken spirits and disheartened soulsA^ In 1884, Des Esseintes looked back to Baudelaire for this ability to “express the inexpressible." To accomplish this paradox for himself, Huysman called upon the image of "double lines.”^^ Responding a year later to a novel of Edmond de Goncourt, for example, he expressed his admiration: There is, in this novel (La Faustin), a unique art of evocation, that is to say, an art of double lines. Under the line which is written and printed, there is another which is silent. The flame of this line's art is like phrases sketched in an invisible and sympathetic ink, which appears to touch fire . . Huysmans transposed this image of double lines — one physically written on the page and one sym- pathetically felt by the reader — from his correspondence to his fiction. In >4 Rebours, Des Esseintes con- templates La Faustin, one of the volumes he most delighted in: Indeed, that suggestiveness, that invitation to dreamy reverie which he loved, abounded in this work, where underneath the written line peeped another visible to the soul only, indicated rather than expressed, which revealed depths of passion piercing through a reticence that allowed spiritual infin- ities to be defined such as no idiom of human language could have encompassed.^^ In both his letters and his fiction, the metaphor of the "double lines” helped Huysmans spatialize Baude- laire’s abstract theory of correspondences: one must view the world as a "forest of symbols” pointing beyond themselves to a deeper reality. For six years of development, Huysmans refined this image of the double lines. In the end, it evolved from a description of the writer’s craft into a metaphysical claim on the ultimate nature of reality itself Between 1884 and 1891, Huysmans gradually and self-consciously cultivated his notion of a Spiritual Naturalism. Huysmans’ turn to Spiritualism did not occur in a vacuum. In the same period, the new religio- philosophical movement known as Spiritualism continued to sweep through America, England, and the Continent.*^ From the late eighteenth-century Franz Anton Mesmer in Austria and the Marquis de Puysegur in France to the fictional yet ubiquitous Svengali in fin-de-siecle Britain and America,*^ hyP" nosis promised to "unlock many chambers of mystery.”*’* Not surprisingly, the bodies that submitted most "naturally” to the mesmeric powers of another were those of women (fig. 53). 85 54 55 In addition to livpnosis. religions visions took on a contested med- ical meaniitg. In the Anglo-American context, an ongoing debate contin ned to rage abont wbetber tits, trances, and visions — nsnally exploding tiom within the temale body — were natural (and therefore not reli gions) or supernatural (and therefore religions) Back on the Continent, visions of the Virgin Mary captured the popular imagination and encouraged the cultural war between Catholicism and the state. Neither Bismarck's Germany nor the French Third Republic could suppress the religious movements emerging from the visions at Lourdes (1858) or Marpingen (1876).*^ Even Zola’s Lourdes, a literary attempt to de mystify the Grotto with a narrative of sick multitudes bereft of miracles, could not undermine these enthusiasms (figs. 54 , 55 and 56 ).*^ Finally, psychical studies emerged as an academic discipline that “secularized the soul. Charcot's studies of hypnosis and hysteria became a svmbolic flashpoint in the European debate over science and religion: did such phenomena have esoteric or purely physiological sources (figs. 57 and 58 )?** Later, a student would displace the master’s fame. In 1885, the same year Munch came to Paris for the first time, a young Sigmund Ereud arrived on scholarship to continue his neurological studies at the feet of Charcot, the “Napoleon of neuroses."*° In sum, the French Decadent movement took shape within this enor- mous reaction to dominant ideologies. Even as conspicuous consump tion*^ became the mode in the Gilded Age, modernity’s progressive disenchantment induced discomfort to the point of nausea, leading many to seek out alternative forms of re-enchanted wonder.” This interna- tional context of Spiritualism, hypnosis, visions, and psychical research carried meanings that associated gender, race, and religion. In Britain, for example, the ability to fall under the influence of mes- merists w'as associated not only with the female body, but also with social or cultural primitiveness. The colonized Bengalis were considered to be especially vulnerable — their habits were "sedentary," movements "languid," and their physiology "feeble even to effeminacy."** In France, primitives at home succumbed to mass hypnosis as well. Lucien Levy-Bruhl lamented that as late as 1903, even in a fully-developed civilization such as France, educated people accepted "so gross a contradiction" as believing in miraculous interventions of the Virgin or other saints while at the same time holding to the absolute determinism of the laws of nature.** As seen above, belief in unseen forces was the very cornerstone of Levy-Bruhl’s theory of primitive mentality in "inferior societies,"** and the Catholic asso- ciation of observable phenomena with occult causes was considered a vestige of primitive consciousness. And not only Catholics: )ews were linked with mesmerism and even more often with neurasthe- nia and hysteria. Charcot insisted that Jews were disproportionately prevalent among those with degen erative diseases: hysterics, epileptics, neurasthenics, and diabetics. The Revue de rhyjynotisme claimed that the over-representation of Jews in the wards of Paris hospitals was not surprising given their propensity to neurosis."** The objective measure of rational modernity marginalized women, peasants, colonized peoples. Catholics, and Jews. Within this larger context of marginalization, the French Decadent movement accjuired institu- tif>nal shape. Twf) journals devoted to the movement were founded in 1886: Le Dikddent litterrure el 86 59 54 "Death was already preparing a shroud, but Notre-Dame de Lourdes restores life,” Le Pelerin, September i, 1895.’^ 55 “Echos infernaux," Le Pelerin, September 2, 1894.’® 56 Grotto of Lourdes during the Grand Prayers, August 20-23, from Le Pelerin, September 4, 1880.®’ 57 Autographisme as Satanic possession. 58 Autographisme as a purely physiological phenomenon. La Nature, 1890.^°° 59 Matthias Griinewald, The Crucifixion, 1512-1516. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. nrtistique and Le Decadence arlistitjue et litteraire. I he editor of Le Decadent celelirated llu‘ point ;it whicli social evolution had arrived and tinderinined the ''stiperim[)osed strata of dassicisin, Roinanti cism and Natnralisni.” Symptoms incltided "neurosis, hysteria, hypnotism, morphinomania, scientific charlatanism, Schopenhaiierism to an excess."^°^ These anthors inventetl Decadence as the (|nintessen tially modern movement, dis{)lacing outdated Enlightenment notions as well as Marxist and Darwin ian materialism. As the editor Anatole Bajn wrote a year later, the Decadents had "the honor of crushing Naturalism" without being "in contradiction with modern progress" (as the Romantics were).’°^ Mes- merism, hysteria, and morphine were hip. Within this large conflict in the world of psychical studies, the serious stakes for Huysmans'dou ble vision become clear: he wanted to hold onto both Spiritualism and Naturalism simultaneously. An 1890 letter of Huysmans to the occultist Abbe Boullan demonstrates how carefully he constructed his militant alternative to a world devoid of mystery; / want to confuse everyone — to create a work of art 0 / supernatural realism, 0 / Sffiritualist Natural ism [d un realisme surnaturel, d un naturalisme spiritualiste|. / want to show Zola, Charcot, spirits and otherwise that none of the mysteries which surround us [des mysteres qui nous entourent) are explained."^°^ Writing later that same year to Jules Destree, Huysmans further developed this apparent oxymoron, supernatural Naturalism. Huysmans had experienced a profound intellectual conversion while study- ing the paintings of the Flemish Primitivist school, and looking back to the sixteenth century he found a solution to his late nineteenth-century conundrum. In these Nordic primitives such as Griinewald, he distinguished materialistic Naturalism from its supernatural strain: / await with impatience your transpositions of Primitives . . . They contcuned the whole of art, supernat- uralism, which is the only true and great art. The only true formula, sought after by Rogier van der Wey- den, Metsys, Griinewald, absolute realism combined with flights of the soul, which is what materialistic Naturcdism has failed to understand — and has expired on account of it, despite all its useful service.^°'^ “Absolute realism combined with flights of the soul”: in this formula of a spiritual, psychic, or super- natural Realism, Huysmans struggled to articulate the complexity of his project. We completely mis- understand him if we imagine him simply as turning against nature — for he saw himself paradoxically as integrating reality’s double aspects, that is, both rationality and irrationality, nature and super-nature. In a recent study of Decadence and Catholicism, one scholar has formulated Huysmans' mystical discovery in Griinewald's grotesque representation of the Crucified Christ's wounds (fig. 59): Huysmans believed that art — even the body as art, or nature as art — is the primary mode of mystical reverie. What Huysmans discovered in Griinewald s brutal Crucifixion is a spiritualization of the hys- terical symptom. The symptom, in other words, as a work of religious art. For the hysteric also experi- ences through the symptom an irruption of the Real on the body, a fragmentation of the familiar fantasy of the body to make way for another, more occult fantasy. . . . For Huysmans, the irruption of the Real is often a religious spectacle of torture and rnurder.^°^ Huysmans took the very symptom that Charcot employed as the irreducibly naturalistic and endowed it with a mystical significance. To a Naturalist, the body irrupting with sores pointed only to itself and a world of violence. To a Spiritual Naturalist, however, the same bodily symptoms pointed beyond them- 87 sol\ es. Like the Catholic sacrament of t lie Body and Blood, the sores manifested the outward irrn|ition of the unseen Real. In iSgi, Hnvsmans published the definitive statement of his solution in La has (Down There), a no\ el packed with ' popular sorcery, mesmerism, spiritism, hypnotism (and) the oriental thaumaturgies of one sort or another" so popular in l’aris.^°^ In the ofiening chapter of L(TBas, a fictionalized conver- sation between the protagonist Durtal and his f riend Des Hermies probed the problem of Naturalism: You shnu] vour shoulders, but tell me, how much has Naturalism done to clear up life's really trouble- some mvsteries which surround Nothing. When it comes down to explaining a passion, when you have an ulcer of the soul — or indeed the most benign little pimple — to be probed. Naturalism can do nothing. Appetite and instinct" seem to be its sole motivation and rut and brainstorm its chronic states. The field of Naturalism is the region below the navel. Oh, it s a hernia clinic of emotions (senti ments); it puts a bandage on the soul and sends you on your w(ry!^°^ Flaubert had written about the education of one's emotions (sentiments) in Sentimental Education, but this reduction of the soul to sentiment no longer sufficed. About the "mysteries which surround us” Realism had nothing to say. Thus, Huysmans believed that the Spiritualist movement had "accom plished an enormous task.” As another character enthused several chapters later: Spiritism has accomplished one important thing. It has violated the threshold of the unknown, broken the doors of the sanctuary. It has brought about in the extranatural a revolution similar to that which was effected in the terrestrial order in France in i/Sg. . . . There remains this unanswerable question: is a woman possessed because she is hysterical, or is she hysterical because she is possessed? Only the Church can answer. Science cannot.^°^ These assaults on reason disturbed Durtal. After the door closed and left the protagonist all alone, he began to reflect. "For some montbs” now Durtal had been "trying to reassemble the fragments of a shat tered literary theory which had once seemed inexpugnable.” His friend's assault had persuaded him, yet Durtal "could see no possibilities for the novelist outside of Naturalism.” Were they expected to "go back to the pyrotechnics of Romanticism,” that complete deformation of reality? He then succinctly formulated his synthesis of a double vision: We must . . . retain the documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the compact and sinewy language of Realism, hut we must a/so dig down into the soul and cease trying to explain mystery in terms of our sick senses. If possible the novel ought to be compounded of two elements, that of the soul and that of the body, and these ought to be inextricably bound together as in life . . . In a word, we must follow the road laid out once and for all by Zola, but at the same time we must trace a parallel route in the (dr by which we may go above and beyond. ... A spiritucd N(duralisrn.d^° A parallel route, double lines: Sfiiritualist Naturalism. One bad to conserve the Naturalist generation’s total descrifjtion without any deformation of reality. Yet, simultaneously, one had to resist the Natu ralists' f inclusion of total explanation from total description}^^ In a world without mystery, Huysmans .tood against its eclipse and called for its return: one must "no longer desire to explain away mystery." Of course, tfie Symbolists had also constructed their world of mystery, but Huysmans considered hi- -olution to be significantly different from tbeir project. Symbolists were content to represent exotic 88 60 I I i' symbols — from )ewish and Christian s('ri[)lur(‘, ancient Greece and Rome, the Orient, and Egyptian mythology (fig. 60). However, Hnysmans rejt'Cted this turn to scriptures and anticiuity for subject mat ter, insisting rather that he was the true Naturalist. When askenl by an admirer what made him [rriina rily a Naturalist and not a Symbolist, he replied, "I believe, just as you do, both in exact documentation and in life, and 1 have absolutely no intention of abandoning this belief." Both matter and method set him apart: he believed in life as subject matter — that is, drawn from the streets and not from antic] uity or the Orient; and he believed in exact documentation as method, recording details with excruci ating precision. (His minute descriptions of appalling events in Ld-has, for example, render the novel grotesque.)^^^ He would not "deform reality." Yet, he distinguished himself from other Naturalists by investigating an inner reality — a j)sychic reality of the soul. "1 am also going to a place beyond (vers un au-deld) Zola and even Goncourt,” he added. "1 am going toward the lesser-known states of the soul (etats-d'dmes) which are both interesting and troubling."^^^ He was still producing, in the words of one historian, "a literature of observation, hut observation of the invisible."^^"’ From this point on Huysmans wanted to observe and represent the states of the soul in all their sickly, neurasthenic, hysteric, and perverse profundity. This double desire made the hysterical body a privileged site for the Spiritual Naturalist. III. LA MADONE MYSTERIOUE: A PSYCHICAL NATURALISM Space is peopled by microbes. Is it more surprising that space should also be crammed with spirits and larvae? Water and vinegar are alive with animalcules. The microscope shows them to us. Now why should not the air, inaccessible to the sight and to the instruments of man, swarm, like the other elements, with beings more or less corporeal, with embryos more or less mature? — joris-Karl Huysmans, Ld-Bas (1891) Called to a destiny more momentous than any in all of Time, she did not quail to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness; to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity . . . — Denise Levertov, “Annunciation" If a man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in dread. Since he is a synthesis he can be in dread. — Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (1844) I 60 Gustave Moreau, Mystic Flower, 1890. Moreau Museum, Paris. After the death of his father and during his stay at Saint Cloud in the winter of rSSq-qo, Edvard Munch underwent his French conversion. From now he would paint "living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love." His subjects would be so sacred that people would "take their hats off" before them.^^^ Munch’s conversion was echoed back home. In the summer of that same year, Arne Garborg wrote of the Idealistic Reaction sweeping Norway: A steady distaste grows for Naturalism 's preference for rendering people that consist only of nerve ends and the physical phenomena of the senses, people who are only living evidence for the laws of hered- i 89 itw or ore the soulless products of oue or another milieu. Instead, there is a longing for depictions of people with souls. . . . The phalanx of young authors has already formulated a new slogan: I'esprit seule 116 importe. . . . L esprit seule importe ("only the spirit matters”). Suttocated by a materialist gerontocracy, a new gen eration of voung artists looked to the sonl.^^^ Even sleepy Norway had been mesmerized: Mo longer is our mentality dominated by positivist philosophy. We live in the age of hypnotism and spiritism. IVe are tired of superficial facts and their regulated categorization. We long for what lies behind them, for the abnormal, for the rnystiecd. The soul alone is of significance . . . Our soul is a dark continent where the pitiful lamp of science does not reach. Our soul is a primeval forest of mys- teries. Mystery filled the air: Garborg wrote these lines about the inability of the lamp of science to illuminate the soul the same year that Huysmans wrote Ld-bas. Moreover, the Norwegian’s "primeval forest of mysteries" seems directly lifted from Stephane Mal- larme’s complaint that only the most vulgar Naturalism would try to capture in writing "the actual and palpable wood of trees” rather than the inner experience that a forest inspires. Mallarme insisted that words cannot imitate transparently. Because language is "allegorical,” the relationship between repre- sentation and referent is too arbitrary. Thus he concluded: The ideal is to suggest the object. It is the perfect use of this mystery which constitutes the symbol. An object must be gradually evoked in order to show a state of soul; or else, choose an object and from it elicit a state of soul by means of a series of decodings.^^^ Mallarme intended to represent not tbe external reality but rather the psychic reality — that is, "the state of soul.” In the scientist ’s "world without mystery,” artists had to create mystery to suggest a deeper real- ity. Mallarme envisioned reality as double-edged, both visible and invisible, and saw the artist's task as representing un representable mystery.^^° It was "the perfect use of this mystery” that constituted the symbol: Garborg’s “primeval forest of mysteries.” Garborg concluded his account of this Idealistic Reaction by noting that the practioners of this anti- materialist movement in France, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany were "fond of calling themselves Decadents.” Here Garborg was following the lead of essays published earlier that year in a new period- ical called Samtiden. This publication was founded by and associated with the Bohemians (including Munch himself) surrounding Hans jaeger, who was no longer in jail and no longer a Naturalist. In a late spring issue, Andreas Aubert published three long articles under the rubric "Tendencies in French Cultural Life.”^^^ Aubert took Baudelaire's decadent celebration of that which “appears morbid and artificial to more sim[)le natures" and applied it to the person and painting of several artists including Munch. Eater that year, Aubert devoted an article uniquely to Munch: Among our artists, Munch is the one whose temperament is formed by the neurasthenic. He belongs to the generation of fine, sicklily sensitive nerves that we encounter more and more frequently in the newest art. And not seldomly they find a personal satisfaction in calling themselves “Decadents," the ' hildren of a refmed, overly civilized age.^^^ 90 In these pieces, suggests ReinlioUl Heller, Auherl achievc'd a uni(iue aim. 1 le constnu ted Miiiu h so that lie "transcended the provincial limitations of Kristiania" and represented "the first modern Norwegian artist contributing to the development of an artistic movement not nationally focusc'd in Norway; Decadence.”^^^ Munch’s heroic mission was specified, moreover, in Hermann Bahr's call for a double vision that synthesized both psychology and Naturalism. Bahr jiraised Auhert's idea of an fdealistic Reaction hut criticized his term "neoddealism." He agreed that a reaction was needed, but not a retreat into idealism. Rather, a new dialectical synthesis had to preserve Naturalism even as it embraced the [isychological turn to the soul. Thus, a truly novel Decadent would call for a psychology in opposition to the one-sicledness of existing Naturalism, \biit also demand] a psychology that comes to terms with the long-stcmding habits of Naturalism. He [would demand] a psychology that has passed through Naturalism and has gone beyond it [and was| no longer at peace with the old pre Naturalist psychology}^'^ In other words, as in France, there could be no question of returning to Romanticism as such. The world had grown too old for such youthful naivete. A truly modern vision of the soul would have to bring with it all that had been learned through the long century. Krohg, Munch’s early artistic mentor — like Jaeger, now no longer threatened with jail and no longer Naturalist — continued to make the case that Munch was the double-visioned hero. In the autumn of 1891, Krohg tried to articulate this paradox: Thus we are confronted with the strange fact that Munch, who here at home is regarded as the most incorrigible of all Realists and the most impudent and presumptuous painter of hideousness, is really the first and only artist to have embraced that Idealism, who dares to subordinate Nature, his model, to his mood . . . It is related to Symbolism, the latest movement in French art.^^^ A year later Munch moved to Berlin with Krohg’s words in mind: the need to maintain both the "hideousness" of a Realist as well as the inward vision of an Idealist. As Huysmans would have said. Munch needed to record spiritual realities with a Naturalist’s "veracity of the document.” In Bahr’s Berlin, Munch fell in with a bohemian Nordic crowd that met at the Black Piglet tavern. August Strindberg, the German poet Richard Dehmer, and Julius Meier-Graefe all circled around the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski and his Norwegian /emme/ata/e wife, Dagny Juell. Strindberg was fascinated by hypnosis and medicine and avidly studied the work of Charcot; Przybyszewski stud- ied medicine in Berlin, specializing in neurology. Thus in Berlin Munch found himself once again, as in his childhood, in a medical milieu. Yet he was in a far different position, for he had become dis- satisfied with the "materialistic, shallow optimism and self-satisfaction’’^^^ that science and medicine promised. "One became accustomed to the idea of not believing in a god," Munch wrote, "but that was a belief, after all.” He continued: All this was in connection with that great wave that went over the earth: Realism. Things did not exist unless they could be pointed to, be explained by chemistry or physics. Painting and literature consisted only of what one saw with one's eyes or heard with one's ears; it was the shell of nature. One had become self-satisfied with the great discoveries that had been made}^^ 91 Tlui>. Munch st't out to c'vpiess a lU'w kind ot rc'ality — a mystical reality: Mystical qualities \yill always exist: after all. the more one discovers the more inexplicable things there will he. The new movement whose progress and whose flashes of light are being felt everywhere, it will give expression to all that which now has been suppressed for an entire generation, all that of which humanity will alwiiys have a great ({uantity: mysticism.'^^^ Munch s new mysticism w'onld emerge from the milieu of the Black I’iglet. Przybszewski, known to his triends as Staezu, snttered from hallucinations and wrote “bold, ecstatic works" in German. His wife, nicknameef “Ducha" (which means "soul”), "drank absinthe by the litre without ever getting tipsy.” Strindberg would talk about cbemical analysis while Muneb remained silent. In the noisy background, Staezu ferociously pounded on tbe piano and kept ongoing bis conversations about pathological eroti- cism. Both Strindberg and Brzybyszewski were obsessed by tbe occult, dabbled in black magic, and rev- eled in tbe idea of being a"Satanist.”^”(One of Przybyszewski’s books — written in Norway and published in Paris — w'as entitled Satan s Children {Satans Kinder).)^^° Recalling those days in Berlin with Munch, Meier-Grafe considered its unspoken background "tbe Paris of Huysmans" whose grotesque Ld-bas accounts of Satanism, sadism, and child murder had caused a sensation just the year before.^^^ Munch e.xhibited at the Verein der Berliner Kiinstler in 1892. Violent debates closed tbe exhibition ancf tbe scandal gave Muneb German notoriety. Shortly thereafter. Munch exhibited his six-painting series entitled "Love” in Berlin. As a means of publicizing but also (presumably) setting the terms of interpretation for this unnerving vision, Przybyszewski published an essay appearing in Bahr’s Berlin entitled simply "Psychic Naturalism”: "Fsychischer Naturalismus."^^^ Although the phrase substitutes tbe Greek psyche for the Latin spiritus, both, of course, signify spirit or soul. (In fact, throughout Przybyszewski’s essay the word soul or spirit (die Seele) occurs more often as a synonym for psyche.) Most importantly, however, Przybyszewski clearly intended to articu- late a project parallel to Huysmans's. His Psychical Naturalism was to be another double vision, a vari- ation on Spiritual Naturalism.^^^ "Psychical Naturalism” begins by associating individuality — the "eternal in humanity” (das Ewige irn Menschen) — with the very "foundation of the psychical life" (der Urgrund des psychischen Lebens)}^^ According to Przybyszewski, Edvard Munch was among the first artists to have represented (darzu- stellen) this eternal element of the soul's most intimate and subtle states (Seelenvorgdnge) . He described Munch's paintings as utterly faithful "dissections of the soul” (Prdparate der Seele), the soul as it lay in its "animalistic” and "irrational” state (tierischen, vernunftlosen Seele), independent of any distortions that might come from the interference of the intellect. Until now, Przybyszewski asserted, no one had understood the central element in Munch. All painters were concerned with the "external world” (der dusseren Welt). Even the Symbolists repre- sented interior emotions and moods by means of some distorting medium (metaphorical or mytho- logical/ that had been taken from the outer world of appearances.^^^ They always tried to express the phenomena of the soul (seelische Fhdnomene) in scenes taken not from the interior but from the out- -.ide world (dussere Vorgdnge).^^^ Munch turned his back on tins tradition. He painted as only one could "whose eyes have turned toward the interior (nach Innen gekehrt) and away from the world of appearances (der Welt der Erschei- nunqen/. "His landscaj)es,” said ITzybyszewski, were "found in tbe soul.”^^^ In short, Munch wanted to render the psychical world without mediation (unnutlelbar) trans[)arently (einen psychischen, nack ten Vorgangi as c)p[)osed to tlie Symbolists who used mediating symbols (both mythological and metaphorical The transparency Muncli wanted schemed to be both psychical and Naturalist at the 92 same time. The subject matter was the soul, but lie wanted it represented using just the hare lac ts.^” For this reason, Przybyszewski considered Munch "par exce//ence" the "Naturalist of the soul's [ihenomena" (der Naturalist seelischer Phdnomene par excellence) just as Max Liebermann, "the discijile ol the ugly," was "the most ruthless Naturalist o( the outer world” (riicksiclitsloseste Naturalist des Ausseren).^^° The aesthetic laws with which critics judged Munch had no validity since they had been developed based only on external things (aus dern Aussern entwickelt warden). Munch could not be judged thus, for he was the painter of "psychical compositions of emotional impulses” (des psychischen Gestai tungsdranges von Gefiihlsimpulsen) that extended even to "psychical rapture” (psychischen Oher- geschwanges). (Here one could almost hear Przybyszewski pounding on the piano.) Such phenomena (Erscheinungen) transcended the physical world and stood on the same level as the [ihenomena of the “pure life of the individual” along with such hypnotic and hysterical irruptions such as "visions, clair voyance, dreams, and so on” (Vision, Hellsehen, Traurn u.s.w.). For Munch’s true parentage, Przybyszewski encouraged the reader to escape Berlin and look around in Brussels and Paris where were found those "obviously 'totally crazies'” who had the "totally insane idea” of translating these "finest and most subtle associations of the soul” (seelischen Associationen) into words. Among these artists, "The soul, their inner world, is the only reality, a cosmos." (Ihre Seele, ihr Inneres ist die einzige Realitdt, ein Kosmos.) The line translated into German Arne Garborg's description of the Idealist reaction in France. For this new generation, he had written, 'Tesprit seule importe." The soul alone mattered. As if to stress this French genealogy, Przybyszewski concluded by inserting the words of the Sym- bolist in the original French: Nommer un object, sagt Stephane Mallarme, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poeme qui est fade du bonheur, de deviner peu a peu; le suggerer, voild la reve. [To name an object, says Stephane Mallarme, is to suppress three-quarters of the delight of a poem ... to suggest it: voila, that precisely is the dream.]^'*^ Those who had turned against the de-mystifying naming of objects were the true innovators (die Neugestalter); they alone established the younger generation's standards of worth. They were the true aristocrats of the spirit (die wirklichen Aristokraten des Geistes). Edvard Munch — here the cosmopo- lite Przybyszewski slipped into English — was an aristocrat of the spirit "every inch” of the way. Although the details are opaque, Przybyszewski's intent is clear. He considers Psychical Naturalism a middle-road between both Naturalism and Symbolism. Admittedly, one wonders how he imagined Munch's painting of inner states directly, transparently, and nakedly, without a Symbolist's mediating tool of mythology or metaphor. Yet, like Huysmans' Spiritual Naturalism, Munch's Psychical Natural- ism attempted a synthesis. It turned inward for the truly real — the world of "vision, clairvoyance and dream” — yet it desired to record such inner facts immediately, nakedly, and faithfully with a Natural- ist's precision. Przybyszewski imagined the possibility of a double vision. Munch left Berlin the next year to exhibit in his native Norway, for it seemed as though the ground might be better prepared now for this vision. The art of the youngest generation, the Samtiden had recently declared, was a generation of mysticism. The Realist generation had boasted of a "stupid, self- confident clarity which is clarity only because it is superficial.” Attempting to explain humanity and the world in only rational terms, they had merely simplified human problems by "amputating away all uncomfortable contradictions.” In reaction, the new generation "cast themselves down into the world of mysteries.” They cultivated "that aspect of their personality tied to their mystical unconscious, as if it were a sacred object.”^"'^ Perhaps such a milieu would now welcome Munch's new mystical vision. 93 61 62 Kristiania, lunve\ er. was still not ready lor Munch. I'he reviews were mostlv negative, 'let. in a dissenting opinion, the editor of the Parisian La Revue Blanche. Thatlee Natanson, applauded the exhibition and reproduced Munch s lithograph ot the The Screani (no. 7 ). Like German artists, the Frenchman complained, Munch indulged in too many ‘‘meta phvsical speculations.’’ Natanson recommended that Munch come hack to Paris presumahly to absorb some Mediterranean earthiness. .Munch took his advice and moved to Paris in 1896, receiving favor able reviews at the Salon des Independants that year and the next. He began to simplify his style by producing color lithographs and his first woodcuts at Auguste Clot s print shop. The new prints helped him estab- lish new connections with the Symbolists. In 1896 he made two portraits of Stephane Mallarme: a lithograph and a watercolor (whose existence is attested to in a short note ot thanks from Mallarme to Munch). He also produced illustrations for a new edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mai. including one for ‘'Posthumous Regret" and one for “The Happy Corpse" (figs. 61 and 62 ). Even as the lithograph demanded a simpliH cation of Munch’s style, it gave him greater freedom for bolder gestures and stark dramatic contrasts. In 1895 Mmich took his Madonna motif from the 1893 pahiting and re-figured it as one of his first lithographs, revising it at least twice again in color between 1895 and 1902. The ailded elements — the embryo and the swimming spermatozoa — seem to be Naturalist elements with a Decadent twist. Yet even before these biological re-figurations pointed to the perils of heredity, the 1893 Madonna already had a Deca- dent genealogy. Munch had been influenced by Odilon Redon, a friend and collaborator of Huysmans.^’’^ (Redon's Symbolist works still stand as the best visual translation of Huysmans' occult and Satanist writings.) An 1893-4 sketch for the Madonna (fig. 63 ) shows similarities between the halos in Munch and in Redon’s lithograph Serpent Halo (1890, fig. 64 ). Serpent Halo, itself a variation on Franz von Stock’s Surrealist Sensuality (1889, fig. 33 ), perfectly captured Huysmans’ spirit. Composed the same year as La has, it showed a pregnant woman in a crucifixion pose, erotically entangled by a coiled serpent whose tail formed an occult halo behind her head.^''* The halo, painted blood-red by Munch, had played a central though mysterious role in the first Madonna. As Przybyszewski wrote in “Psychical Naturalism," this Madonna had "the halo (Glorierc schein) of the coming martyrdom by means-of-birth” (Gehiirtsinartyriums).^'*^ The puzzling neologism connotes several layers of meaning. In the calendars of Christian anticjuity, the martyrs' deaths were celebrated as birthdays into eternal life. Moreover, their rebirth through self-sacrificed blood gave birth to later generations. As the Latin Church father Tertullian wrote, the blood (sanguis) of the martyrs was the seed (semen) of the church. In the Madonna's esoteric allusion to the ancients, not only does a bloody physical birth prefigure the inevitable end lor the newborn (a Naturalist theme), but a bloody end also signals a spiritual birth of the eternal (a supernatural theme). On another level, [rerhaps it is the woman herself who must be martyred and give her body as seed to bequeath life to a new generation. The Norwegian poet Sigbjorn Obstfelder, also in Berlin in 1894 1895, considered Muncfi’s {)ainting of "the world’s Madonna, woman who gives birth in pain" as a mystery become religious: 61 Edvard Munch, Posthumous Regret, illustration for Les Fleurs du Mai of Baudelaire, drawing, 1896. Munch Museum, Oslo. 62 Edvard Munch, The Happy Corpse, illustration for Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mai, drawing, 1896. Munch Museum, Oslo. 63 Edvard Munch, Sketch for the Madonna, 1893-94. Munch Museum. 64 Odilon Redon, Serpent-Halo, lithograph, 1890. Private collection. 94 65 That which lies at the bottom of life is not clearly seen by our eyes, either in form, color or idea. Life has surrounded itself with a mysterious beauty and terror, which the human senses cannot, therefore, define, hut to which a great poet can pray. The desire to concentrate on this human (jindity, to under stand in a new way that which our daily life has relegated to a minor position, and to show it in its orig inal enigmatic mystery — this attains its greatest heights here in Munch 's art and becomes religious. Munch sees woman as she who carries the greatest marvel of the world in her wond). He returns to this concept over and over again. He seeks to depict that moment when she first becomes conscious of this in all its gruesorneness.^^^ The halo of the birth martyrdom, the woman who gives birth in pain: whatever Mnnch meant to con vey by this enigmatic mystery, the halo entangles the spiritual and the natural in Decadent ways. Mnnch represents life, which has "surrounded itself with a mysterious beauty and terror,” in a way that becomes religious. In addition to the occult halo, the bodily pose and swirling hair of the 1893 Madonna seemed to echo that of Death personified as a woman in Redon's La Mart (hg. 65 ). Redon's piece, from a series produced in homage to Flaubert for a new edition of his post-Realist Temptation of Saint Anthony, was entitled “Death: My Irony Surpasses All!” For Przybyszewski as well, the woman's life-giving capacities were inextricably intertwined with her destructive ones. At the beginning of "Psychical Naturalism” comes this description of "das Weib”^^^ — the term for woman Przybyszewski later uses to describe the "Madonna” — in the painting by the Decadent Felicien Rops: In a catacomb stands a woman in a corset and petticoat. She has lifted up her skirt and with a savage, brutal, and cynical grandiosity she points to her genitals. At her feet rests a coffin. . . . This is the terrT ble tragedy of the man who is destroyed by the woman (das Weib). This is the woman, the Babylonian whore, this is Mylitta, the apocalyptic slut, this is George Sand and Nana rolled into one: an enormous symbol of the eternal, savage battle of the sexes.^^^ 65 Odilon Redon, Death: My Irony Surpasses All! For Gustave Flaubert III, lithograph, 1889. Private collection. As the allusions to prostitution and promiscuity suggest, the symbolic linkage of the woman to death has its roots in fin-de-siecle anxieties over syphilis. The myth of hereditary syphilis transformed sexual desire into what (ean Borie has called an "infernal machine.”^^'' The woman's genitals served as a sure door to the syphilitic coffin. But there is more to the image than this Naturalist litany of anxieties. Like the obscure allusion to Christian "martyrdoms by means of birth”, the image of the "catacomb” connotes sacred overtones of late antiquity as well. These dark subterranean passages ("down there”) ambiguously served both as places of safe refuge for the Christians hunted down by the imperial state and as their burial grounds after their deaths. The catacombs were hallowed places. Mass was said on altars over the bones of mar- tyrs — relics delineating zones of sanctity where temporality and the eternal fused. In this ambiguously sacred place of purity and danger,^^^ the woman's womb is paralleled with the coffin: life's beginning intermingles with its end. Eros draws a man to thanatos as a flame draws a moth: irrational instinct lures the male to give his seed for the species, an act that both enables the survival of species-life but also foreshadows his individual death. In imitating Redon's Death personified as woman, then, the bodily pose of Munch’s Madonna seems to have more than stylistic roots. Munch once again inextricably entangles the spiritual and the natural in Decadent ways. Finally, Munch had framed his Death and the Maiden (painted along with the first Madonna in 1893) with embryos, a suggestion of life beyond the seeming finality of Death's skeleton (no. 53 ). Here 95 66 1 too Redon provided a precedent that explicitly alluded to Darwin’s evolutionary thesis On the Origins of Species. In an iSS-t series entitled The Origins, six illustrations move from the primal origins of life through an evolutionarv progression up to the human species. Redon had used spermdike seed forms to signal the primal origins ot the race (fig. 66). Przvhvszewski echoed Redon’s imagery in "Psychical Naturalism." Both medical student and psy- chical researcher, Przyhyszewski wrote that the seed of human generation is a double-reality: irreducibly material, still it contains the individuality that (as seen above) signified for him the eternal element in the human being. This hope in the possibilities of human procreation emerges from both the conti nuitv and inno\ ation of generations: For me. individuality is the immortal, the inalienable. It is the basis onto which new characteristics are grafted through hereditary transmission. Individuality is the medium of hereditary transmission. The individuality is passed on forever. It lives continuously from the first beginnings, from the first dim signs of life in the embryo to the highest developed forms. It is like a growing wave, a germ cell which reproduces itself in ever new metempsychoses until eternity. The individuality is the collecting point of all the characteristics which are typical for all parts of the whole chain of development. It is a pan- genesis in the sense which Darwin himself pointed out: each seed contains the complete human being with all his characteristic traits.^^^ The seed gives both life and death: even as procreation must inevitably result in the death of the indi vidual, so also it perpetuates the eternity of the race. Thus Munch’s Madonna, hemmed in by the inevitable biological forces of life and death, still suggests a subversion of nature in its ability to out- wit heredity. In the end, how can situating Munch’s work within the Decadent context help deepen our appre- ciation of this subversive Madonna? What cultural meanings does she convey? How does she embody a double vision? A Naturalist framework might read her one-dimensionally, perhaps as one of Charcot's passion- nelles, an over libidinous female body exhibiting hysterical symptoms, ft might additionally suppose that, having framed the erotic moment with spermatozoa and an einbryo. Munch reproduced not only his own biological obsessions with heredity and the perils of sexual reproduction but those of his hour geois culture as well. Munch spent his entire life enveloped in medicine, madness, sickness and death. The skeletal embryo — precariously balanced between life and death and framing the biological act of human love — might well convey the terror he felt towards the seeds of destruction contained within sexual pleasure. Within the Decadent context, however, a far more complex picture emerges: a Psychical Naturalist hope that the irruption of bodily sym[)toms sacramentally suggests the unseen. In Przybyszewski’s phrase, they would point to the soul, the individuality, "the eternal element in the human." (^uite clearly, .Munch and Przyhyszewski intended this Madonna’s moment of ecstasy to transcend itself in nearly cosmic dimensions — a moment in which the destructive natural struggles with the undying meta- physical. Przyhyszewski inter[)reted the Madonna this way: The third picture represents a Madonna. It is a half dressed woman in a completely self surrendered state a state, that is, in which (dl of the senses become essenticdly stimulants of intense delight. A half dressed woman on crumpled sheets with the halo of the coming martyrdom by birth. At this very „ , ' / ./ / / / Odilon Redon, Onlines, miiment, the secret mysticism [geheime Mystik] of the etermd act of procreation radiates on the 1883. Private collection. 96 i woman's face with a sea of beauty. In this hurst of passion, civilized humanity |{ler nilturelle McMisch] with its metaphysical striving for eternity [Ewigkeitsdrange] — confronts the animal with its passionate destructive frenzy.^^^ Needless to say, Munch has endowed the woman's womb and the procreative act with a signilicance that is cosmic in both space and time. In her womb, the human — as a natural animal on the low end of the evolutionary scale, passionately propelled to selhclestruction — collides with its cultural self on evolution's high end. This is Kierkegaard's source of dread. The human being, a doubly composed “god who shits,” demands in the face of self-destruction what only the metaphysical or supernatural can pro- vide: meaning, endurance, and even eternity.^^^ The woman's body as the site of contest between Nat- uralists and Decadents has rarely reached such a feverish pitch of significance. What name might we use for this Decadent female body, the ambivalent contested site of mystic nature? Theorist Luce Irigaray has coined a neologism which, uniting Charcot's hysterique and Lluys- mans mystique, names the double vision of this icon: La mysterique: this is how one might refer to what, within a still theo logical onto logical perspective is called mystic language or discourse. Consciousness still imposes such names to signify that other scene, off-stage, that it finds cryptic. In a world where religious discourse still holds sway, a theological or ontological vocabulary to name and represent unseen realities is taken for granted. In a post-religious world, however, new language must be invented to signify that which, no longer considered theological, remains nonetheless myste- rious and impenetrable. The ambivalent figure of the mysterique gives the disenchanted hysterique a subversive, psychic, mystic meaning. To what cryptic hope in things unseen does Munch point? Munch, carrying from his Lutheran childhood a sense of "sin, anxiety, predestination, seems to have been on a quest for some sort of immortality ever since his father's death. Unlike so many other Symbolists and Decadents, Munch never embraced the sensuous mysticism of the Catholic Mass as a solution, even while in Paris.^^^ Heller speculates that perhaps the elder Munch’s "puritanical Lutheranism remained too powerful still."^^^ But perhaps Munch was simply unpersuaded by theism of any kind — a man no longer capable of a "theo- logical onto-logical perspective." Nevertheless, death remained cryptic. It propelled Munch to create a vision of what might be the unperishing (ewig) element in human existence. Rejecting Naturalism, he formulated an intense vision of the sacred character of human life — if not exactly mystical, then perhaps mysterical. Huysmans' double lines, natural yet yearning for transcendence, have been inscribed on the Madonna's body. One plane foregrounds the natural: a half-dressed woman, crumpled sheets, sexual ecstasy, hysterical pose, viscous spermatozoa, skeletal embryo. Yet another supernatural plane suggests an unseen beyond: the ancient trope of the "Madonna and Child"; a blood-red halo anticipating martyrdom; the seed in which "individuality is passed on forever" (ewig pflanzt sie sich fort) and lives continuously "from the first dim signs of life in the embryo to the highest developed forms”; an eternal struggle between humanity's destructive animal tendencies and metaphysical desires for eternity.^*'' Juxtaposing just three of Munch's works during 1895-1897 — Madonna (1895-6), Madonna in the Churchyard (1896, fig. 31 ), and Inheritance {i 8 g 8 , fig. 82 ) — we see both Munch's Naturalist despair and his transcendent hope. Though the syphilitic child painfully portrays the specter of hereditary degen- 97 eration. Munch found transcendent hope in iconic einl)ryos and spermatozoa — the human ability to generate new generations. A man and woman entwined in lovemaking, he wrote just after his father’s death, are "at that moment . . . no longer themselves hut only a link in the chain that binds a thousand generations."'*^ Later he sharpened this hopeful vision: Thus now life reaches out its hand to death. The chain is forged that binds the thousands of genera- tions that have died to the thousands of generations yet to conie^^^ The complete intertwining of the irreducibly Naturalist images (represented with documentary verac- itvl and the ambivalent irruptions of transcendent meanings in the female body (hysterical, mystical, or mvsterical) boldly demonstrates Munch’s own double lines of Psychical Naturalism. The woman is no longer simply herself. Her body is the site of a cosmic contest between life and destruction, earthly finitude and metaphysical eternity. She is the Madonna, the New Eve, the ‘‘link in the chain that binds a thousand generations.” She is the mysterical Madonna: la Madone mysterique. conclusion: hysterical wonder The only adequate response to reality is wonder. — Flannery O'Connor Let us return to the challenge posed at the beginning of this essay: “we all — scholars and ordinary read- ers alike — must ask about how society constructs, uses, and eclipses the wondrous.”'*^ When we look at our great-great-grandparents’ episodes of Spiritualism, mesmerism, and psychical research, we fre- quently enough treat them with familial indulgence or dismissive condescension. Either way, we think of them as our doddering ancestors on the brink of modernity, struggling with something new — not quite able to be modern, yet no longer able to believe in tradition. We do not, however, respect them for what they saw as absolutely vital issues at stake: the need to represent for themselves what ulti- mately mattered — in a word, reality, whatever that might mean. The subversive use of religious iconography can lead to stereotyped responses. On one hand, reli- gious believers see sacrilege; on the other, defenders erect an autonomous aesthetic of art for art’s sake. Neither position takes such artistic representations seriously. If we see in Baudelaire’s “flowers of evil" or Huysmans’ Black Masses either sacrilege or solipsism, we miss not only the point but also the seri- ous fortunes in play. If there was a blasphemy for the Symbolists, the Decadents, the Rosicrucians, and the Catholic Revivalists (to name only a few), it would not have been diabolism, the occult or the new mysticisms.'** The blasphemy would have been rather a totalizing ideology that reduced the real to empirical facts, domesticated transcendence,'*^ and thus foreclosed all hope in things unseen. For at least three decades now, historians have been attempting to rescue religion from the mar- gins to which it was banished — that is, as an epiphenomenon of economic, social, or political desires.'^° Cultural historians have turned to anthropology to recover religion as a powerful force ca{)able of moti- vating the most deeply held passions, to recover religion as an ultimate claim on reality for which human beings have been willing to fight, suffer, kill and be killed, martyr and be martyred.'^' Religious people in the past saw salvation at stake.'” But perhaps religion is not the most helpful word for understanding nineteenth century European hi .tory. It f ormotes too much the official institutions that embodied religious impulses. While certainly 98 battles were l)itterly fought in those church-state trenches, other coiillicts were engaged on fields more familiar to intellectual and cultural historians. Cultures clashed in classrooms and [)ulpits, hut also, and most vividly, in novels and poetry, on canvases and operatic stages, in art museums, wax museums, daily tabloids, and psychiatric wards. In approaching the complex cultural world of Munch in Paris, I suggest substituting the category of “wonder” for that of "religion.” We can retrieve our doddering forebears on the brink of modernity from the "enormous condescension of posterity”^^^ only if we see what was at stake for them; nothing less than claims on the ultimate constitution of reality. Significance, meaning, and [nirpose beyond the tuberculosis ward and the syphilitic grave: these ultimate human concerns had been largely eclipsed in the dominant public discourse. A suffocating logic of progress with vast institutional resources (including schools and hospitals guided by positivism) ruled questions of significance as being out- of-bounds. We should not regard the many attempts to restore a sense of wonder to a world without mystery — often using the tools of fantasy, magic, and the occult — as either sacrilege or as child's play. Neither response honors our forebears. In the year of Munch’s turn away from Naturalism, Arne Garborg seasoned his Norwegian text with the French flavor: 'Tesprit seule importe."^^'' The spirit, the mind, the soul, the psyche: in a world that eclipsed mystery, however one translated iesprit, this alone mattered. It alone liberated individual free- dom, grounded human creativity, hinted at glimmers of eternity. What our ancestors wanted was a mystery that faced the facts: not a heavenly assumption without a body, but rather a Naturalist's keen attention to the states of the soul. A Spiritual Naturalism or per- haps a Psychical Naturalism — both signified a synthetic approach to reality as a double-composition of wonder. Like the mysterique herself, the marvelous real both attracted and repulsed, appeared in nature yet possessed supernatural energy, allured even in its aspects of dread. Before modernity’s dis- enchantment, this object both tremendens et fascinans would have been called religious. In a world such as ours, perhaps (as Bynum suggests) we would do better to call it "wondrous.”^^^ Relieved of insti- tutional and confessional overtones, the "wonder-response” nonetheless recovers what was at stake: a response of wonder in the face of realities beyond those sanctioned by disenchanting authorities. In this broader sense, the category of wonder belongs to the language of the mystic. As the Jesuit Michel de Certeau wrote suggestively: In a word, one might say that the mystical is a reaction against the appropriation of truth by the cler- ics . . . It favored the illuminations of the illiterate, the experience of women, the wisdom of fools, the silence of the child; it opted for the vernacular languages against the Latin of the schools. It main- tained that the ignorant have competence in matters of faith. . . . The mystical is the authority of the crowd, a figure of the anonymous, that makes an indiscreet return in the field of the academic author- 176 I ties. There are many kinds of clerics in the world — academic authorities, for example — who appropriate truth and eclipse the mysterious. When we see nineteenth-century spiritual symptoms irrupting on so many fin-de-siecle bodies — hysteria, hypnosis, diabolism and visions — we see a reaction against the appropriation of truth by a new caste of clerics — the clerics of modernizing disenchantment. For many centuries, the Madonna's gently smiling face has offered solace and hope. Munch’s ecstatic Madonna most certainly extended this traditional use. Yet in the face of the unseen, even this Madonna’s face points to hope and rescues despair. In every Decadent mysterique, irrupting bodily symptoms possess a spiritual significance, pointing beyond themselves — just as religious sacraments do — to a hope in things unseen. 99 Muiu'li s untraditional Madonna and Griinewald’s Crucifixion both body tortli a mystique — at the \er\ least, a double-composed mystique naturaliste. Tlieir many levels of meaning resist any complete explanation. Despite this unfathomable complexity, Huysmans ibonght he had linally found a descrip- tion adequate to the mysterique. His moving tribute to Grhnewald’s mysterical Christ serves as an appropriate epitaph to Munch's mysterical Madonna: I find that \GrimewaId s\ work can only be defined by coupling together contradictory terms . . . The man is. in fact, a mass of paradoxes and contrasts . . . He is at once natundistic and mystical . . . He per- sonifies . . . the religious piety of the sick and the poor. That awful Christ who hung dying over the altar of the Isenheim hospital would seem to have been made in the image of the acid burnt patients who proved to him: they must surely have found consolation in the thought that this Cod they invoked had suffered the same torments as themselves, and had become flesh in a form as repulsive as their own; and they must have felt less forsaken, less contemptible . . . His pestiferous Christ would have offended the taste of the courts; he could only be understood by the sick, the unhappy and the monks, by the suffering members of Christ ’s body.^^^ In the late nineteenth century, new hospitals sprang up with new illnesses, both factual and fictitious, irrupting primarily on the bodies of women. New suffering members needed new forms of consolation. In a modern world imprisoned by apparent dead ends, Munch too escaped and went d rebours. Declaring an end to the "impudent despotism of things dead," he boldly painted the "return of the liv- ing.” His degenerate Madonna regenerates future generations. 1 Reinhoid Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 114. 2 Letter of Munch to Danish painter )ohn Rohde, dated March 1893. "At the moment I am occupied with studies for a series of paintings ... It will have love and death as its subject matter.' In john Boulton Smith, Munch, revised and enlarged edition, London: Phaidon Press, 1992, pp. 11-12. 3 The six paintings were The Voice (Summer Night); Kiss (later: The Kiss); Love and Pain (later: Vampire); The Face of a Madonna (later: Madonna); Jealousy (later: Melon choly); and Despair (later: The Scream). 4 The phrase is adapted from Caroline Walker Bynum's review for the publisher, printed on the hardcover copy of William A. Christian, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Bynum writes, ‘this study of Catholic religiosity in the 1930s sheds light on fundamental aspects of human spirituality and psychology and on the sophisticated ques- tions we all — scholars and ordinary readers alike — must ask about how society constructs, uses, and el lipses the wondrous." For Bynum's own recent investigations into the category, see: Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Cender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York: Zone Books, 1991; The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995; and “Wonder," Amencan Historical Review 102, February 1997, pp. 1-26, 5 For the radical shift in hygiene and mentalities effected by the Invention cjf sewer systems see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagi nation, translated by Miriam L. Kochan, Roy Porter and Christopher Prendergast, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer sity Press, 1986, originally published as Le Miasme el la jonquille: Todorat et Timaginaire social XVHIe-XIXe sie- cles, Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982, 6 Spurred by the example of the British public health move- ment, "water mania" and the building of massive urban sewer systems swept across Europe as a successor to the "railway mania” of the 1840s. In Paris, the irruptions of epidemics were associated with the irruptions of revolu- tions. The horrific cholera epidemic of 1832, two years after the )uly Revolution, killed some twenty thousand in Paris and its suburbs and touched off riots. Again in 1849 a cholera epidemic presented a "biological complement” to the Revolution of 1848. After overthrowing the Second Republic in a coup d’etat in 1851 and replacing it with the Second Empire, Emperor Napoleon III transformed Paris both above and below ground. “Not only did this improve public hygiene in the city, it also disrupted the metonymi- cal relationship of the sewers to the social threat from below." For this relationship between bodily disease and disease in the body politic, see Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 9-36. 7 Alain Corbin, “Backstage,” A History of Private Life IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, edited by Michelle Perrot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cam- bridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. 451 668; originally published as Histoire de la vie Privee, vol. 4, De la Revolution d la Grande Guerre, Paris: Editions du Seiiil, 1987. 8 "In the second half of the century, what )ean Borie has called mythologies of heredity' were developed by physi- cians and novelists (such as the Zola of Fecondite and Docteur Pascal), by fear of the great 'social scourges' — tuberculosis, alcoholism, and syphilis — and by terror of 100 flaws transmitted Ivy tainted blood. Because of these hered itary weaknesses the family came to he seen as a weak link to be protected from danger through constant vigilance. Chastity was recommended, even to young men, whose escapades had once been tolerated as a mark of virility, while young women were recpiired to remain virgins." Michelle Perrot, “The Family Triumphant," A History of Private Life. Vol. IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, edited by Michelle Perrot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 124. See )ean Borie, Mythologies tie I'heredite au XIXe siecle, Paris: Galilee, 1981. 9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality : An Introduc tion, translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978; originally published as Histoire de la sexuaF ite, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, 10 For prostitution see Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; and Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, translated by Alan Sheridan, Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, originally published as Les files de noce: misere sexuelle et prostitu- tion (ige siecle), Paris: Flammarion, 1982. For mental ill- ness, see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard, London: Tavistock Publications, 1971, originally published as Folie et deraison; histoire de la folie a I age classique, Paris: Plon, 1961. For connections between madness, masturbation, homosexuality and schiz- ophrenia see Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representa- tion: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS, Ithaca: Gornell University Press, 1988; for these themes in the context of race see Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1985; and Freud, Race, and Gender, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. As Martha Hanna recounts, French writers had associated the newly invented “homosexuality” with Germany at least as early as 1896. See Hanna, "Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon," in Homosexuality in Modern France, edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 203 and note 7, p. 222; and also John Fout, “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia,” in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, edited by Fout, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 11 This naturalization of the supernatural had already occurred with the Romantics. See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernat- uralism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, New York: Norton, 1971. 12 R. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Y. Frecerro, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; originally published as Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque, Paris: Grasset, 1961. 13 Although the label “Realist" is a useful point of entry, it "is not one that can be maintained once we start to tbink about what 'reality’ in a work of literature can possibly be." See Alison Finch, “Reality and its Representation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel," The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel from 1800 to the Present, edited by Timothy Unwin, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 36-52; p. 37. See also A. Fairlie, Flaubert: Madame Bovary, London: Edward Arnold, 1962; M. Butor, "Balzac et la realite,” Repertoire, Paris: Minuit, 1960-82, vol. I, pp. 79 93. C. PrendergasI highlights the latt that language can never copy reality but as a code can only symbolize it. See Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 14 rhe lile of the prostitute is traced from its beginnings | The Procuress] to its victimization |'l he Vit tim; One Year After] to its end ]The End! Died in the Streets]. "1 he Vile Traflic," British News[)aper Library. 15 Alain Corbin describes this device: "When surveillaiue by parents and teachers failed, only a special orthopedic device could quell the adolescent's irrepressible need for solitary release and save him from premature senility or even death from loss of precious bodily fluid." A History of Private Life. Vol. IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Edited by Michelle Perrot and translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Ihe Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 495. 16 For the definitive edition see Emile Zola, Les Rougon Mac quart, vols. 1-5, Paris: Gallimard, 1960-67. 17 On associations of late-century consumption with hysteria and women's compulsions to shop see Patricia O'Brien, “The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Women and Theft in Late I9th-c. France," /ouma/ of Social History 17, Fall 1983, pp. 65-77; 4nd Leslie Camhi, "Stealing Femininity: Department Store Kleptomania as Sexual Disorder," Differ- ences 5, 1993, pp. 26-50. 18 Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 19 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, pp. 76-79. 20 L'lllustration, December 10, 1881, in Schwartz, Realities, p. 121. 21 Letter from Grevin to Zola, July 6, 1881; in Schwartz, Reali ties, p. 122. 22 Emile Poulat, Liberte, laicite. La guerre des deux France et le principe de la modernite, Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1987. 23 The importance of the Republican educational system, along with innovations in transportation and the military as a means of consolidating the new Republic, is well docu- mented in Eugen Weber's classic Peasants into French- men. The Modernization of Rural France, 18/0-igiq., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. See also the chapter on Jules Ferry, Minister of Education and author of the Third Republic's educational system and colonialist policies in Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madelein Reberioux, The Third Republic From its Origins to the Great War, i8ji~igi4, translated by J. R. Foster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 72-100. On the replacement of religious sisters as teachers with a newly invented “profes- sional" class of female instituteurs, see Jo Burr Margadant, Madame le Professeur. Women Educators in the Third Republic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. 24 Marcelin Berthelot (1827-1907), an organic chemist as well as a man of politics, synthesized acetylene in i860, thus demonstrating that it was possible to artificially create the molecules which comprised living beings — that is, without the intervention of some metaphysical /orce vitale. “Le monde est aujourd'hui sans mystere. La concep- tion rationnelle pretend tout eclairer et tout comprendre: elle s'efforce de donner de toute chose une explication positive et logique, et elle etend son determinisme fatal jusqu'au monde moral." Quoted in Gerard Choivy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contem- poraine, 1880-igjo, vol. 3, Paris: Bibliotheque historique Privat, 1986, p. 143. Biographical information on Berthelot from Le Petit Robert des noms propres, edited by Alain Rey, revised edition, Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1997, p. 245. 101 :S Ernest Renan, \ le tie lesus. Paris: Michel Levy Freres, iSn V In this historicist portrait. |esus was painted as the supreme moral exemplar while at the same time stripped ot all supernatural signiticance. This process of naturaliz- ing the supernatural was theorized as "disenchantment,” a necessary element in the process of "modernization,” by the sociologist Max Weber, For Weber, "disenchantment” {Entzauberung. literally: the end of magic) means a world in \N hich phenomena are no longer explained by gods and spirits but rather by laws scientifically investigated. For a succinct over\ iew of Weber’s narrative of modernity as the effect of Kulturprotestantisnuis, see Max Weber, "Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Ma\ Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited bv H. H, Gerth and C, Wright Mills, New York: Oxford Univ ersity Press, 1946, pp, 323-59, For historiciza- tion of Weber’s thesis as an artifact of late nineteenth-cen- tury confessional conflicts, see Weber's 'Protestant Ethic': Origins. Evidence, Contexts, edited by Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993. 26 Ernest Renan. L'avenir de la science — pensees de 184.8 1849]. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1890; quoted in Andre "Valenta, Le Scientisme ou Llncroyable seduction d une doctrine erronee, Evry: self-published, 1995, p. 10. Renan's book was published immediately after the Revolution of 1848, but it only achieved w'idespread notoriety (and translations into several languages) in 1890 during the Third Republic. 27 On the Third Republic’s universalizing project and the suppression of local and particular differences, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchman: on the universalizing project of modernity in general and its suppression of the local, particular, and contingent, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis, cited above. For the close associations between anti-religious ideology and the French colonial project, see the work of Lucien Levy-Bruhl: published approximately ten years apart, Levy-Bruhl's three large works on primitive thought were: Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures, Paris; F. Alcan, 1910; La mentalite primitive, Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1922, and Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalite primitive, Paris: F. Alcan, 1931. For his early study on morality see La morale et la science des moeurs, Paris: F. Alcan, 1903. As the British translator of the 1923 edition put it. Primitive Mentality would enable ’a colonizing country such as ours” to understand much better much that had been puzzling hitherto, espe- cially 'the very real sense in which the primitive partici- pates’ in the mystic nature of all that surrounds him, the way in which he lives in the seen and the unseen worlds simultaneously. . .” See Lilian A. Clare, "Translator's Note,” in Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd,, 1923, p. 5; originally published as La mentalite primitive, Paris; Alcan, 1922. On the para- doxes of the Republic's imperialist agenda see Alice L. Con- klin, Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France & West Africa, iSg^-ig^o, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 28 The corpse of a four-year-old girl found in a stairwell at 47, rue du Vert Bois is displayed. See Schwartz, Spectacu- lar Realities, p. 77. When the corpse was put on display at the local morgue in August 1886, newspapers reported that about fifty thousand visitors came to see the body. Despite extra policing, the size of the crowd forced the traffit in front to a halt while vendors turned the quai de I Archeveche into a genuine fairgrounds, hawking coconut, gingerbread, and toys. Not coincidentally, this was the • 'a of the invention of the department store: see Michael Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920, Princeton, N) : Princeton University Press, 1981. Emile Zola published Au Bonheur des dames, his "realist novel" of the department store and its effect on women, in 1885. It was translated immedi- ately into English; see The Ladies' Paradise: A Realistic Novel, London: Vizetelly, 1887. 29 In January 1886 the Musee Grevin opened a scene from Zola's Germinal. This tableau represented a typically bleak scene at the end of the novel: Etienne has just killed Chaval and the mine has just flooded. Etienne and Cather- ine, trapped and about to die, make love not far from the corpse. The wax representation hoped to be worthy of its ultra-realist subject matter. "Here is a real mine shaft," reported a tabloid, "black and deep with pieces of real coal and its timbers that were taken from the depths of the shafts at Anzin. Everything is of the most exact nature. . , . As we already said, all is real . . . the timbers, the lamps, the tools, right down to the clothing that is worn by real min- ers.” L'lllustration, January 2, 1886, in Schwartz, Realities, p. 123. 30 Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Her- itage, Boston: LittJe, Brown and Company, 1941, pp. 351-2. 31 As Eugen Weber recounts, a farmer in the fin-de-siecle returned from the railway station with a cartful of fertil- izer and met the priest. "What are you carting there?" asked the curate. "Chemicals,” replied the farmer, “But that is very bad,” admonished the priest; “they burn the soil!” "Monsieur le cure,” said the farmer, "I’ve tried everything. I’ve had masses said and got no profit from them. I’ve bought chemicals and they worked. I’ll stick to the better merchandise.” Weber concludes, "It was the requiem of nineteenth-century religion.” Weber, Peasants into French- men, p. 356. Weber quotes historian Keith Thomas who “suggests that fertilizers replaced fertility rites. But he says this about Tudor England. We find it happening in the days of Jean Jaures." Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, p. 792; in Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, p. 356. 32 Smith, Munch, pp. 6-8. 33 Quoted in Smith, Munch, p. 5. 34 During the Paris Commune of 1871, various socialist groups of citizens staged an insurrection against the provisional government set up after the French defeat in the Franco- Prussian War. During “the bloody week” of May 21, govern- ment troops massacred about 20,000 Communards and permanently exiled the working-class masses out to the "Red Belt" surrounding Paris. Afterward, 38,000 more were arrested and 7,000 deported. This irrevocably altered the relationship between Liberalism and the Left in France. For a wonderfully readable account see Rupert Christiansen, Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune, New York: Viking, 1995. 35 Carl Naerup, Skildringer og Stemminger fra den yngre Iitferafur [Kristiania: 1897], p. 78; in Reinhold Heller, “Edvard Munch’s Night, the Aesthetics of Decadence, and the Content of Biography,” Arts Magazine vol. 53, no. 2, October 1978, p. 83. Hereafter, "Decadence.” 36 Heller, "Decadence," p. 83. 37 Christian Krohg, "Tredje Generation,” Verdens Gang, April 27, 1889; reprinted in Krohg, Karnpen for Tilvaerelsen, sec- ond edition, Oslo: Gyldenal Norsk Verlag, 1952, pp. 172-174; in Heller, "Decadence,” p. 81. 38 A new generation comes and replaces an outmoded one in a natural evolutionary moment rooted in the biological 102 processes. "The twilight of legitimacy, the dawn of the notion of generation. The past is no longer the law: this is the very essence of the phenomenon." See Pierre Nora, "Generation," in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. V. I. Conflicts and Divisions, under the direction ol Pierre Nora; English language edition edited and with a foreward by Lawrence D. Kritzman; translated by Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 499-531; here, p. 502. The discourse of "generations" has its roots in the French Revolution: the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1793 — Condorcet’s text — proclaims that "a generation has no right to subject any future genera- tion to its laws” (Article 30). As Saint-Just summed up the revolutionary measures, "You have therefore decided that one generation cannot place another in chains." 39 Jean Cassou, "Munch en France,” Oslo Komrnunes Kunst- samlingers. Aarbok, Oslo: Oslo Komrnunes Kunstsam- lingers, 1963, p, 124. 40 In Cassou, "Munch en France," p. 124. 41 Suggested by Smith, Munch, p. 8. 42 Suggested by Heller, "Decadence," p. 101. 43 Smith, Munch, p. 8. 44 Hermann Bahr, "Maurice Maeterlinck,” Ueberwindung, p. 196; in Heller, "Decadence," p. 86. Translation altered. 45 Letter of Emmanuel Goldstein to Edvard Munch, dated "Copenhagen, 30 Dec. 1891," in Heller, “Decadence," p. 95. 46 As Baudelaire wrote in Fusees: "Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.” ("Deux qualites litteraires fondamentales: surnaturalisme et ironie.”) See Max Milner, "Baudelaire et le surnaturalisme,” in Le Surnaturalisme frangais: actes du collogue organise a I'Universite Vanderbilt les 31 mars et ler avril ig/8, edited by Jean Leblon and Claude Pichois, Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconniere, 1979, pp. 31-49. 47 Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life,” 1863, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated by Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1964, p. 3. Emphasis added. Baudelaire (1821-1867) inherited the Romantic tradition even as he watched the destruction of medieval Paris by Baron von Haussman. Consequently, he forged a modernist esthetic vision which sought to rep- resent a lasting element underlying a rapidly changing world. For the classic interpretation of Baudelaire and his relationship to the new Paris of Napoleon III see Walter Benjamin's essays "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938), "Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), and "Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), collected in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Verso, 1976. "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" is also available along with "An Introduction to the Translation of Baude- laire's Tableaux parisiens" in Benjamin's Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, trans- lated by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1968. See also David P, Jordan’s Transforming Paris: the Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann, New York: Free Press, 1995. 48 After 1848, traditional forms of artistic patronage — aris- tocratic, ecclesiastical and monarchical — gave way to a market form of artistic competition. Artists were forced to become the inventors of fashion, producing, in David Harvey's phrase, "a work of art, a once and for all creation ... a cultural object that would be original, unique, and hence eminently marketable at a monopoly price," See David Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990, p. 22. Baudelaire's 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life” appeared the same year as Manet's controversial painting, Olympia. For a discussion of com- modilication in the newly modernist (ontexi of post llaussmannization, see I. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet anil his Followers, Prim elon, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, esf). p[). 79 146. 49 In the eighteenth century. Saint Simon had imagined art as the new religion and the artists as the new priesthood: "It is we, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde. What a most beautiful destiny for the arts, that of exercising over society a positive power, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the van ol all the intellectual faculties in the epoc h ol their greatest development!" However, the new technic al capacity to reproduce, distribute and sell books and images to mass audiences changed the social and political role of the artist. If a photograph could faith fully reproduce mimetic resemblances of reality and, better yet, quickly manufacture multiple copies for a wide audi- ence, what role was left for the artist? In addition, the com- modification and commercialization of a market for cultural products during the nineteenth century forced cul- tural producers into a market form of competition. This shift from artist-as-priest to artist-as-magician led Walter Benjamin to call modernist art “auratic art" in the sense that "the artist had to assume an aura of creativity, of dedi- cation to art for art's sake, in order to produce a cultural object that would be original, unique, and hence eminently marketable at a monopoly price. The result was often a highly individualistic, aristocratic, disdainful (particularly of popular culture), and even arrogant perspective on the part of cultural producers. . .” David Harvey summarizing the theory of Benjamin. See Harvey, Condition of Post- modernity, pp. 19-20, 22; and Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illumi- nations, edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955, pp. 217-252. Saint-Simon quoted in Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York: Basic Books, 1976, p. 35; and Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Gerald Fitzgerald, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1968, p. 9. 50 Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences," Les Fleurs du Mai, trans. Richard Howard, Boston: David R. Godine, 1982. 51 The phrase is from Peter Nicholls, Modernisms. A Literary Guide, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 5. 52 Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans- lated by P. E. Charvet, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 391; in Nicholls, Modernisms, p. 5. 53 For the Enlightenment philosophes and the Liberal histori- ans (e.g., Lecky and J. B. Bury) who followed them, "the progress of truth consisted in the light of science invading dark chambers inhabited by mysticism, until at last no darkness should be left. . . . The problem of 'enlightenment' began to turn into the new problem of 'secularization.'” Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 15, 7. 54 What Habermas calls the project of modernity came into focus during the eighteenth century as an attempt “to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic." Following Ernst Cassirer's account, Harvey summarizes Enlighten- ment thought as embracing "the idea of progress,” and actively seeking “that break with history and tradition which modernity espouses. It was, above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacraliza- tion of knowledge and social organization in order to liber- ate human beings from their chains." Rational modes of thought and forms of social organization "promised libera- 103 tion from tiu' irrationalities of nn th. religion, superstition, release from the arhitrarv use ot power as well as from the dark side ot onr ow n human natures. Only through such a project could the universal, eternal, and the iniinutahle qualities of all liunianitv he revealed,' See liirgen Haher- mas. Modernit\ : an Incomplete Project." in Mai Foster, eefitor. rite Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Prrrt Townsend. \\ .-\: Bay Press, 1983, p. 9; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophv of the Enlightenment, translated by Fritz C, kirelln and lames P. Peltegrove, Princeton, N]: Prince- ton Unix ersitv Press. 1951; Harvey. Condition of Post- modemitv. pp. 12-13. Emphasis added. 55 On the conflicted origins of modernity and its ambivalent attitudes tow ards both the particular and the universal, see Stephen Toiilmin, Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of .Modernity. New York: Free Press, 1990. 56 The Svmbolist mox ement had a complex genealogy which included: Gustax e Moreau's paintings (such as Oedipus and the Sphinx. 1864) and Odilon Redon's lithographs (such as Dans le Reve. 1879); the literature of J.-K. Huys- mans whose descriptions of Moreau's work in A Rebours (18S4) solidified Moreau's place as the movement's mas- ter); the music and operas of Richard Wagner, especially as interpreted in the Revue Wagnerienne (begun in 1885); and the name as coined in a manifesto by a minor poet, lean Moreas, in Le Eigaro, September 18, 1886. For a suc- cinct introduction, see Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. 57 The study of the Decadent movement has exploded within the last twenty years. See, for example, in order of publica- tion: Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 2880-igoo, translated by Derek Coltman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; Murray G. H. Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence. The Literature of the i8gos, New York: Rout- ledge, 1993; R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma, London: Edward Arnold, 1983; Barbara Spackman, Deca- dent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baude- laire to D Annunzio, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989: Jean de Palacio, Figures et formes de la decadence, Paris: Nouvelles Editions Seguier, 1994; David Weir, Deca- dence and the Making of Modernism, Amherst: Univer- sity of Massachusetts Press, 1995; The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin De-Siecle France, edited by Asti Hustvedt, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998; and Decadents, Symbolists, Fr Aesthetes in America. Fin-de-Siecie American Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Edward Foster, jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2000. 58 Theophile Gautier, "Charles Baudelaire,” in Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, Paris: Levy, 1868, p. 17; in Heller, "Deca- dence," p. 82. 59 For an excellent overview of "neurasthenia” see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Rise of Modernity, New York: Basic Books, 1990. 60 Charcot's exact term for "homosexuality" was "inversion of the genital sense" (inversion du sens genital). However, since the French sens also means "way” or "direction" (as when a street sign indicates, “sens unique," meaning 'one-way street"), it also connotes going "the wrong way" [a rebours). See Vernon A. Rosario II, "Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies. The Pederasts' Inversions,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, edited by jeffrey Merrick and Bryant I. Ragan, )r.. New York: Oxford University Press, 199b, pp. 14b 17b; and Rosario, The Erotic Imagination. French Histories of Perversity, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. For a general overview of the modern move from morality to medicine in sexuality, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, 1990. 61 [an Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychi- atric Profession in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Cambrirlge University Press, 1987; “The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Later Nineteenth- Century France," Journal of Modern History 54, 1982, pp. 209-39; and "The Uses of Male Hysteria; Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France," Repre- sentations 34, Spring 1991, pp. I34~ib5. See also Foucault, History of Sexuality, cited above. 62 See Goldstein, Console and Classify, p. 237: "An engraving from an 1881 text by a member of the Salpetriere school unabashedly emphasizes the grotesqueness of a woman in the throes of this pathology." 63 See Goldstein, Console and Classify, p. 23b: "This news- paper cartoon from the early Third Republic comments on the candidacy of Dr. D. M. Bourneville for the Chamber of Deputies from tfie fifth arrondissement of Paris. For the cartoonist, Bourneville's whole identity as a politician is bound up with anti-clericalism. The candidate champions the laicization of the Paris public hospitals (note the flee- ing nursing sisters in the lower left-hand corner). He edits the Bibliotheque Diabolique (in whose doorway he stands), the series of books reinterpreting famous episodes of demonic possession as instances of hysterical pathology. Bourneville's bid for election in 1883 proved successful." 64 Edmond et |ules de Goncourt, April 11, 1857, Journal, Memoires de la vie litteraire, Paris: Laffont, coll. "Bouquins,"i98g, p. 1:248. 65 L'Hysterique was very likely inspired by Louise Lateau (1850-1883), a Belgian woman who was a famous instance of a stigmatic. Her case was examined by the medical establishment, which was unable to find an explanation for her wounds. The novel has been recently republished with an excellent preface by Eleonore Roy-Reverzy situating the fin-de-siecle concern over hysteria and women's bodies within its historical context, has been recently republished as Camille Lemonnier, L'Hysterique I1885I, Paris: Nouvelles Editions Seguier, 199b. The phrase "une sorte de Zola flaman" is from Roy-Reverzy's "Presentation," p. 7. 66 Following Rene Girard's use of the term "erotic" (in Violence and the Sacred) to refer to "all forms of violence and rup- ture as it is related to the experience of otherness" (i.e., the irrational), Donald Leach writes: "The naturalist, represen- tative of late nineteenth-century culture generally, seeks to deny natural disorder by humanizing, ideologizing, representing it. This obsession with ideological order explains the obsession of Huysmans' culture with natural disorder in all its forms: sexuality, sickness, insanity, crime, poverty, to name only a few examples . . . An authentic aspiration towards totality requires of man that he embrace the otherness which is his corporeal self, the objectivity of his body. This act is the essence of eroticism.” I owe this approach to Donald Lee Leach, Ideo- logical Order and Erotic Disorder in the Conversion of J.-K. Huysmans from Naturalism to Catholicism, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1989, p. 12b. Emphases added. For Decadence as a series of counterfeit values intended to devalue Naturalist categories of meaning and representation, see Leonard Koos, Decadence: A Litera- ture of Travesty, Ann Arbor, Ml: University Microfilms, 1990, 67 Huysmans' "Emile Zola et L'Assommoir" was published in l.'Actualite, a Belgian newspaper headed by his friend Camille Lemonnier, the author of L'Hysterique (see note b5). 104 68 George Ross Ridge, ]. K. Hiiysmans, New York: I'wayiie, 1968, p. 17; Henry M. Gallot, ExplU dlioii dp j. K. Huysrnaris, Paris: Agence parisienne de Distrilnition, 1955, p. 68; Henry Brandretli, Hitysmans, New York: Hillary, 1963, p. 23; all riled in Ruth B, Antosh, "Huysmans' Dot trine ot Spiritual Naturalism," Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J. K. Huysmans, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986, p. 14. 69 Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres ('oini)letes, VI 11 , p. 224; in Antosh, “Spiritual Naturalism," |), 24. 70 Antosh, "Spiritual Naturalism,” 25. 71 Ted Gott, "Odilon Redon,” in Paris in the Late Nineteenth Century, edited by Jane Kinsman, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia; New York: Distributed by Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 148. 72 Emile Zola quoted by ). K. Huysmans, 1894 Preface to A Rebours, 1884, reprint, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1978, p. 55; in Theodore P. Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe, New York: MacMillan; Twayne Publishers, 1994, p. 16. 73 For the dandy as a modernist icon, see Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Moder- nity, London: Verso, 1983, pp. 53-4. Berman draws directly on Baudelaire's essay on "The Painter of Modern Life"; the section on the Heroism of Modern Life cites the Dandy as a modern hero. For a critique of the gender implicit in the construction of modernity, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. As Felski says with respect to Marshall Berman’s reading of the tradition: "All the exemplary heroes of his text — Faust, Marx, Baudelaire — are of course symbols not just of modernity, but also of masculinity, historical markers of the emergence of new forms of bourgeois and working-class male subjectivity. Both in Berman’s account of Faust and in his later evocation of Baudelaire’s flaneur, the stroller who goes botanizing on the asphalt of the streets of Paris, the modern individual is assumed to be an autonomous male free of familial and communal ties . . Felski, Gender of Modernity, p. 2. 74 Although Des Esseintes is male, the association of feminin- ity with physical disorder remained constant in Huys- mans’ move from naturalism to Catholicism. Just as the naturalist takes femininity as the object of his science, so in the decadent novels women tend to be the locus of the inexplicable. After Huysmans’ conversion, the woman’s body becomes the privileged site of both divine action and Satanic temptation. See Leach, Ideological Order and Erotic Disorder. 75 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 5, 11. Hanson examines in detail the cases of Verlaine and Huysmans in France and Pater and Wilde in England. 76 See for example these illuminating titles: Abbe Jules Pacheu, De Dante a Verlaine: etudes d'idealistes et mystiques: Dante, Spenser, Banyan, Shelley, Verlaine, Huysmans, Paris: Plon, Nourrit, 1897; and Du Positivisme au rnysti- cisme. Etude sur Tinquietude religieuse contemporaine, Paris: Librairie Bloud et cie, 1906; Henri Bachelin, ].-K. Huysmans, du naturalisme litteraire au naturalisme mystique, second edition, Paris: Perrin, 1926. 77 For an overview of the Catholic Revival in general, see Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution. The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1S70-J9J4, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1965. The title of the French translation is instructive in its allusion to Huys- mans: Revolution a rebours. Le renouveau catholique dans la litterature en France de i8yo a 1914, Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1971. For two recent studies see Elke Lind- horst. Die Diidektik von Geistesgeschichte une l.iteratur in der modernen l.iteratur Frankreichs: Dichtung in tier Tradition des "renouveau catholique" von 1H90 1990, Wiirzburg: Kbnigshausen & Neumann, 1995; and Frederic Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisrne en France i8H^ 194^, Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998. Gugelot has assembled a helplul bibliography. For primary sources in the study of the renouveau catholique see for example: Abhe jiilien Laurec, Le Renou veau catholique dans les lettres, Paris: P. Feron Vrau, 1917; Fhomas Mainage, O.P., Les Temoins du renouveau catholique, sixth edition, Paris; G. Beauchesne, 1919: La Psychologie de la conversion: lepons donnees d TInstitut Catholique de Paris (1914) Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1915; and Le Temoignage des apostats; lepons donnees d TInsti tut Catholique (igi^-igibj, Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1916; Louis Rouzic, Le Renouveau catholitjue. Les jeunes avant la guerre, second edition, Paris; P, Fequi, 1919; Jean Antoine Calvet, Pour refaire la France, Paris: n.p., 1919; Le Renou veau catholique dans la litterature contemporaine, Paris: F. Lanore, 1927; and D une critique catholique, Paris: Editions Spes, 1927; Claude Romain, Le Catholicisrne de quelques conternporains, Paris: Librairie Aniere, Victorion Freres & Cie, 1933. Flermann Weinert, Dichtung aus deni Clauben. Ein beitrag zur problematik des literarische renouveau catholique in Frankreich, Hamburg; Hamburg Seminar fur Romanische Sprachen und Kultur, 1934. Eliza beth Fraser, Le Renouveau religieux d'apres le roman franpais de 1886 a 1914, Paris, Societe d’edition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1934; Joseph Ageorges, Le Manuel de litterature catholique en France de i8yo a nos jours, Paris: Editions Spes, 1939; Louis Chaigne, Anthologie de la renaissance catholique, 3 vols., Paris: Editions «Alsatia», 1938-1940; and the ongoing six-volume study, Louis Alphonse Mau- gendre. La Renaissance catholique au debut du XXe sie- cle, 6 vols., Paris; Beauchesne, 1963-. 78 J.-K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (A Rebours), translator unknown. New York: Dover Publications I1931] 1969, pp. 133-135; in Huysmans, Oeuvres completes de J.-K. Huys- mans, Paris: Editions G. Gres et Cie, 1929, VII, pp. 216-218. 79 See Pierre Lambert’s note 5 in Lettres inedites d Edmond de Goncourt, edited by Pierre Lambert, Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1956, p. 73; and Antosh, “Spiritual Naturalism,” pp. 27-28. 80 J.-K. Huysmans to Edmond de Goncourt, dated “Paris, 19 January 1882,” in Lettres a Edmond de Goncourt, p. 70. 81 Huysmans, Against the Grain, p. 170; in Huysmans, Oeu- vres completes, VI 1 , p. 275. 82 See Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. 83 See Daniel Pick, Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France [1968], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 84 Allen Putnam, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Witchcraft and Miracle: A Brief Treatise Showing that Mesmerism is a Key which will Unlock Many Chambers of Mystery, Boston: Colby & Rich, 1890. For a contemporary overview see William B. Carpenter, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c.: Historically & Scientifically Considered, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1895. 3 recent cultural history see Derek Forrest, The Evolution of Hypnotism, Scotland: Black Ace Books, 1999. 105 55 S«H' the excellent study bv Ann Taves, Fits. Trances, & \ isions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience '-om Weslev to James. Princeton. N): Princeton University Press. n)gQ. For links between prostitution and the seance, see the chapter "Science and the Seance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre." in ludith R. Walkow itz, City of Dread- ful Delight: \arratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: Univ ersity of Chicago Press. 1992. pp. 1-1 1S9. W illiam James published his masterwork in 1902: The Wineries of Religious Experience. New York; London: Longmans. Green. 1902. 56 For recent cultural histories of apparitions, see: David Blackhourn. -\pparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nine teenth-century Germany. New York: Knopf, 1994; Ruth Flarris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, New York: \’iking Press, 1999; and William A. Christian, \ isionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 87 Emile Zola. Lourdes. Paris, G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1S94. For a reply to criticism of his "Lourdes” in a letter dated July 31, 1894, see Zola, A propos de Lourdes, Lyon: Societe des .Amis des Livres, 1894; for a statement by Waldeck Rousseau on behalf of Zola in a libel suit, see Pierre-Marie- Rene Waldeck Rousseau, M. Bourgeois contre M. Zola a propos de Lourdes: plaidoirie de Me V/aldeck- Rousseau pour M. Emile Zola, Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1895. Waldeck-Rousseau, a senator, became premier of France in a government of “republican defense" in response to the Dreyfus Affair in 1899. 88 John |, Cerullo, The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Fluman Issues, 1982; Alan Gould, The Founders of Psychical Research, New York: Schocken, 1968; and Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psy- chical Research in England, 1850-1914, Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1985; Thomas Leahey and Grace Leahey, Psychology's Occult Doubles, Chicago: Nelson- HaJJ, 1983; John C. Burnham, Flow Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and FFealth in the United States, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. 89 See Robert G. Hillman, "A Scientific Study of Mystery: The Role of the Medical and Popular Press in the Nancy- Salpetriere Controversy on Hypnotism,” Bulletin of the FUstory of Medicine 59, 1965, pp. 163-182. 90 For helpful overviews of the Charcot-Freud relationship, see Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; and Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. The phrase is Tatar’s. 91 Thorstein Veblen coined the theory “conspicuous con- sumption" in his Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Macmillan, 1899. 92 One upper-class New York cosmopolite, a graduate of both Yale and Columbia, wrote in apocalyptic terms: “It may be said in conclusion, and without any attempt at the discur- sive, that the moral atmosphere of the present century is charged with three distinct disturbances — the waning of religious belief, the insatiable demand for intense sensa- tions, and the increasing number of those who live uncom panied, and walk abroad in solitude, . . , The immense nausea that is spreading through all lands and literature is at work on the simple faith, the contented lives, and joyous good fellowship of earlier days, and in its results it brings with it the signs and portents of a forthcoming though undetermined upheaval." Edgar Saltiis, The I'hilosophy of Disenchantment, New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1885; in Foster, Decadents, Symbolists & Aesthetes in America. 93 See Alison Winter on “Colonizing Sensations in Victorian India,” in Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, p. 199. 94 See Ethics and Morality, English 2-3; also above, section 2, “Analytic Abstraction vs. Synthetic Concreteness.” 95 Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures, Paris: F. Alcan, 1910. 96 Daniel Pick, Svengali's Web, pp. 144-146. 97 In this engraving, tJie figure of death in the lower right corner releases its grip on the woman who lets go of her crutches in a "supplication" pose to the Virgin Mary. See Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, New York: Viking, 1999, p. 286. 98 See Harris, Lourdes, p. 338: “Two devils, one carrying Zola’s Lourdes, look at the crowds before the Grotto and wonder why their attempts to undermine the shrine have met with so little success.” 99 See Harris, Lourdes, p. 263, 100 Alison Winter writes, "In this example of mesmeric 'auto- graphisme’ from the journal La Nature (1890), a hysterical French patient of Dr, Mesnet made her body write the words ’La Nature’ on her back. Readers were to understand that the phenomenon was caused by natu- ral law’ and not from 'supernatural’ sources." Mesmerized. Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 352. 101 The Editors (i.e., Anatole Baju), “Aux Lecteurs," Le Decadent litteraire et artistique (April 10, 1886); in Noel Richard, Le Mouvement decadent: dandys, esthetes et quintessents, Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1968, p, 27; in Heller, "Decadence,” p. 82. 102 Anatole Baju, L’Ecole decadente, Paris: 1887, p. 5; in Richard, Mouvement decadent, p. 26; in Heller, "Deca- dence,” p. 82. 103 J.-K. Huysmans to Abbe Boullan, February 7, 1890, in Robert Baldick, La Vie de f.-K. Huysmans, Paris: Denoel, 1958, p. 195; quoted in Marc Eigeldinger, “Du supranatural- isme au surrealisme,” Le Surnaturalisme franqais: actes du colloque organise d TUniversite Vanderbilt les 31 mars et ler avril igj8, edited by Jean Leblon and Claude Pichois, Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconniere, 1979, p. 115. Translation mine. 104 Earlier in the same letter Huysmans wrote: "I have finished my book on Satanism, which is enormous (five hundred tightly packed pages!) ... I expect nothing from it ... I am resigned knowing that the reading public and the press like only badly put together books, whose documentation is worthless, false or falsified, as all Zola’s are; he doesn’t check them, and doesn’t give a damn.” J.-K. Huysmans to Jules Destree, December 12, 1890, in The Road from Deca- dence: From Brothel to Cloister. Selected Letters of f.-K. Huysmans, edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont, London: The Athlone Press, 1989, p. 105, 105 See the chapter entitled "Huysmans' Mysterique” (a pun on Charcot’s hysterique) in Hanson, Decadence and Catholi- cism, especially pp. 122-123. 106 As one reviewer summed up Ld-bas: "Popular sorcery, mesmerism, spiritism, hypnotism, the oriental thaumatur- gies of one sort or another that are so popular these days — all of this has certainly been touched upon, and to some effect, in the modern novel. But no-one has yet endeavored in this form, based on personal observation and using authentic documents, a study of the Satanism of today. That is what J. K. Huysmans has done, audaciously and successfully, in liis book Ld-bas . . .” B. H. Gausseron, 106 “Conference bibliologique sur la litteralure d’actualite," Le livre moderne, May lo, 1891, pp. 280-281, in Ted Gott, “Odilon Redon," p. 148. 107 . . des mysteres qui nous entourent": tlie ptirase repeats exactly that in Husymans' letter to Abbe Boullan a year earlier, February 7, 1890, cited above. Emphasis added. 108 Down There, pp. 1-2. Translation altered. 109 The passage continues: "No, come to think it over, the effrontery of the positivists is appalling. They decree that Satanism does not exist. They lay everything at the account of major hysteria, and they don't even know what this frightful malady is and what are its causes. No doubt Charcot determines very well the phases of the attack, notes the nonsensical and passional attitudes, the contor- tionistic movements; he discovers hysterogenetic zones and can, by skilfully manipulating the ovaries, arrest or accelerate the crises, but as for foreseeing them and learn- ing the sources and the motives and curing them, that’s another thing. Science goes all to pieces on the question of this inexplicable, stupefying malady, which, consequently, is subject to the most diversified interpretations, not one of which can be declared exact. For the soul enters into this, the soul in conflict with the body, the soul overthrown in the demoralization of the nerves. You see, old man, all this is as dark as a bottle of ink. Mystery is everywhere and reason cannot see its way." Down There, pp. 143, 154. 110 Down There, pp. 4-5. Emphasis added. 111 This reading is heavily indebted to the chapter “).-K. Fluys- mans” in Rene Dumesnil, Le Realisme, Paris: J. de Gigord, 1936. PP- 433-46- f-s Realisme was the ninth volume of Histoire de la litteralure fran(;aise, edited by Mgr. )ean- Antoine Calvet, a significant figure in the Catholic Revival. See his volumes Le Renouveau catholique dans la littera- ture contemporaine (1927) and D'une critique catholique (1927), cited above. 112 By employing the grotesque to evoke metaphysical and even spiritual significance, Huysmans created a trajectory which would be followed by a long line of Catholic novel- ists: Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos in France, Graham Greene in Britain, Flannery O’Connor in the United States. For a helpful investigation into the grotesque and religion see The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, edited by James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates, Grand Rapids, Ml: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997. 113 The word “au-dela” can mean simply "beyond” as well as in a religious sense: "the great beyond.” The text of this letter to an unknown admirer is printed in L'Amateur d'Auto- graphes: Revue retrospective et contemporaine, June 1907, p. 166; in Antosh, "Spiritual Naturalism," p. 29. Translation mine. 114 Pie Duploye, Huysmans, Paris: Bruges: Desclee de Brouwer, 1968, p. 65; in Antosh, "Spiritual Naturalism,” p. 30. 115 Smith, Munch, p. 8. One should note that Munch had been prepared for this turn by his exposure to German art in the preceding decade, e.g., that of the Swiss Arnold Bocklin and Max Klinger. 116 Arne Garborg, “Den idealistiske reaktion,” Dagbladet, June- July 1890, translated and reprinted as "Neuidealismus," Freie Biihne I, 1890. The article was praised by Hermann Bahr in “Die Krisis des Naturalismus,” Die Uberwindung des Naturalismus als zweite Reihe von "Zur Kritik der Moderne," Dresden: E. Pierson, 1891, p. 66; in Heller, “Deca- dence,” p. 94. 117 “Youthfulness" suggests the prerogative of a new genera- tion to assume power after history has passed by the gen- eration of the fathers. As Pierre Nora notes, the ideology of “youthfulness" as rightfully assuming its historical role and supplanting the ancien regime must be seen in terms of "an inversion of what one might call the age prestige pyramid.” More than a word, the ideology of "youtfdulness" implies an opposite word gerontocracy. See Pierre Nora, "Generation," p. 510 and footnote 46: "Robert's dictionary attributes the word to Beranger in 1825, but Fazy, De la gerontocratie on aims de la sagesse des vieillards dans le gouvernernent de la France (Paris, 1928), writes of tliis new word, which I have put together out of the language of the Greeks." See also Pierre Bourdieu, "La jeunesse’ n' est qu’un mot," in Questions de sociologie, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980, pp. 143-154. 118 Mallarme’s phrase alludes to Baudelaire’s poem, "Corre- spondences,” quoted in part above: "The pillars of Nature’s temple are alive/and sometimes yield perplexing messages;/ forests of symbols between us and the shrine/remark our passage with accustomed eyes." See Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mai, translated by Ricliard Howard, p. 5; and Mallarme: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, translated by Bradford Cook, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956, p. 40; Nicholls, Modernisms, p. 36. 119 Mallarme, p. 21; Nicholls, Modernisms, p. 36. Emphasis added. 120 The need to represent the un representable was not a uniquely French concern. For British efforts similar to the French Symbolists’ see W. David Shaw, Victorians and Mystery. Crises of Representation, Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1990. For an interpretation of the early German Romantics as "modernists" similarly subverting this view of literature as mimetic representation see Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993; and Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard, translated by Henry Pickford, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999; originally published as Lob des Unsinns: ilber Kant, Tieck und Blaubart, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. For an immensely readable overview of the period in Britain which highlights the problem of representing mystery see A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999. 121 Andreas Aubert, "Stromminger i fransk aandsliv," SamtL den I, 1890, p. I53ff. Among other works, Aubert reviewed Paul Bourget’s essay on "Charles Baudelaire” in his Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1881) which included a section on the "Theorie de la Decadence.” For the Norwe- gian appropriations of French Decadence, see: Heller, "Decadence"; and Jacques Letheve, "Le Theme de la Deca- dence dans les lettres frangais a la fin du XIXe siecle," Revue de Thistoire litteraire de la Erance 63, 1967, p. 51. 122 Andreas Aubert, “Hdstudstillingen Aarsarbeidet IV. Edvard Munch,” Dagbladet, no. 355, November 5, 1890, pp. 2-3; in Heller, "Decadence," p. 81. Emphasis of neurasthenic is from the original. 123 Heller, "Decadence,” p. 82. 124 Bahr," "Krisis des Naturalismus," p. 67; in Heller, “Deca- dence," p. 94. 125 Christian Krohg. The quotation here is a collation of two translations: see J. P. Hodin, Edvard Munch, New York: Praeger, 1972, p. 50; and Smith, Munch, p. 10. The "Evening” motif reappeared later as "Jealousy," renamed "Melancholy.” 126 Reinhold Heller, "Love as a Series of Paintings and a Matter of Life and Death. Edvard Munch in Berlin, 1892-1895. Epilogue, 1902,” in Arne Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, Washington, DC: National Gallery, 1978, P- 98. 127 Edvard Munch, Manuscript T 2760 (The Violet Book), entry dated "Nice, 8 January 1892”; in Heller, “Love as a Series," p. 98. 107 i;s Eilvanl Munch. Manuscript T ^760, in Heller. "Love as a Series.’ p. uS. 1^9 Rajtua Stang. Edvurd Munch. New 'tork: .Mrhex ille Press, ig~~. p. g(v 130 Stanislaw Prz\ In szewski, Siifuns Kinder: Konian. Paris: ■MlH'rt Langen. 18^7. 131 lulius Meier-Grate, in Moclin, Edvnrd Munch, pp. 64. 66. 137 Stanislaw Przvhvszewski, ’Psychischer Naturalismus,” Pie neue deutsche Rundschau (Feb. 1894). pp. 150-6; reprinted in Das U'erk des Edvard Munch: vier Beitrdge \-07i Stanislaw Przyhyszewski. edited by Przybyszewski (Berlin. 1844). For the translations wbicb follow. 1 have consulted the unpublished manuscript The Work of Edvard .Munch: Four Essays by Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Dr. Franz Sers’aes. Willy Pastor, lulius Meier-Graefe, editecf bv Stanislaw Przybyszewski, translated by Dr, Flanna Marks, Unpublished: National Gallery, n.d. This manuscript. bowe\ er, always translates the word "psycbis- cber’ as "emotionar and thus completely obscures any allusive connections to Huysmans. For the concept "psy- chic naturalism' 1 am indebted to Carla Lathe, "Edvard .Munch and the Concept of Psychic Naturalism',” Gazette des Beaus Arts 93. March 1979, pp. 135-146. 133 .^s if to make the parallel clear, the editors of Die neue deutsche Rundschau placed "Psychischer Naturalismus” next to an article entitled: "Letter from Paris. A Visit with [oris Karl Huysmans.” Having arrived in Paris the essay's author finds modern Paris a bit dull: nothing much in the way of theater, art or literature. But this great void is filled when the author makes his "trip to J.-K. Huysmans, the great critic in our petty age, the new high priest of both Satan and God, that pessimistic refugee who was plucked out of the modern world and thrown into the uiifath omable chaos of the Middle Ages. 1 had finally found my stride. . . . When you want to visit Huysmans, you have to pick him up at the Ministry of the Interior: at Plan Beau- vais, just at the Elysee. There, the author of Ld Bas (Down There) works as sous-chef de bureau directly across from where Mr. Carnot sits. ... he works at the office of the state everyday from from 10 to 4.” "Pariser Brief. Bei (oris- Karl Huysmans,” Die neue deutsche Rundschau, February 1894, p. i57ffi "Pariser Brief" employs a clever series of plays on imagery: for example, the infamous "high priest of the occult" works in the "ministry of the interior” — the German Innem is the same word used by Przybyszewski to denote the "inner life” of the psyche. Huysmans (the author of "Down There") works as the sous-chef — literally, the “sub- boss” (assistant manager) of the office. Finally, this satanist works in the very heart of the materialist beast — at the Elysee presidential palace of the Third Republic, seated directly across from Marie-Frantjois-Sadi Carnot (an engi- neer turned statesman who served as the Republic's fourth president (1887-94)). What the author could not have known in this February essay was that Carnot would be assassinated four months later in Lyon by an Italian anar- chist on )une 24, 1894, 134 In 1892 the twenty-four-year-old Przybyszewski had pub lished a pamphlet entitled Zur Psychologic des Individu- urns in which he analyzed Chopin and Nietzsche. Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 96. 135 "Die Wirkung war immer mittelbar dutch das Mittel der ausseren Erscheinungwelt.” 136 Here Przybyszewski juxtaposed the German with the French: ‘etats d ames dutch etats de choses auszu- dnjf ken." 137 "Seine Landscaften sind in der Seele geschaut.” 138 Admittedly, Przybyszewski's details are opaque: he thought Munch could paint colors "directly" without the necessity for mediating symbols. The German reads: "Munch will, um es kurz zu sagen, einen psychischen, nackten Vorgang nicht mythologisch, d.h. durch sinnliche Metaphern, son- dern unmittelbar in seinem farbigen Aequivalente wieder- geben . . .” 139 The German "nackten," literally denoting "naked," can figu- ratively connote the unadorned, bare or hard facts of a scene, e,g., “die nackten Tatsachen.” 140 Max Liebermann (1847-1935), a realist in Berlin, was known for his studies of the life and labor of the poor. Critics dubbed him the "disciple of the ugly,” a phrase that the Catholic Revivalist Leon Bloy would later pick up and apply to his friend Georges Rouault: “the apostle of the ugly.” 141 Arne Garborg, "Den idealistiske reaktion,” Dagbladet, )une- (uly 1890. 142 In a paragraph describing the final painting which Przy- byszewski calls an "emotional landscape" (Gefuhlsland schaft), he also quotes a lengthy passage from Baudelaire's "Confiteor of the artist” without translation from the origi- nal French. These foreign language quotations from Baude- laire and Mallarme suggest a desire to be legitimated by their genealogical pedigree. 143 Gerhard Gran, "Den yngste generation,” Samtiden 5, 1894, p. 42; in Heller, "Decadence," p. 83. Gran was the editor of Samtiden. 144 Smith, Munch, pp. 14-15. 145 Note reproduced in Cassou, “Munch en France,” p. 122. 146 ■['he argument for these connections between Munch and Redon comes from Gosta Svenaeus, Edvard Munch. Das Universum der Melancholie, Lund: Gleerup, 1968. See especially pp. 129-144. 147 Huysmans celebrated his good friend Odilon Redon in A Rebours as one of the protagonist’s two ideal painters (the other being Gustave Moreau). For Redon’s relation ship with Huysmans and especially with respect to the Catholic Revival, see Maryanne Stevens, “Redon and the Transformation of the Symbolist Aesthetic"; and Fred Lee- man, "Redon's Spiritualism and the Rise of Mysticism”; in Redon: Prince of Dreams, i840-igi6, edited by Douglas W. Druick (et al.). New York: Abrams, 1994, pp. 196-236. 148 The description is from Ted Gott, "Odilon Redon,” p. 148. Gott concludes: “Serpent-aureole is a consummate image of Satanic impregnation, the goal of certain black rituals studied by Huysmans.” 149 The German reads: "ein Weib im Hemde auf zerknitterten Laken mit dem Glorienschein des kommenden Geburts- martyriums . . ," Przybyszewski, "Psychischer Naturalis- mus,” Die neue deutsche Rundschau, p. 152. Curiously, the unpublished translation by Hanna Marks has omitted the phrase completely. 150 In the Apologeticus adversus gentes pro christianis (chap- ter 50), Tertullian argues that Christianity is not just a philosophy but a divine revelation, and thus cannot be destroyed by its persecutors. Hence, "nothing whatever is accomplished by your cruelties, each more exquisite than the last. It is the bait which wins men for our school. We multiply whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed.” (Nec quicquam tamen proficit exquisitior (juaeque crudelitas vestra: illecebra est magis sectae. Plures efficimur, quoties metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum.) Patrologia Latina, edited by ), P. Migne, 50.13. Emphasis added. 151 Sigbjorn Obstfelder, "Edvard Munch, et forsok," Samtiden 7, 1896, p, 21; in Heller, "Love as a Series," p. 105. 152 "Das Weib" is the word which, combined with modifiers. 108 carries a pejorative gendered meaning: "das alte Weil)" can be translated as "crone,” "geezer," or "bag"; "das zankiscbe Weib" as "shrew," "vixen," or "virago" (extremely pejora- tive). 153 The German reads: "Das ist die furcbtbare Tragbdie des Mamies, der durch das Weib zerstbrt wird, und das ist das Weib, die babyloniscbe Dime, das ist Mylitta und die apokalyptiscbe Hure, das ist Georges Sand, und Nana zugleich: ein Riesensymbol ist es von dem ewigen, wusten Kampfe der Geschlechter," Przybyszewski, "Psychischer Naturalismus,” p. 151. The passage is a commentary on Felicien Rops Vengeance dune femme (Vengeance of a Woman). All three proper names refer in some way to promiscu- ous female sexuality: George Sand was a British Romantic socialist writer who wrote under a male pseudonym. She was known not only for her feminist novels but also for her romantic liaisons with (among others) Prosper Merimee, Alfred de Musset, and Frederic Chopin. Nana was the prostitute-protagonist of Zola's novel by the same name. "Mylitta" is the Greek transcription for the Assyrian goddess Mullissu — a fertility and birth goddess, identified by Herodotus with the Greek Aphrodite, and by other writers with Ishtar. Her cult demanded that every woman serve in her temple as a sacred prostitute, until released by a fee from a stranger. The money for the service was given in the name of the goddess. See the Oxford Classical Dictionary and The New Century Classical Handbook. As noted above, Przybyszewski's own wife was considered just such a femme fatale: she was shot by a Russian lover, who then shot himself. 154 “The naturalization of sin, indeed of mere negligence, placed new responsibilities on the shoulders of every indi- vidual. The myth of hereditary syphilis transformed desire into what )ean Borie has called an 'infernal machine.' The pox became a pervasive symbol in novels and iconography. Huysmans' heroes and Felicien Rops’s hideous portraits reflected collective anxieties reinforced by the tragic fates of well-known syphilitics. The risks of debauchery now became more serious; the impossibility of biological redemption supplanted or reinforced existing fears of sin and hellfire. The belief in morbid heredity made it impera- tive for man to rise above animality." Michelle Perrot, “Cries and Whispers," in History of Private Life: Vol. IV, p. 619. See also )ean Borie, Le Tyran timide: le natural- isme de la femme au XI Xe siecle, Paris; Klincksieck, 1973. 155 For an excellent investigation into the anthropology of relics, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 156 For anthropological investigations into the relationship between blood and sexuality, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [1966], New York: Praeger, 1970. 157 The translation, with slight alterations, is from “Psychical Naturalism,” translated by Hanna Marks, p. 2. Emphasis added. 158 The German reads: "Das dritte Bild stellt eine Madonna vor. Es ist ein Weib im Hemde, mit der charakteristischen Bewegung der absoluten Hingebung, in der alle Organ- empfindungen zu Erethismen intensester Wollust werden; ein Weib im Hemde auf zerknitterten Laken mit dem Glorienschein des kommenden Geburtsmartyriums, eine Madonna, in dem Momente erfasst, in dem die geheime Mystik des ewigen Zeugungarausches ein Meer von Schbn- heit auf dem Gesichet des Weibest erstrablen lasst, in dem die ganze Tiefe ins Empfinden tritt, da der culturelle Mens( h mil seinem mctaphysischen Ewigkeitsdrange und das Tier mit seiner wolliisligen Zerstdrungswutsif h begeg nen." Przybyszewski, "Psychist her Naturalismus,” p. 152. 159 File phrase is Ernest Bet ker's. See his Pulitzer Prize win ning study. The Denial of Death, New York: I he Free Press, ■973- For 4'^ overview ol Kierkegaard on "dread" as a pro ductioii of humanity's douhle-composition ol animality and psychic self-consciousness, see Becker's chapter five, "The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard," pp. 67-92. See also Vanessa Rumble in this catalog. 160 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985; originally published as Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977; quoted in Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 108. 161 Cassou, "Munch en France,” p. 124. 162 Ellis Hanson discusses the conversions of Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Verlaine and Rimbaud. "Paul Verlaine, lionized by (the converted) Huysmans as the only great Catholic poet of his time, also underwent a con version while serving a prison sentence for shooting his lover, Arthur Rimbaud, who was himself a deathbed con- vert." Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 12. 163 Heller, "Decadence,” p. 93. 164 Przybyszewski, "Psychical Naturalism,” translated by Hanna Marks, p. 2. 165 Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, edited by Mara-Helen Wood, London: National Gallery, 1992, pp. 11-14. 166 Quoted in Eggum, Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, p. 105. 167 Bynum, review for the publisher, Christian, Visionaries. 168 Indeed, for Huysmans, the truly "improper" art was “Tart sulpicien’ — that is, the religious kitsch produced and sold in the quarter surrounding the church of Saint-Sulpice — which he considered to be the "revenge of the devil.” In Huysmans' book The Crowds of Lourdes (Les Eoules de Lourdes), the devil was portrayed as speaking to the Virgin Mary and admitting that she had conquered him through the death and resurrection of her Son, )esus. However, the devil then announced that he would yet avenge himself by appropriating "religious art”: "1 will set about in such a way that 1 will cause you to be insulted without relief by the continuing blasphemy of ugliness (de la laideur)." Huysmans' bitterly ironic reversal lay, of course, in his association of “the continuing blasphemy of ugliness” with mass-produced Madonnas, Crucifixions, and Nativity scenes which domesticated transcendence — and not with his gory accounts of sadomasochism and Satanic Black Masses. See Jean-Pie Lapierre and Philippe Levillain, "La'icisation, union sacree et apaisement (1895-1926),” Histoire de la France religieuse, edited by Rene Remond, vol. 4, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992, p. 114. Emphasis added. 169 Eor a helpful historical-theological study, see William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Mod ern Thinking about God Went Wrong, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996. 170 See for example historian Jonathan Sperber's notion of religion as a "loyalty toward a way of life, a set of beliefs and institutions, created in response to given social and political circumstances by a group in which certain socioe- conomic interests were most influential — a 'sociomoral milieu' — which can be politically mobilized.” As opposed to a narrow ecclesiastical reading, Sperber argues against treating religion as an autonomous entity existing along- side socioeconomic conditions and independent of them. On the other hand, he wants to avoid a reductionism in 109 \shich religious issues in modern politics are "pretexts tor the defense of certain socioeconomic interests." thus reduc- ing religious cultural expressions "to an epiphenomenon ot economic interests." He prefers "to understand religious practices, organirations. and beliefs as being shaped in response to socioeconomic change. They provide ways ot interpreting society and suggest, justify, or explain a cer- tain course of action." lonathan Sperber. Popular Catholi- cism in \ineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton, N): Princeton University Press, 19S4. pp, 286-7. 171 See the helpful historiographical overview along with responses; Mack P. Holt, "Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion." French Historical Studies, Fall 1993. pp. 342-51: Henry Heller. "Putting History Back into the Reli- gious Wars: A Reply to Mack P. Holt," French Historical Studies, Spring 1996, pp, 853-61; Mack P, Holt, “Religion, Historical Method, and Historical Forces: A Rejoinder," French Historical Studies, Spring 1996, pp. 863-73; Susan Rosa and Dale Van Kley, "Religion and the Historical Disci- pline: .A Reply to Mack Holt and flenry Heller,” French Historical Studies, Fall 1998, pp. 611-629. 172 Brad S. Gregory. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Gregory’s new study argues that reductionism of religious issues to socio-political-economic epiphenomena is not sufficient to an understanding of sixteenth-century martyrdom. 173 The phrase is from E, P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage Books, 1963. 174 Arne Garborg, "Den idealistiske reaktion,” Dagbladet, [une- |uly 1890. 175 Fhe seminal study of the "holy" as something that both lures and terrifies was published just as the horrors of the Great War were ending. See Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, translated by John Wilfred, New York: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1923; originally published as Das Heilige: iXber das Irrationale in der Idee des Gbttlichen und sein Verhdltnis zurn Rationalen, Breslau: Trewendt und Granier, 1917. The medievals also considered the “wondrous” as an inextrica- ble combination of the fascinating and the dreadful. See Bynum, "Wonder.” 176 Michel de Certeau, interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, September 25, 1982, pp. 118-21; quoted in Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 46. 177 Note the obvious sacramental language of "substance” and “accident" in Emmanuel Goldstein’s remarks on the sym- bolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck: "Thus the poet creates an inner reality that is truer and deeper than the accidentals of external reality,” In C. E. Jensen, preface to Maurice Maeterlinck, Prinsesse Maleine, Copenhagen: 1892; in Heller, “Decadence," p. 95. 178 J.-K. Huysmans, “The Griinewalds in the Colmar Museum," trails. Robert Baldick, in Griinewald, with an essay by j.-K. Huysmans, Oxford: Phaidon, 1976; originally pub- lislied in Huysmans, Trois primitifs les Griinewald du Musee de Colmar, le Maitre de Flemalle et la Florentine du Musee de Francfort-sur-le-Mein, second edition, Paris: L. Vanier, 1905. no “A STRANGE BOULDER IN THE WHIRLPOOL OF THEATER”: EDVARD MUNCH, MAX REINHARDT, AND GHOSTS SCOTT T. CUMMINGS On November 8, 1906, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts opened at a small theater in Berlin. Although this was far from the first showing of Ibsen’s modern tragedy in the German capital, it was an event of tremendous historical importance for two reasons. First, the production marked the opening of the Kammerspiele, a new, more intimate theater created by Max Reinhardt as part of his effort to change the very nature of theatrical experience. Second, the scenic designs were created from a series of paintings commis- sioned by Reinhardt from Edvard Munch. By 1906, Munch had been associating for the past twenty-hve years with some of modern Europe’s leading poets, playwrights, and polemicists. In the 1890s, he began a short lived but intense friendship with August Strindberg in Berlin, designed playbills for two experimental Ibsen productions in Paris, and gave Ibsen, thirty-five years his senior, a private tour of an Oslo exhibit of his work. Munch later claimed that his painting Woman in Three Stages (Sphinx), a lithograph of which appears in this exhibition (no. 30 ), had exerted an influence on Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. Munch went on to render Ibsen’s por- trait many times, showing him most often in the restaurant of Oslo’s Grand Hotel, the playwright’s favorite haunt following his return to Norway in 1891 after twenty-seven years of self-imposed exile (no. 58 ). Of Munch’s many theater-related works, his design studies for Reinhardt’s Ghosts represent his most direct involvement in the theater practice of his day. Reinhardt at that point had emerged as the wunderkind of the Berlin stage, an ambitious director and impresario with plans to build a theater empire that would revitalize German theater in the new century. Reinhardt was turning to Munch, as he had to so many others, for a particular strategic contribution to his general effort to replace Natu- ralism in the theater with a new stage Symbolism. Munch in turn provided him with images so steeped in his personal connections to the play that they prefigured the coming shift from Symbolism to Expressionism in European, and especially German, drama. The historic collaboration of these two giants represents a crucial passage in Munch’s troubled life as well as an important transition in mod- ern theater history, one which can only be fully understood by a closer look at Ibsen’s play and Rein- hardt’s career.^ “ONE OF THE FILTHIEST THINGS EVER WRITTEN IN SCANDINAVIA” Ghosts is a tightly constructed modernist tragedy in three acts that takes the form of an unusual child custody battle. It takes place in provincial Norway in the isolated home of Mrs. Helene Alving on the day before the dedication of a new orphanage she has built as a memorial to ber deceased husband, Gaptain Alving. Their son Osvald, a thriving young painter living in bohemian Paris, has returned home for the hrst time in two years for the ceremony. Jacob Engstrand, a local carpenter putting hnishing touches on the orphanage, is on hand, as is his young daughter Regina, who serves as Mrs. Alving’s maid. Pastor Manders, Mrs. Alving’s spiritual and business adviser as well as long-time friend, will pre- 111 67 IT side at the dedication. In a manner similar to Greek tragedy, the forward action digs deeper and deeper into the past and thereby demonstrates how “the sins of tlie fathers are visited upon tlie children."^ In this instance, the sins in question belong— initially at least — to Ca[)tain Alving, a man who had a healthv appetite for hedonism. Nearly thirty years ago, Mrs. Alving fled her free-spirited husband after onlv a vear of marriage to be with Pastor Manders, who sent her back to Captain Alving with a stern reprimand abont a woman’s marital duty. Since then, she has maintained a curtain of secrecy around her life with Captain Alving, who grew so increasingly dissolute that Mrs. Alviug had to take over management of the estate, which she did for the sake of their young son, Osvald. The Captain's promiscuitv led him to contract syphilis, and also led to the pregnancy of the household maid, whom the opportunistic Engstrand agreed to marry for a price. The child of that union was Regina, who was summoned by Mrs. Alving to work for her not long after Captain Alving finally succumbed, ten years before the play’s action begins, to the ravages of prolonged and isolated debauchery. Since Osvald’s birth, Mrs. Alving's life has been dedicated to protecting her precious son from the influence, and even the knowledge, of his father’s immorality. She sent him away from the estate as a boy, and her letters since then have been filled with glowing reports on Captain Alving's character. In her effort to make sure Osvald inherits nothing whatsoever from his father, she has calculated the cost of the new orphanage to equal the Captain's net worth before she married him; the public monument to his supposed virtue will be for her a final private exorcism of his hidden vice. But as the Norwegian title Cengangere, meaning "those who return to walk again," suggests, the Captain is a formidable antagonist, even in death. In body and spirit, he "returns to walk again” in Osvald, who displays a similar inclina- tion towards wine, women, and unconventional living. Away from the gloomy, repressive, duty-bound climate of home, the life of an artist in Paris led him to appreciate such controversial values as free love and to express what he calls the "joy of life” (livsglede) in his painting, much to the chagrin of the ortho- dox Pastor Manders. As it turns out, Osvald has returned home not because he wants to honor his father, but because his health is rapidly deteriorating due to a case of syphilis which, unbeknownst to him until the third act, he inherited from his father. Fearful that his next attack will reduce him to a human vegetable, he has saved up a fatal dose of morphine and is counting on either Regina or his mother to help him take his own life when the dreaded hour comes. The play’s mounting revelations prompt Mrs. Alving to rec- ognize that an imperfect and thwarted search for the “joy of life” motivated her husband's behavior, and that her dutiful efforts to quash it have contributed to the demise of the son she fought so hard to protect. Thus, in the play's terms, the sins of the mother are also visited upon the child. When Osvald’s symptoms strike again and he is reduced to a babbling paralytic, she is caught in a mother’s tragic dilemma between taking a child's life or prolonging his misery. With the meanings of love and duty now unhinged from conventional orthodoxy, she is both liberated and condemned to make a free and conscious choice. As the play ends, she stands over her son, pills in hand, transhxed by agonizing inde- cision (fig. 67 ). Ibsen was living in exile in Rome when Ghosts was first published in Copenhagen on December 13, 1881, in time to benefit from Christmas sales. A few weeks earlier, he had written to his publisher: "G/iosts will probably cause alarm in some circles; but there is nothing to be done about it. If it didn't do that, there would have been no need to write it."^ Ibsen’s suspicions were soon confirmed. The scan dal that greeted the play throughout Scandinavia forced bookstores to return much of the first edition to the publisher and prompted theater managers and official censors to reject the {)lay as unsuitable for performance. The [)lay’s more universal and subtextual themes were ecli[)sed by outrage over its frank discussion of virtually taboo subjects: syphilis as a disease that reaches [)io[)er bourgeois homes, the 67 t he final moment of the first European production of Ghosts (1883).'’ 112 68 It 68 Contemporary cartoon of Antoine from [ean Chothia’s Andre Antoine. specter of sanctioned incest between Osvaltl and Regina, (jiiestioning the filial obligation ol child to parent, free love and raising children out of wedlock, the ethical legitimacy of euthanasia, and the legal ization of prostitution.^ The dramaturg of the Kristiania fheatre rejected the [)lay on the basis that it was "lacking in dramatic effect and tries to hide this by the use of [)alhological and titillating material."^ Ludvig josephson, one-time director of the Kristiania f heatre and champion of fhsen's earlier plays, called it "one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandinavia.”^ An editorial in a Kristiania newspaper f)roclaimed: "The hook has no p)lace on the Christmas tal)le of any Christian home."* The play quickly became what Swedish actor manager August ldndl)erg called literary "contraband,"* a perfect instance of the free-thinking literature that l^astor Manders is shocked to find on Mrs. Alving’s reading table. The controversy in Scandinavia contributed to the play’s unlikely world premiere in Chicago, where it was first presented in its original language more than a year ear- lier, on May 20, 1882, by an enterprising group of amateurs led by the Danish actress Helga von Bluinne. In the fall of 1883, Lindberg organized the European and Scandinavian premiere of Ghosts, a [rrivate touring production which played provincial venues as well as theaters in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Kristiania. For most of the 1880s, productions of Ghosts were mounted privately for a subscription audience, often by hastily organized theater clubs — thus avoiding the censor's refusal to grant a license for pub- lic performances. Several of these private performances were presented by landmark theaters of the independent theater movement, making Ghosts a play of unsurpassed importance in the history of modern theater. In 1887, Andre Antoine, an army veteran and clerk at the Paris Gas Company, became "the animator of forces which 1 did not even suspect"^° when he founded the Theatre Libre as a theatri- cal home for Naturalism and a testing ground for a "slice of life" realism in stage production (fig. 68). Antoine's actors turned away from the audience and spoke to each other in conversational rather than declamatory tones, transforming the spectator into a voyeur who has the illusion of peeking through the imaginary "fourth wall" of the proscenium stage at a private world within. In the spirit of Natural- ism pioneered in the novel, playwrights marshaled the life-like depiction of everyday behavior to demonstrate how adverse social conditions, manifest in an unfriendly environment, contributed to the misery of the downtrodden and the disadvantaged. Aesthetically and politically, the stage became a challenge to the status quo of the bourgeois mainstream. As soon as the Theatre Libre was established, Antoine began plans to stage Ghosts and to play the role of Osvald himself. After a series of delays, the play had its Paris premiere on May 30, 1890, the first performance of an Ibsen play in France. Less than a year later, not long after George Bernard Shaw pub- lished his provocative pamphlet The Quintessence of Ibsenism, J. T. Grein triggered a firestorm of con- troversy in London when he opened his new Independent Theatre with a single performance of Ghosts on March 13, 1891. By the time of this English-language premiere, there had already been several pro- ductions of Ghosts, albeit private ones, in Germany: at the Stadt Theater in Augsburg (1886), the Gourt Theater at Meiningen sponsored by the famous "theater Duke" (1886), and the Residenz Theater in Berlin (1887). Ibsen was on hand for all three of these productions; in Berlin, he was accompanied by one of his principal champions in Germany, the critic Otto Brahm. When Brahm and others went on to estab- lish the Freie Biihne, an independent theater in Berlin on the model of Antoine's Theatre Libre, they opened on September 29, 1889 with Ghosts. In the literary journal published by the theater, Brahm proclaimed the Freie Biihne's mission: We are launching a Free Stage for Modern Life. Art shall be the object of our strivings — the new art, which fixes its attention on reality and contemporary existence . . . The banner slogan of the new art. 113 69a written up in golden letters by the leading spirits, is the single word Truth; and Truth it is. Truth on every path of life, which we too strive for and demand. Sot the objective truth which eludes those who stand in battle; but the individual Truth which is freely created out of the most personal conviction and which is freely expressed — the Truth of the independent spirit who has nothing to euphernize and nothing to conceal. And who has therefore but a single foe. his arch enemy and mortal antagonist: lies, of every shape and rnanner.^^ This zealous commitment to the sovereignty of the individual, the ideal ot Art, and the necessity of telling "the Truth” was a hallmark of what Shaw and his continental contemporaries called "Ibsenism." Inspired by Ibsen, these three — Antoine in Paris, Brahm in Berlin, and Grein in Lon- don — triggered what Brian )ohnston has called the "three seismic shocks that forever altered the modern cultural landscape.”^^ In championing a free and independent theater art, they split from the cultural and com mercial mainstream and began a tradition of alternative, often opposi- tional, experimental theaters, most of them operating on shoestring budgets in makeshift venues, which continues to this day. Ghosts, in addi- tion to its intrinsic interests, thus acquired a tremendous historical impor- tance (figs. 69a, b). “A KIND OF THEATRICAL CHAMBER MUSIC” The play’s historical weight could not have been lost on a young Max Reinhardt, who, in 1890, was an aspiring seventeen-year-old actor from Vienna about to embark on a career in the theater. By the time he was twenty-one, Reinhardt had already played dozens of roles at theaters in Vienna, Bratislava, and Salzburg. In 1894, he was invited to join the com- pany of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin by Otto Brahm, who was in the process of taking over the ten-year-old theater from its owner, the play wright and impresario Adolph L’Arronge. Partly because of his diminu tive stature, Reinhardt came to specialize in older character roles (fig. 70), including Jacob Engstrand in Ghosts, which Brahm mounted again in his first season at the Deutsches Theater.^^ Over the next eight years, Rein- hardt had an opportunity to witness first hand Brahm’s efforts to bring the Naturalist repertoire and naturalistic methods of the Freie Biihne into the more expressly professional theater of the day. In that period he grew from a novice young actor out of the provinces to the ambitious leader of a new generation ready to challenge the policies of Brahm and his peers. Still in his twenties, Reinhardt grew weary of his life as a young actor [)laying old men in gritty. Naturalist dramas, sticking on false beards and eyebrows and sitting around on stage eating real saner kraut, night after night after night. In a famous 1901 meeting with Arthur Kahane, who was to become Reinhardt's chief dramaturg, he articulated his theatrical vision; 69 A, B Two 1903 productions of Ghosts, each with detailed, naturalistic scenery.'^ 70 Max Reinhardt as Jacob Engstrand in Ghosts. 114 71 71 Max Reinhardt in 1905. What I have in mind is a theater which gives people pleasure again. One which serves as a means to lead them out of the grayness of their everyday lives into the clear and pure air of beauty. I feel that people have had enough of always encountering their own misery in the theater, that what they long for are brighter colors and an intensification of life. Which doesn 't mean that I want to renounce the great achievements of naturalistic acting, its truth and authen ticity, which had never been attained before. I could not do so even if I wished to .. . But I would like to take the development further, applying it not just to the description of states and surroundings, but to other things, beyond the odor of poor people and the problems of social criticism, applying the same high degree of truth and authenticity to purely human matters, in a deep and subtilized art of the soul; I would like to show life from another side, not that of pessimistic negation, but one which is equally true and authentic in its serenity, filled with color and light.^^ In the late 1890s, with Brahms blessing, Reinhardt had already helped to organize touring productions featuring younger members of the company and guest veterans that traveled to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest in the summer, when the Deutsches Theater was closed. Then, in January 1901, much in the spirit of the day, Reinhardt and his friends created a cabaret theater called Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke), which presented evenings of satirical songs, poems, and sketches, often followed by a trenchant parody of Friedrich Schiller, Gerhardt Hauptmann, or Maurice Maeterlinck. Begun as a fundraiser for one of their compatriots, the writer Christian Morgenstern, who suffered from tubercu- losis and needed money for a cure in Switzerland, Schall und Rauch quickly became a Berlin sensation. It led that fall to the formation of the Kleines Theater as more of a legitimate playhouse. All of this activity prompted Reinhardt to break his contract and leave the Deutsches Theater at the end of 1902, thus incurring Brahms wrath and a stiff Hne. Less than three years later, in 1905, Reinhardt managed a triumphant return to the Deutsches Theater as its newly appointed director, replacing a bitter Otto Brahm, whose lease on the theater was not renewed by L’Arronge.^^ In just over a decade, the young apprentice had overthrown the master (at the peak of his career no less) and emerged at age thirty-two as the face of the future of German theater (fig. 71 ). In his effort to create a theatrical "art of the soul,” Reinhardt became the prototype of a regisseur, a director who masterminds all aspects of a production and molds them into a unified artistic whole, which Richard Wagner famously dubbed a Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work). From early on, Reinhardt demonstrated a particular practical awareness of how theater architecture and stage design defined the relationship of actor to audience and shaped the subliminal nature of the theatrical event. As Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian playwright who worked with Reinhardt for many years, described it: He considers place in the highest degree important. For months and sometimes for years he has dreamed of how a room will shut an audience in, whether with solemnity of height as in a church, or with solemnity of breadth as in the ancient theatre, or mysteriously, as in some grotto, or agreeably and socially, as in a pleasant, peopled salom^ In tbe interest of creating for the spectator the most immediate and direct experience possible, Rein hardt made a special effort to choose plays well suited to the performance space at hand and to find theaters well suited to the plays that he liked. As early as the 1901 meeting with Kahane, he dreamt of 115 operating multiple theaters ot dillerent sizes: a standard playhouse of the day, seating 1,000 or so, such as the Deutsches Theater: a smaller, plainer, more intimate space for a coterie of a few hundred; and what he later called his "theater of the 5000,” a large amphitheater for a mass audience with a thrust stage suitable for theater on a grand scale. ••\t root, Reinhardt s directorial strategy was Symbolist and essentialist. For him, each play had an animating spirit or essential pulse, and he summoned the technical means at his disposal to create a sensuous, inwardly focused world onstage that put the audience in touch with the soul of the play through a kind ot theatrical mesmerization. "For him the process of a theatrical performance goes on not on the stage hut in the imagination of the audience," wrote Hofmannsthal.^* "His endeavor," wrote Frank E. Washburn Freund, "as ought to be that of every real producer, is to bring out the mood and atmosphere ot the play in such a way as to force the audience into it and keep it there during the action as completely as possible.”^* Reinhardt became famous tor his capacity to marshal light, sound, color, and movement in a man- ner that generated a powerfid mood — Stimniunc] — onstage. Years earlier, August Strindberg, among others, had advocated for a theater that worked on the spectator like a hypnotist, but Reinhardt's 1905 production ot A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Neues Theater was the first to cast such a spell. For Reinhardt, the essence of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy lay in its setting: the fertile, fantastic forest outside Athens. With the innovative use of a turntable stage, he and his designer Gustav Knina created a charming, enchanting wood which struck the Berlin theater as a revelation. "The stage has gone and no one seems any longer to be a mere actor,” wrote Herman Bahr with typical enthusiasm. "Everything is transtormed, the stage into the earth, acting into dream, everything appears only as forest, the breath of the forest, the exhalation of the forest, now in human form, now like a transient ghost, woven from air, blown away into air.”^° The success of A Midsummer Night 's Dream secured for Reinhardt the appointment as head of the Deutsches Theater. His contract there required him to relinquish the two theaters in his nascent the- atrical empire, which included the tiny Kleines Theater where he had produced several of Strindberg's chamber plays, Oscar Wilde's Salome, Frank Wedekind's Earth Spirit, and a very successful production of Maksim Gorky's The Lower Depths. "Do you remember that delightful Viennese evening which we experienced at the Bosendorfer Rooms, when the Rose Quartet played chamber music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven?" Reinhardt said to Kahane as early as 1901. "1 should like to achieve something similar to that. What I have in mind is a kind of theatrical chamber rnusic."^^ Such theatrical chamber music required what he dubbed a Kammerspiele, a chamber theater, a performance space that by virtue of its intimate confines and humble decor served as a natural resonator for the ethereal introspection and psychological subtlety of certain contemporary plays. In his description, Hofmannsthal picked up on the musical analogy: What he dreamed of was a house resembling as closely as possible the body of a violin and, like the violin, attuned to receive and respond to the slightest vibration. That was the famous Kammerspiele, in which he later produced all plays which depended for effect on intimacy, and spiritual delicacy, on wit or smartness of dialogue: Bernard Shaw and Wilde, Maeterlinck too, and Knut Hamsun, much of Goethe, and particularly the supernatural plays of Strindberg’s last phase.^^ Six months after Reinhardt took over directorship of the Deutsches Theater in 1905, he bought it and the adjacent buildings from L'Arronge. With the architect William Muller, he made plans to convert the Emberg Dancehall next door into the theater still known to this day as the Kammerspiele (figs. 116 72 73 72 and 73). In doing so, Reinliardt pioiu'crcd llu* now ronnnon practice of coupling a smaller studio theater with a theater's larger maiustage facility [X'rhaps his most lasting and wide S[)read contribution to tlieater history. Ttiis original chamber theater was built to accommodate an audience of about three hundred in twenty two rows of featfier s(>ats. f he tfieater was noted for "the harmony of its [)roportions and its simple, hut very distinctive decoration."^^ Without loges or gallery, the audi torium was all on one raked level, as "siiTi[)le and elegant as a I’ullman car"^”' and not much larger thati the stage itself. The connection between the two was promoted by the efimination of footlights and the prompter’s box and the inclusion of two steps which led down from the edge of the stage to the floor of the house. The proscenium arch was relatively plain and only twenty-two feet tall by twenty-six feet wide, as opposed to the much larger opening at the Deutsches Theater next door (figs. 74 and 75). One of the critics on hand when the Kammerspiele first opened described the experience in terms that must have pleased Reinhardt: 72 Interior view of the Kammer- spiele in Berlin, c. 1906. ! flH i ll Everything about the Kammerspiele was designed to generate a feeling of austere comfort and resonant intimacy and to con- centrate the audience's attention on the atmospheric stage-world that was to unfold before them. The first world Reinhardt sought to conjure on the Kammerspiele stage was the Nordic gloom of Ibsen's Ghosts. Ever the showman, Reinhardt sought to make his mark at his new chamber theater with the same notorious play that in Berlin, Paris, and London had already triggered the earthquake of mod- ernism. Immediately upon entering the auditorium, the visitor is struck with a feeling of being at home. Nothing artificial, nothing ostentatiously obtrusive; a noble mind discovered these forms, created this room filled with warmth and coziness. Arranged these wonderfully comfortable seats, banished the dreadful theater programs full of advertisements, and replaced them with simple but handsome sheets of stiff paper; posted at the doors ushers dressed in tasteful, unobtrusive garb. And one is no longer in a theater, but in a private house.^^ 73 Exterior view of the Kammer “A COMBINATION OF ME AND B I E D E R M E I E R ! ” spiele, c. 1906. 74 Kammerspiele elevation. 75 Kammerspiele groundplan. In Germany, the censorship on Ghosts had been lifted in 1894 for simultaneous productions of the play at the Deutsches Theater and its cross-town rival, the Lessing Theater. By 1906, the twenty-five-year-old play had lost its initial shock value and become a standard of the modern repertoire, making Rein 117 hardt s dec ision to inaugurate the Kaniinerspiele with Ghosts not so much intlanmtator\- as rcn isionist and connneinora- ti\e. After a prolonged illness and a series of debilitating strokes. Ibsen, champion of the indi\ idual and hero to a whole generation of European artists and intellectuals, died on Mav ap 1906 in Kristiania. Reinhardt chose to honor Ibsen bv opening the Kaminerspiele with Ghosts, and in doing so. he also laid claim to him as more of a Symbolist than a Naturalist. Of course. Ibsen was neither Symbolist nor Naturalist in any orthodo.x sense, but Reinhardt’s theatri- calist approach was a calculated corrective to Ibsen's early reputation as a libertarian provocateur and proto-feminist out to rupture the moral fabric of bourgeois Christian society in Northern Europe. Rein hardt wanted to switch the axis of Ghosts, the third installment in Ibsen’s twelve-play prose cycle, from the social to the spiritual and to align it with the later, more introspective plays in the cycle, such as fohn Gabriel Borknian and When We Dead Awaken. Towards this end he sought the aid of Ibsen's fel- low countiyman and one of the most famous painters in Germany at that time: Edvard Munch. Reinhardt's approach might well have been inspired by the Ibsen productions mounted in Paris at the Theatre de I'Oeuvre by Aurelien Lugne-Poe. As the leading proponent of Symbolist theater in France, Lngne-Poe sought to realize Maeterlinck’s vision of a static drama which revealed le tragique quotidien through a hauntingly resonant stillness that evoked the ineffable presence of cosmic forces in ordinary life. Starting in 1892, Lugne-Poe mounted ten Ibsen tlramas in five years, including Peer Gynt (1896) and John Gabriel Borkrnan (1897). Both of these productions featured posters and playbills with graphic images provided by Munch (figs. 76 and 77 ), who had met Lugne-Poe in Stockholm in 1894 when the Theatre de I’Oeuvre was on tour with Ibsen’s Rosrnersholm. Frederik and Lise-Lone Marker find in Munch’s image for Peer Gynt: a graphic intimation of the suggestive, somnambulistic mood which this director invariably sought to invoke, irrespective of which Ibsen play he was presenting ... we see the ravaged, sorrowful counte- nance of an old woman lost in thought, significantly juxtaposed with the figure of a young girl with long, flowing hair who stands gazing — as figures in symbolist dramas were wont to gaze — into the far distance, across a dream like landscape of deep valleys and distant rnountains.^^ This is much the same ambient sense of mood that Reinhardt sought to realize in his theater, and he had already articulated a strategy for achieving it: I cannot tell you how much I long for music and color. It is my intention to employ the best pointers, I know how they are waiting for it and how interested they are in the cause of the theater, and just as a suitable director is sought to direct each play, and each role is played by the most suitable actor, so I should like to find the most suitable, and where possible the only suitable, painter for every individual work."^ The well-cast" painter would create images that would conjure the spirit of the play in a visual and infectious form that would inspire first the director, then the actors, and finally the audience, all the more so in the intimate confines of the Kaminerspiele. By 1906, Reinhardt had already worked with a number of painters, but none of them were as famous as Munch. 76 Edvard Munch, playbill for Theatre de I'Oeuvre production of )ohn Gabriel Borkman depicting Ibsen, 1897. Munch Museum, Oslo. 77 Edvard Munch, playbill tor Theatre de I'Oeuvre production of Peer Gynt showing Aase and Solveig, 1896. Munch Museum, Oslo. 118 78 Roinliardi inighi have become aware ol Mimcli as early as November 1892, when ibe early retrospective of Muncb’s work presented by the Verein Berliner Kiiti Siler, Berlin’s most prestigious artists' society and the semi-oHicial arbiter of German imperial taste, was sbnl down in a week, triggering a nationwide controversy and eventually leading to the formation ol the Berlin Seces sion in 1898. As noted by the [)ainter Lovis Corinth, the "Munch Affair" made the Norwegian [)ainter for awhile "the most famous man in the whole German Empire."^’ Among the publications that rose to his defense was the journal of the Freie Buhne, which despite the theater's commitment to Naturalism wrote of Munch’s work with an appreciation of its inci[)ient Sym holism: "All this has been precisely observed, has been experienced, has been felt deeply and intensely! If someone can speak like that, or paint, or sing — I am uncertain how to describe it — in him a |)oet 's soul is alive."^° From this point forward. Munch spent periods of time in Berlin on a regular basis, much of it with the international bohemian community that gathered at an Armenian wine cellar known as Zurn Schwarzen Ferkel (The Black Piglet). This is where Munch met and befriended Strindberg, whose plays were being promoted by Otto Brahm at the Freie Biihne. Within weeks, an admiring Munch had corn pleted a portrait of Strindberg, which was featured prominently in Munch’s next Berlin exhibit (no. 67 ). For many, it has become the definitive Strindberg likeness. As a critic wrote when it was first shown, "it is as though he had been caught unaware in his study and skillfully captured in a characteristic moment, ffead and torso emerge vividly from the warm background, disclosing an impetuous tern perament and a certain touch of superiority and bitter agitation."^^ Munch continued to exhibit in Berlin through the 1890s and into the new century, becoming the inspiration and prophet for a generation of German painters. He was at the peak of his fame in Ger- many when Reinhardt approached him about contributing to his preparation for the production of Ghosts that would open the Kammerspiele. In a letter to Munch from one of Reinhardt’s right-hand men, Felix Hollaender, written only weeks after the playwright’s death, the invitation became official: Dear Sir, I take the liberty of resuming the conversation we had in Weimar. We would like to open our new little theater, which we’ve told you something about, with Ghosts. We would really be very pleased if you would agree to sketch a design for the decor. You won 't be in the least further troubled — what we would like is to obtain from you, for transforming to the stage, just a sketch from which we might draw ideas for the decor. We believe no other painter could capture the character of Ibsen 's family tragedy as well as you — and we can think of no more solemn or more beautiful funeral rite than this production. Thus we beg you most sincerely to grant our request. This sketch must show a view of the landscape through the window — in everything else, we leave the execution entirely to you.^^ 78 Edvard Munch, Sketches for the Reinhardt frieze, 1906. Munch Museum, Oslo. That Reinhardt would dispatch one of his chief lieutenants to Weimar to meet with Munch personally suggests the importance and urgency of the mission. For Reinhardt, there was no other possible choice of designer. To add to the inducement, he offered a second floor foyer of the new theater for Munch to paint in any way he desired. This led to the so-called "Reinhardt Frieze," a series of seaside scenes which revisited some of the motifs of Munch’s Frieze of Life and its themes of love, jealousy, melancholy, and pain (fig. 78 ). In a letter to Jens Thiis, Munch wrote, "I have recently taken on a daunting task — 1 am painting a frieze for the Kammerspiele. I find providing decoration for a definite place both difficult 119 vuul untaniiliar — and almost impossible in this case, when the theatre is so small and already decorated in tine Hiedermeier style. Can yon imagine — a combination of me and Biedermeier!”^^ Delays prevented the twehe tempera paintings of the Reinhardt frieze from being hung until December r907. As it turned out, the designated room proved unworkable as a ioyer for the Kammerspiele and was closed otf. except for special occasions: Munch's paintings languished there in relative obscurity for six years, hetore being ilispersed.^^ \\ hen Munch agreed to work on Ghosts, Arthur Kahane followed up with a letter of thanks dated lulv 1 1. 1906. He relayed Reinhardt's request that Munch send "a sketch within the next few days, if it is in anv wav possible (preferably before July 15th, if at all possible). Anything whatever that will give him an idea for the mise en-scene."^^ The letters from Hollaender and Kahane both emphasize the necessitv of including a large picture window with a view of the landscape beyond; a subsequent set of detailed "notes” from Reinhardt to Munch concerning the scenery for Ghosts makes clear why. With- out describing it in any topographical detail, Reinhardt makes clear that for him the landscape outside constitutes an objective correlative for what goes on inside. Reinhardt tells Munch that, for him, “the landscape visible through the windows toward the hack is, so to speak, the soul of the room, and changes so that it substantially affects the mood inside.’’^^ Reinhardt's instructions to Munch are worth quoting in full because of the inferential light they shed on this unusual and historically important collaboration and the reminder they provide about the unavoidable practical concerns of the theater artist. Here is what Reinhardt wrote: Notes for the interior 0/ Ghosts: The high-ceilinged, soberly-colored central room of a rather old-fashioned Norwegian house located outside of the city. A kind of vestibule which is both a living room and the main room of the house, and in which Frau Alving is usually to be found. Accordingly, it must have about it something quite simple, solemn, almost ascetic, while also revealing something of the raw hedonism and brutality of the deceased chamberlain — so it need not be altogether tasteful. At the same time, this room must have secrets, dark nooks and crannies with strange, old-fashioned furniture that — in the dark, for instance — has a sinister effect. The room could have wainscoting, per- haps halfway up the wall, and above it not light-colored, but faded, wallpaper. (A sketch of this would be greatly appreciated.) The greenhouse (towards the back) is brighter and the staircase — as much of it as can be seen through the doors at the left — is similarly bright and specifically recalls to mind the chamberlain Alving. For the color of the chair-covers and curtains (something plush) perhaps a dark, somewhat tired violet would be suitable. The parquet floor, of an old-fashioned pattern, is only partially covered with carpets (under the table in the center and at the left by the window, perhaps). By the win- dow at the left, in front of the doors to the staircase, stands a big armchair, or perhaps a small sofa, and in front of it a sewing table. This is Mrs. Alving s special place and also the place where Osvald goes mad at the end. By the armchair, a small footstool. Leading to the staircase, which is illuminated from the side, French doors, one of which always remains closed. In the middle of the room, a round, dark, heavy fam ily table with chairs around it. To the right, two doors, one of which — the one nearest the front — opens into the dining room, while the one further back leads into the hallway. Between the two doors, a fireplace, upon which stand two old candelabra, and between them an old fashioned grandfather clock. In front of the fireplace are two fauteuils. Against the left side wall, which closes the staircase off from the room, a high cabinet and rigidly upright, high hacked chairs. A couple of steps lead hack into the slightly elevated greenhouse, the far wall of which consists entirely of glass windows reaching from 120 floor to ceiling and affording a view of the countryside. 'Hie landscape visible tlirongli the windows toward the hack is, so to speak, the soul of the morn, and changes so that it snhstantUdly affects the mood inside. The ceiling might he thought of as a raf tered ceiling of dark wood. Veils of fog might hang between the landscape and the room, thickening and evaporating accordingly with the fluctuating mood. Act 1: Bleak, gray, wet weather. Outside brighter than inside. Main source of light from the window on the left. Windowpanes: wet, clouded with dew. Damp, pale, rainy atmosphere. Variation through lighting. Morning. Act II: Slowly approaching dusk. Dark shadows grow longer. At first brighter, later darker and darker until it is black outside. Inside, towards the end floor lamps that brightly illuminate one part of the room, especially the table, leaving the corners of the room in an eerie darkness. At the end, the slight, red glow of a fire outside the window. Af ternoon — evening. Act III: Night. Lamps. Later, very slowly: a pale shimmering light that grows much stronger toward the end, and together with the lamp that still burns, creates a strange, sinister twilight. At the very end, cold, desolate sunlight from the back so that the play ends with a magnificent finale, like a symphony. Night — early morning. To begin, it is o/highest priority — and would be of great help to us — that we receive a sketch for the interior without atmospheric lighting, and sketches for the most important pieces of furniture, for the wall-paper patterns, the wainscoting, and the windows, these, in particular, as soon as possible; like- wise, colors for the curtains, tablecloths, and upholstery, and for the wood and wallpaper. The individual sketches indicating mood and changes in the lighting can wait until later, perhaps until mid-September, when we will already be rehearsing and will be able to have positive influence on the artistic work. The landscape, also later. However, because of the very pressing orders, the afore- mentioned detail sketches are needed absolutely as soon as possible — also because it takes a great deal of time to fill the orders, as Ghosts is the opening performance of the new theater. Until now, Ibsen interiors have been indescribably neglected and abused. However, in my opinion, they convey to a significant extent much that lies between and behind the lines in Ibsen and not only frame but also symbolize the action. Only with your help, I firmly believe, will we be able to make people and scenery interact so har- moniously — while also retaining their effectiveness as separate entities — that we will illuminate yet unplumbed depths of this splendid work, and will produce, on the whole, something quite remarkable. Up to now, the German theater has pushed a more or less successful clinical study of madness into the dazzling limelight and allowed all else to operate in shadow. In my opinion, quite the opposite would be the right thing. Respectfully, with best wishes. Max Reinhardt Reinhardt's instructions are noteworthy in a number of respects. First, they suggest how the mind of a modern regisseur works. Despite Hollaender’s assurance that the details of the sketches would be left to Munch as long as they contained a window with a landscape view, Reinhardt spells out the ground plan for Ghosts in painstaking detail, indicating the type and placement of furniture, the location of walls, doors, and archways, and the character of the home as one that should reflect not only the proper if progressively minded Mrs. Alving but also the ten-years-after lingering presence of the debauched Captain Alving. These concerns are all within a director's purview and, it should be noted, most of them derive directly from Ibsen. Nevertheless, the precision of Reinhardt's description reveals the level of 121 intliionce ho presumod to exercise on Munch s work. Most ol what is left to Munch is a matter of dec- orative detail; even then. Reinhardt cannot refrain from suggesting that the curtains and chair covers miglrt be a dark, faded \ iolet. Second. Reinliardt's logistical concerns as producer compete with his artistic ones as director. His top prioritv is to get a number of detailed sketches — of the curtains and other fabrics, the treatment of the walls, and the style of furniture — so that his scene shop can get to work placing orders for uphol- ster\. wallpaper, wood, and other materials nect'ssary for the construction of the set. Because lighting design is not to be executed until later in production, sketches suggesting it can wait; ironically, so can the all important landscape that will serve as the very pulse of the interior world. As is often the case in the deadline-driven process of producing a play, the countdown to opening night jostles with aes- thetic concerns, all the more when it is the first-ever opening night in a brand new theater. Hollaender and Kahane start out entreating Munch to provide a sketch that will provide an "impetus” — "You won’t be in the least further troubled ” — and the next thing Munch knows Reinhardt is haranguing him for wallpaper patterns, fabric swatches, and wood trim. The show must go on. Third, Reinhardt's letter makes it clear that he conceived the theatrical chamber music of Ghosts in terms of chiaroscuro. His specific notes for the three acts outline a lighting plot that moves rhythmi- cally from light to dark and dark to light, marking not just the temporal movement of each act but a spa- tial rhythm as well. Reinhardt clearly intends a dynamic tension between inside and outside (in terms of stage geography, downstage and upstage), modulated by the changing time of day and the settling and lifting of the fog, as well a more strictly interior tension between different parts of the room (more right and left perhaps), achieved through the use of corners, furniture, and lamps to create areas of light and ghost like shadows. He explicitly asks Munch for a sketch "without atmospheric lighting” in order to prepare a basic set which, almost like a screen, will receive and reflect a variety of lighting effects. In this regard, Reinhardt must have been inspired not only by the earlier work of Lugne-Poe but by more recent experiments by the visionary designer-directors Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig. Although underappreciated in his own day, Appia revolutionized the approach to scenography by his concentration on the rhythm of the stage space. The American scene designer Lee Simonson has out- lined Appia's agenda as follows; "The plastic elements involved in scene design, as Appia analyzed them, are four; perpendicular painted scenery, the horizontal floor, the moving actor, and the lighted space in which they are confined. The aesthetic problem, as he pointed out, is a single one; How are these four elements to be combined so as to produce an indubitable unity?"^^ For Appia, the key was in the fourth element, lighting, because its ability to reflect changes in mood and tone, even subtle ones, most closely approximated the effect of music and its unrivaled capacity to express the Eternal. "Light and light alone," Appia wrote, "quite apart from its subsidiary importance in illuminating a dark stage, has the greatest plastic power, for it is subject to a minimum of conventions and so is able to reveal vividly in its most expressive form the eternally fluctuating appearance of a phenomenal world.”^* Simonson articulates the difference for Appia between mere illumination and plastic light; "Diffused light produces blank visibility, in which we recognize objects without emotion. But the light that is blocked by an object and casts shadows has a sculpturesque quality that by the vehemence of its defi- nition, by the balance of light and shade, can carve an object before our eyes. It is capable of arousing us emotionally because it can so erri[)hasize and accent forms as to give them new force and meaning.”” Thus did Appia introduce the centuries-old painting techni(|ue of chiaroscuro into the visual realm of the stage. Gordon Craig, the illegitimate son of actress Ellen Terry and architect and designer Edward God win, was a disciple of Walter Eater who imagined theater as "a |)lace in which the entire beauty of life 122 can be unfolded, and not only the external beauty of the world, but the inner beauty and meaning of life.”^° His aestheticist conviction prompted him to pursue a vision similar to Appia's in terms of its emphasis on light as a com[)ositional element, the elimination of realistic detail in favor of austerity and grandeur in design, and a sculptural and rhythmic conception of stage space. But where Appia con centrated on the play of light and shadow, Craig experimented with color and texture, sometimes in the form of huge hanging curtains or tall pillars. In addition, Craig sougtu to add [>lasticity to the stage picture by designing scenery that moved, experimenting with large screens with textured surfaces, neu tral in color to receive light, and intended to glide across the stage from one position to another. fn 1904, Craig was introduced to the Berfin theater scene by Count Harry Kessler, a Weimar diplomat and cosmopolitan patron of the arts who, coincidentally, had been a champion of Munch's in Germany for the past decade. Kessler had seen Craig’s work in London and wanted to fuse his visual lyricism with the verbal lyricism of Austrian playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Craig came to Berlin to work with Otto Brahm on the world premiere of Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Otway's Venice Preserv'd at the Lessing Theater; the arrangement turned into a hasco, paving the way for Craig to work with Brahm’s new rival and competitor, Reinhardt.'*^ Off and on for the next two years, at precisely the time when Reinhardt was taking over the Deutsches Theater and making plans to build the Kammerspiele and stage Ghosts, he and Craig engaged in a series of negotiations about plays Craig might direct and design for Reinhardt, starting with Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and including Hofmannsthal’s Oedi- pus and the Sphinx, The Oresteia of Aeschylus, and Shakespeare's King Lear. The collaboration was stillborn. Disagreements over choice of play, contractual details, and artistic control led to contentious relations, with Craig eventually claiming that Reinhardt appropriated his work. Craig was notorious throughout Europe for accusing others of imitating his ideas, but in this case, according to L. M. New- man, the charge is not without some merit."*^ “THE ARMCHAIR SAYS IT ALL!” As the italicized entreaties in the letters of Hollaender, Kahane, and Reinhardt suggest. Munch was slow at first to produce images for Ghosts. As prolific as he was. Munch was notorious for periods of inac- tivity during which he mulled over his subjects. Max Linde, an eye doctor who became an important patron of Munch's, explained it this way: "Munch can go for weeks without actually putting brush to canvas, merely saying 'Ich male mit meine Gehirne' in his broken German ['Em painting with my senses']. He carries on like that for a long time, just absorbing, until suddenly he will give shape to what he has seen, pouring his whole body and soul into his work. Then it is only a matter of days, even hours, before his pictures are ready. He puts everything he has into them. That is why his pictures have such a feeling of greatness, of genius.””'^ Frustration with Munch's pace of work is evident in an oft-quoted anecdote from Ernst Stern, Rein- hardt's Costume and Scenery Director for Hfteen years and the man ultimately responsible for turning whatever Munch produced into a stage set. In his memoir. Stern recalled the summer of 1906: Today in his study Reinhardt showed me an oil painting by the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. It represented a room whose characteristic feature was a big black armchair. The room was intended as staging for Ibsen's drama Ghosts, with which the recently completed Kammerspiele was scheduled to open. Munch 's picture, painted in his usual manner, gave me only very few hints in regard to details, and I said so to Reinhardt. "That may be," he responded, "but the armchair says it all! Its black- 123 nt’.o' restlt'sslv reflects the entire mood of the drama! And then the walls of the living room in Munch 's picture, he went on. they have the color of sick gums. We must make sure to find a wallpaper of that color. It will transpose the actors into the proper mood, /n order to live fully, acting needs a room shaped hv form, light, and most of all color.^*^ E\ontuallv, Muncli completed a series of paintings which depicted different moments from the play, each one of which includes the conspicuous presence in the foreground — or downstage center, as the- ater people would say — of the same high hacked black armchair, turned away (upstage) at an angle as if to provide a view of the landscape outside or to protect whoever sat there from view (no. 59 ). Munch scholars have been quick to associate the black armchair in Munch’s Ghosts sketches with the wicker chair of Death in the Sickroom (oil painting of 1893, lithograph of 1896, no. 10), the painting in which .Munch recalls the 1877 death from tuberculosis of his hfteen-year-old sister, Sophie.'’^ This traumatic loss, along with the equally traumatic death of his mother nine years earlier when Munch was a hve- vear-old boy, accounts in large part lor Munch’s fascination with death and his repeated depiction of deathbed scenes (no. 60 ). No wonder then that Munch seems to have regarded Ghosts as a three-act deathbed play centered on Osvald, who he adopted as his doppeiganger. There is more than ample basis for Edvard's identification with Osvald. Both were young idealistic painters who left the oppressive cultural climate of their native Norway to study painting in Paris, where they enjoyed the camaraderie and pleasures of a thriving bohemian counter-culture. As Osvald says after his return home, “I’m afraid that everything that's most alive in me will degenerate into ugli- ness here. Both were abandoned by their mothers at a young age, Edvard by way of death and Osvald by virtue of being sent away by his mother for his own protection. Both were victims of hereditary ill- ness. Osvald blames what he calls his “carelessness” for the syphilis which is killing him, until his mother takes away "the agony of remorse and self reproach” in the third act by telling him the truth of his father's past and the hereditary cause of his disease. Edvard was a notoriously weak child from birth, often missing school because of rheumatic fever or some other illness; he attributed his frailty to hered- itary factors on both his mother’s and father’s side; "Sickness and insanity and death were the black angels that hovered over my cradle and have since followed me throughout my life.”"'^ At Christmas time in 1881, when the publication of Ghosts first sparked controversy throughout Scandinavia, Munch was a new student of painting at Kristiania’s Royal School of Art and Design and just turning eighteen. Two years later, m October 1883, the August Lindberg production had a run of thirteen performances at Kristiania’s Mdllergaten Theatre, which, according to Arne Eggum, "there is every reason to believe that Munch attended.”''® By that time. Munch had already been introduced by Christian Krohg and others to the Kristiania Bohemians gathering around the writer and free-love advocate, Hans Jaeger, who had written in defense of Ghosts when it was first published.''^ Among the impishly sacrilegious "Nine Commandments” formulated by the Kristiania Bohemians, three might have been inspired in part by Ibsen’s scandalous play: "Thou shalt sever thy family roots. . . . Thou canst not treat thy parents harshly enough. . . . Thou shalt take thy life.”®° Whether or not Munch saw the Lindberg [)roduction, he could not have escaj)ed notice of the play and the prototype it offered him of an artist in extremis. Over the next twenty-five years, as Ghosts became a fixture of the modern reper- toire, Osvald became Munch’s theatrical alter ego. Perha[)S the most immediate and intense point of identity between Edvard and Osvald at the time of .Munch's work on Ghosts was that both men were going crazy. In act two, Osvald explains to his mother that when he returned to Paris after his last visit home, he "began having such tremendous pains in my head — mostly toward the back, it seemed. It felt like a tight iron band sejueezing me from my neck up ... At first 1 thought they were nothing more than the old, familiar headaches I’ve been 124 bothered by ever since I was little.” Wlien he went to work on a new large painting, “it was as if all iny talents had flown, and all my strength was paralyzed; 1 couldn't focus any of my thoughts; everything swam — around and around." Clutching his head, he says, "Mother, it’s my mind that’s broken down out of control — I'll irever he able to work again!”^^ In the summer of 1906, Edvard was in much the same condition. His troubled relationshif) with I'ulla Larsen had come to a traumatic and bloody conclusion in September 1902 with a gunshot wound to one of Munch’s fingers. Since then, he had become increasingly restless and agitated, sedating himself with excessive amounts of alcohol, moving about from place to place even more than usual, picking fights with strangers, experiencing hallucinations and temporary paralysis, and behaving erratically. He took refuge in the home of concerned patrons, who commissioned portraits from him partly in an effort to settle his nerves. “I am glad that I am going to Weimar,” he wrote to a friend on )anuary 13, 1904, "as I have on three occasions threatened people with a pistol purely on impulse. Apart from that, the fact that Germany has fallen under the spell of my art affords me cold comfort, but at least it has stimulated interest in it. I am now going to paint Count Kessler in Weimar, and so all that is missing is a commission from the Duke.”^^ By 1906, Munch’s physical and psychological health had so deteriorated that he yielded to pressure to forsake alcohol for awhile and take a rest cure at a spa in Thuringia near Weimar. As he later recalled: While at Kosen I repeatedly felt small attacks of lameness, especially at night. My legs and arms would be numb frequently. During the days, I felt a sort of pressure in my right leg. I limped a little. Then there were the strange attacks and notions I had. One day I am sitting in the spa's restaurant and am eating breakfast with a Dutchman, a habitual guest. “I can hypnotize you," I suddenly say. "No, I don't want to," he responds. "You will see." Then I mix together in a bowl some mustard, pepper, tobacco ash, and vinegar. "Eat this," I say and gaze fearfully at him. "If you don't. I'll shoot you on the spot." The Dutchman got up and left. On the same day, he departed from the hotel.^^ While in Weimar that summer, Munch painted one of his most famous self-portraits. Self Portrait with Wine Bottle, which shows the artist sitting impassively at a near-empty table in the restaurant of the Hotel Russischer Hof, hands in lap and a blank inward stare on his face (no. 6). The painting has been celebrated as a consummate portrait of melancholic despair and a barometer of Munch's deeply trou- bled psyche at this particular time. Such was Munch's state of mind when Reinhardt and his associates invited him to make "just a sketch from which we might draw ideas” for their production of Ghosts. The master director was celebrated for finding the best possible painter to create images that would evoke the soul of a particular play, but in this instance, he could hardly have known just how apt his choice was. He was, in effect, inviting the character of Osvald to design the sets for his own play. Munch responded with a number of sketches, in charcoal, pen, tempera, and oil, some of which were completed too late to be of direct benefit to Reinhardt’s production. Much of the work was done right on the premises. As Arthur Kahane later recalled: Munch was in the Deutsches Theater every day, lived among us, worked days, drank nights, and painted alternately on the pictures for Ghosts and on his cycle [the Reinhardt Freize]. Sometimes he also sat for a long time, long and quite still and absorbed, and nothing moved in his face: what was going on behind these brazen features? And then at some small provocation, he awoke and was quite bright and laughed — the simple, cheerful laugh of a child — with his eyes, the corners of his mouth, his whole face. He was always friendly in manner, but at the same time reserved, with a northern sort of stiffness, with- 125 79 ( 1 ra\m iwd impenetrable. He remained the stranper, remained a mvsterv ta us . . . He was sometimes ridiculously ohstitiate, did not look up. did not listen at all. remained unmoved, unflus- tered bv either praise or blame: but behind this obstinacy he had a titanic, iroti will of his own, of which he was only semi- conscious. .And a desire for freedom that seemed to burst the bounds of society, as if he could only have been born in, and could only thrive in. the most profound state of solitude. This Munch was certainly a strange boulder in the whirlpool of the- ater. In terms of groundplan and furnishings, Munch’s sketches fol- low Reinhardt s (and Ibsen’s) directions closely: the requested 80 picture window at the rear, area rugs which expose the floor, the French doors, and round family table are all there (hg. 79 ). The greenhouse is suggested only by a tall potted plant, and the grandfather clock stipulated by Reinhardt for the hreplace has been shifted to the opposite wall (upstage right in stage terms), where it anchors the composition and suggests an inanimate figure tall enough to compete with the characters drawn into the sketches. That same stage-right wall contains Munch’s major decorative addition to the room: a pair of family portraits, which, according to Paal Hougen, are based on portraits painted by Peder Aadness of Munch’s great-grandparents.^^ If only by virtue of their frames, these portraits and the imposing clock are present in even the roughest of the Ghosts sketches, an inscrip- tion of hereditary influence into the scene (fig. 80 ). At a time when his mental health was diminishing, Munch’s work on Ghosts revived his convic- tion that he was a victim of heredity. One of the paintings he initially planned to include in the Rein hardt Frieze was a re-working of Inheritance, which he hrst painted in the late 1890s (fig. 81 ). Originally titled The Syphilitic Ghild, it shows a grieving woman seated on a bench against a green wall with a ghost-white infant in her lap. Munch wrote: The woman bends over the child which is infected by the sins of the fathers. It lies in the lap of the mother. The mother bends over it and weeps so that her face becomes scarlet red. The red, tear-swollen, distorted face contrasts strongly with the linen white face of the child and the green background. The child stares with big, deep eyes at a world into which it has come involuntarily. Sick, anxious, and questioning does it look out into the room, wondering about the land of agony into which it has entered, asking, already. Why — why}’ It was the usual feeling 0/ Ghosts — / wanted to stress the responsibility of the parents. But it was my life, too — my Why. I, who came into the world sick, in sick surroundings, to whom youth was a sickroom and life a shiny, sutdit window — with glorious colors and glorious joys — and out there I wanted so much to take part in the dance, the Dance of Life.^^ By the "Dance of Life" Edvard must have meant what Osvald refers to as the "joy of life,” which both of them image as a radiant, life-giving sun. 79 Edvard Munch, Design sketch for Ghosts: Osvald, Pastor Manders, and Mrs. Alving in act one, 1906. Munch Museum, Oslo. 80 Edvard Munch, Rough sketches for Ghosts, 1906. Munch Museum, Oslo. 81 Edvard Munch, Inheritance, 1898. Munch Museum, Oslo. 126 82 One of the renderings of the Ghosts interior depicts the very end of the play, alter Osvald, anticipating the imminent, final attack that will reduce him to catatonia, has insisted that his mother give him a fatal dose of morphine. When she shrinks from the task, he echoes the syphilitic child when he explodes in anger: "I never asked you for life. And what is this life you gave me? 1 don’t want it! You can take it back!"^^ He chases her when she flees the room to call a doctor and then locks them both inside. This physical exertion is sufficient to trigger the brain fever that he dreads. He sits in the armchair, which minutes earlier Mrs. Alving had pulled over to the sofa in order to talk to him. Dawn is breaking, and Ibsen's stage direction indicates that "the glaciers and peaks in the background shine in the brilliant light of morning." Munch painted this view bathed in gentle pink and blue light, with a snow-capped peak in the distance, a village enclave in the valley below, and in the foreground an ambiguous natural mass which in shape, color, and contour resembles the high back of Osvald’s big black armchair (fig. 82 ). As Osvald settles in, his posture echoes that of Munch in Self-Portrait with a Wine Bottle; accord- ing to Ibsen, he "appears to crumple inwardly in the chair; all his muscles loosen; the expression leaves his face; and his eyes stare blankly." All he can do is mutter over and over again, "The sun. The sun," which stands as both a desperate appeal for the killing drug and a final incantation of the "joy-in life" that Osvald's art has stood for. As James McFarlane, translator and editor of the Oxford Ibsen, has put it: “THE SUN— THE SUN” The entire weight of the drama bears down on this one select, refined moment of terror, where words fail and speech has become an idiot's babble and a mother's wounded cry of pain, where gesture has been paralyzed by seizure and the torment of excruciating indecision. After the stolid monumentality o/Pillars of Society, after the daring bouleversement of h Doll’s House, Ibsen built up Ghosts to a fate- ful, final situation, then knocked away the props to leave it desperately balanced on a knife-edge of infinite resolution and of unspeakable distress.^^ 82 Edvard Munch, Fjord landscape for Ghosts, 1906. Munch Museum, Oslo. 83 Edvard Munch, Rendering of the final moments of Ghosts, 1906. Private collection. 84 Edvard Munch, Death of Marat, 1907. Munch Museum, Oslo. The Munch sketch shows Osvald slumped over in the chair and Mrs. Alving standing by the table, transfixed by indecision, arms down, clasping the pills in front of her (fig. 83 ). The composition — in which a standing female figure, shoulders square to the picture plane, defiantly faces down the viewer (or spectator) while a prostrate or stooped male figure languishes wounded at her side — harkens back to such works as Ashes II (1894, no. 28 ) and looks forward to Munch’s rendering of his final encounter with Tulla Larsen, Death of Marat (1907, fig. 84 ), except that here the female figure is maternal rather than sexual. As opposed to Munch’s other Ghosts images, which show the chair facing upstage, its high black back an ominous void into which Osvald will eventually disappear, this sketch follows Ibsen’s stage directions and places Osvald "with his back toward the distant view.” The sun he is calling for is one he sees in his mind, not with his eyes. Munch made this vision of Osvald’s concrete in The Sun, one of the huge murals that he painted for the building at the University of Oslo known as the Aula. The painting, and several studies for it, depict a blazing sun with solid, colorful beams that radiate out to the four edges of the canvas, penetrating the landscape with divine intensity and the same sym- phonic magnificence that Reinhardt described as the finale of Ghosts (no. 81 ). Munch traced this paint- ing’s origins as far back as 1889, to one of his earliest depictions of a deathbed subject. Spring (fig. 85 ) 127 85 A straight line leads from Spring to the Aula Paintings. The Aula Paintings are humanitv as it strives towards the light, the sun, revelation, light in times of darkness. Spring was the mortally ill girl s longit}g for light and warmth, for life. The sun in the .Aula was the sun shining in the window of Spring. It was Osvald s sun. In the identical chair in which I painted the sick girl, I and all those I loved, beginning with my mother, once sat winter after winter, sat and longed for the sun — until death took them away.^^ Tlie most remarkable ot Mimcb’s Ghosts paintings, tlie one that suggests the key to understanding this foray into scene design, is one that omits scenery altogether (nos. 61 and 62). It zeroes in on mother and son alone in an expressionistic pietd that extends the composition of Spring, The Sick Child (no. 9), and Inheritance. Mrs. Alving, according to Ihsen, "drops to her knees beside him and shakes him,” crying out "Osvald! Osvald! Look at me! Don’t you know me?” Munch shows the kneeling mother with head bowed, leaning on and holding her son’s left arm, as he sits slack and motionless, facing away from her, eyes slightly downcast. The hgures are rendered in swift, broad strokes. Mrs. Alving’s face is an unnatural red similar to that of the mother in Inheritance, and Osvald's contorted face seems to be dis- solving into a blur, as if uttering the words "The sun. The sun.” made its yel- low glow leak out of his sagging mouth like some corrosive acid or bile. Munch’s image is a stunning representation of this moment — "where ulti- mately the only gesture is a gesture of negation"^” — except that the "idiot’s babble” drowns out the "mother's wounded cry of pain” and Osvald's dis- solution into paralysis upstages Mrs. Alving's "excruciating indecision.” Munch’s close identihcation with Osvald results in the repetition ot the existentialist query of "Why? Why?” which he noted in Inheritance. His calling for "The sun. The sun.” is a proto-Expressionist wail every bit as painful as The Scream (no. 7). In this light, Munch's representations of the Alving home — the central and dominant black arm- chair waiting for Osvald, the living room walls "the color of sick gums," the looming, inescapable fam ily portraits and sentry like grandfather clock, even the shadows drawn into one of the sketches, trailing behind the characters like limp pod-like sacs (no. 60) — should be seen as projections of Osvald's sub- jective perception of tbe immediate world around bim. Reinhardt had described tbe interior to Munch in terms that reflected a lingering tug-of war between the "simple, solemn, almost ascetic” Mrs. Alving and "the raw hedonism and brutality of the deceased chamberlain.” Moreover, just as the key to Rein- hardt’s A Midsummer Night's Dream was the intoxicating atmosphere of the forest, "the soul of the room" in Ghosts lay in the required "landscape visible tbrough the windows." Reinhardt intended that changes outside the house would affect the mood inside, drawing people and scenery into an emotional symbiosis. Nowhere does Reinhardt designate Osvald as the psychic engine at the center of the play, and his enigmatic comments in the hnal paragraphs of his extensive notes to Munch suggest that he is less interested in spotlighting a "clinical study of madness" than in presenting a more ethereal atmos- phere of light and dark forces caught u[) in an im[)ressionistic dance of death. In short, Reinhardt asked Munch for a Symbolist treatment wbicb empbasized tbe emotional effect of the scenery on the char (/ij 85 Edvard Munch, Spring, oil on canvas, 1889. National Gallery, Oslo 86 Edvard Munch, Design sketch for Ghosts: Osvald on tlie sofa. Hergen Kunst museum. 128 87 87 The final, graveyard scene from Frank Widekind's Spring Awakening at the ICammerspiele. 88 Edvard Munch, Design sketch for Kammerspiele production of Hedda Gabler, 1907. Munch Museum, Oslo. acters (and tlu' actors and the audiciicc), and wliat lie got was an Lixpres sionist Ireatnu'iit wliicli enifihasizcd the pcrccplnal cflcct o( one (cntral character’s emotions on tlie scenery (fig. 86).^' Max Reinhardt's memorial production of Ghosts reetdved its gala opening at the Kammerspiele on November 8, 1906, with Agnes Sorma as Mrs. Alving, Alexander Moissi as Osvald, Friedrich Kayssler as Fastor Manders, Lncie Hoellich as Regina, and Reinhardt himself re[)rising the role of )acob Engstrand. Critics, who were not admitted until the second night, declared the production a rousing success, [lartly because of the novelty of the occasion and the much vaunted intimacy of the new the- ater. "From every row one feels able to touch the stage," wrote Siegfried )acobsohn.^^ “A destiny is fulfilled, an intractable late of dreadf ul power," said Richard Wilde, "and in the Kammerspiele, this painful event does not pass over us — we experience it; we are a part of the small circle of people whose fates are inter twined.”^^ For at least one critic, the intimacy was too much, depriving the play of a needed aesthetic distance. "Whether or not Ghosts is quite suitable for the first experimental effort with the Kammer spiele seems to me to be questionable,” wrote Alfred Klaar. "I don’t want to say that this masterpiece of technique and of nuanced characteristics is crude, because the transitions are much too subtle, but the play advances gradually in keeping with its inner consistencies to brutalities, in the presence of which the moderation afforded by spatial distance is more welcome than harmful.’’^'' Although no photographs of the production are known to exist, prevailing scenographic practices and contemporary reports suggest that the set built for the Kammerspiele stage, while being more real- istic than Munch’s abstract sketches, was nevertheless free of the fussy details of Naturalism typical of earlier productions.^^ Klaar found the decor "all the more praiseworthy as its contribution was both unpretentious and effective." Wilde credited the set for heightening the theatrical illusion, citing the constant drumming of the rain on the windowpane through the first two acts and the sound of a dis- tant foghorn coming across from the f]ord. Reinhardt's Symbolist orientation to the play would seem to be borne out by these atmospheric sound effects as well as the subtlety and nuance of the acting and his liberal use of silences which might allow the haunted soul of the play to resonate. While the critics praised Alexander Moissi’s characterization of Osvald as subtle, simple, and like- able, there was nothing about it to indicate that Osvald’s subjective experience determined the tone or mood of the whole. Still, Munch’s sketches for Ghosts and the influence they had on Reinhardt and his actors constitute just as meaningful a forerunner of Expressionism in the theater as the play that received its world premiere at the Kammerspiele only twelve days after the opening of Ghosts: Erank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (fig. 87 ). Munch was in Berlin for the premiere of Ghosts and the Kammerspiele, attending an opening-night party where he sat with Gordon Craig and Arthur Kahane, but nervous relapses and bouts of heavy drinking prompted him to return to Bad Kosen later in November. He came back to Berlin in early 1907 to work on the Reinhardt Erieze and scenic designs for another production at the Kammerspiele, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler as staged by Hermann Bahr, which opened on March 1 1, 1907. Unlike Ghosts, this was not a success. Several of Munch's sketches for the play include representations of Hedda Gabler (fig. 88) modeled on the figure of Tulla Earsen, a lingering psychic presence which he sought to exor- cise in a series of paintings depicting the unfortunate incident at his summer retreat in Aasgaardstrand. Although Munch continued to produce work as prolifically as ever, his health and sanity degenerated throughout that year and the next. Eeelings of persecution drove him from city to city. On one occa- 129 >ion. he rented two iot)ins in the same hotel “so tliat he could esca[)e from one into the other.”^^The \ oices in his head grew louder and more insistent until he finally had a nervous breakdown and entered the Copenhagen psychiatric clinic ot Dr. Daniel Jacobsen on October 1908. .\tter a seven month stay, during which he continued to paint in a makeshift studio on the prem ises. Munch left the clinic renewed, if still weak, and at age forty-two returned to Norway. In a letter to Reinhardt a vear after his breakdown. Munch ex[)iessed hopes that they would work together again: "I have often thought of our plans — sketches for Peer Gynt, Rosrnersholrn, and other plays by Ibsen. Wonderful motifs. I’erhaps it will be possible that 1 carry them out some day."^^ Nothing came of those plans. Munch traveleil less and less, and he came to prefer the solitude and sanctuary of his live-in stu- dios near Oslo. As with Osvald, he sought the healing power of the sun, which was reflected in his cen- tral painting for the Aula of the University of Oslo and illuminates his late landscape paintings. The Kammerspiele Ghosts came at a traumatic period in Munch's personal life and a pivotal moment in Reinhardt's professional career. While Osvald, Munch’s theatrical twin and anchor in the storm, returned to his native Norway to die, Edvard, “a strange boulder in the whirlpool of theater," had come home to live. 1 I would like to extend my gratitude to the following people for material aid they pro\ ided to the research and writing of this essay: Peter Ferran, Crystal Tiala, Dan Brunet, Sissel Biornstad of the Munch Museum in Oslo, Alexander Weigel and Eberhard Keienburg of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and especially Elizabeth A. McLain, Further thanks are due to the Inter-Library Loan Office of Boston College’s O'Neill Library and to the Office of Research Administration for a Research Expense Grant which sup- ported my work on this project. 2 Flenrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays: Volume II, translated by Rolf Ejelde, New York: New American Library, 1970, p. 88. 3 lames Walter McFarlane, translator and editor, The Oxford Ibsen: Volume London: Oxford University Press, p. 474. In addition to McFarlane (pp. 465-91), information regard ing the history of Ghosts is drawn from Asbjorn Aarseth, Peer Gynt and Ghosts: Text and Performance, London: .Macmillan Education Ltd., 1989, pp. 95-112; Robert Fergu- son. Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography, London: Richard Cohen Books, 1996, pp. 248-69; Brian Johnston, “Historical Background" in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997, pp. 9-34: Frederik j. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, Ibsen's Lively Art: A Per- formance Study of the Major Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 90-125; and Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., •971. PP 473-92- 4 August Lindberg as Osvald and Hedvig Charlotte Winter- Hjelm as Mrs. Alving. 5 In the play, Jacob Engstrand recruits his daughter Regina to join him in his own cynical tribute to Captain Alving, a brothel posing as a hostel for sailors. Prostitution was legalized in Norway in 1868, but by the time of Ghosts pub lie sentiment had swung towards its abolition. 6 Ferguson, Henrik Ibsen, p. 265. 7 .Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 484. 8 Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 484. 9 Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 483. 10 Jean Chothia, Andre Antoine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres^, 1991. P- 3- 11 Otto Brahm, "To Begin,’ translated by Lee Baxandall, in Eric Bentley, editor. The Theory of the Modern Stage, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 373. 12 Johnston, in Marinelli, Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, p. 16. 13 Reinhardt’s otlier Ibsen roles included Foldal in John Gabriel Borkman, Mortensgard in Rosrnersholrn, and Old Ekdal in The Wild Duck. In eight years at the Deutsches Theater, he played 94 different roles, including Baumert in Hauptmann's The Weavers, Akim in Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness, and Luka in Gorky's The Lower Depths. His diary for April 1895, at which point he was twenty-one, includes the following entry: "... I seldom have the oppor- tunity in my sphere of activity to play myself. Half of my work consists in the purely technical job of making myself look older, which I constantly have to bear in mind . . . Of course, the audience is completely unaware of all this. It assumes that I am the required age and does not lake the technical preparations into account, since it knows noth- ing of them. The same applies to the critics. If they knew my real age, they would judge me differently.” Gottfried Reinhardt, The Genius: A Memoir of Max Reinhardt, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979, p. 26. 14 Top: New York production presented by the company of George Fawcett. Bottom: Danish Royal Theater production in Copenhagen staged by Johannes Nielsen. 15 Max Reinhardt, The Magician's Dreams, edited by Edda Fuhrich and Gisela Prossnitz, translated by Sophie Kidd and Peter Waugh, Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1993, p. 31. 16 Paul Lindau, a writer turned theater director, was Brahm’s immediate successor at the Deutsches Theater, but due to poor financial management he remained in his position for barely a year. 17 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Reinhardt as an International Force,” in Max Reinhardt and His Theatre I1924], edited by Oliver Sayler, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968, p. 24. 18 Hofmannsthal, in Sayler, Max Reinhardt and His Theatre, p. 24. 19 Frank E. Washhurn-Freund, "The Evolution of Reinhardt,” in Sayler, Max Reinhardt and His Theatre, p. 51. 20 Simon Williams, "The Director in the German Theater: Harmony, Spectacle and Ensemble,” New German Gritique 29, Spring/Summer 1983, p. 125. 21 Max Reinhardt, The Magician's Dreams, p. 32. 130 22 Hofmannsthal, in Sayler, Max Reirilutrdt and His Theatre, p. 24. 23 Max Reinhardt, The Magician’s Dreams, p. 48, 24 Hofmannsthal, in Sayler, Max Keitdtardt and His Theatre, p. 24. 25 In a 1901 letter to Berthoki Held with instructions for the design of the Schall and Rauch Theater, Reitihardt wrote: "In my opinion, there must at all costs he a flight of steps leading from the stage into the audience. We will really need this and it increases the intimacy, perhaps a few steps on either side, which we should also include in the plan.” Max Reinhardt, The Magician's Dreams, p. 48. 26 Richard Wilde, Boersen-Courier no. 528, November 10, 1906, in Hugo Petting, editor, Freien Biihne zurn politis- chen Theater. Drama and Theater im Spiegel der Kritik, Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam, 1987, p. 318. Translation by Elizabeth A. McLain. 27 Marker and Marker, Ibsen's Lively Art, p. 20. 28 Max Reinhardt, The Magician's Dreams, p. 33. 29 Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. tor, 30 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 102. 31 Reidar Dittmann, Eros and Psyche: Strindberg and Munch in the iSgos, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982, p. 81. Munch’s complicated relationship with Strindberg is germane to the general topic of Munch and theater but is beyond the immediate scope of this essay. Dittman's study provides a thorough introduction to the subject. Harry G. Carlson also takes up the subject in Out of Inferno: Strind- berg's Reawakening as an Artist, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996, pp, 269-284. 32 Peter Krieger, Edvard Munch: Der Lebensfries fiir Max Reinhardts Kammerspiele, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, p. 14. Translation by Elizabeth A. McLain. 33 Ragna Stang, Edvard Munch, New York: Abbeville Press, 1977, p, 194. For a complete discussion of the Reinhardt Erieze, see Krieger, Edvard Munch: Der Liebenfries, pp. 32-63. 34 Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 192. Most of the paintings in the Reinhardt frieze now reside in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Others are in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the Museum Folk- wang in Essen, and in private collections. 35 Krieger, Edvard Munch: Der Lebensfries, p. 14. Translation by Elizabeth A. McLain. 36 Max Reinhardt, "Anmerkungen fiir das Gespenster Interieur," in Knut Boeser and Renata Vatkova, editors. Max Reinhardt in Berlin, Berlin: Verlag Frblich & Kaufmann, 1984, pp. 272- 73. Also quoted in full in Krieger, Edvard Munch: Der Lebensfries, pp. 16-17. Translation by Elizabeth A. McLain. 37 Lee Simonson, The Stage is Set [1932], New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1963, p. 355. 38 Simonson, The Stage is Set, p, 358. 39 Simonson, The Stage is Set, p. 358. 40 Gordon Craig, The Art of the Theatre, quoted in Bentley, p. 144. 41 For one account of the Craig-Brahm collaboration, see Horst Claus, The Theatre Director: Otto Brahm, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981, pp. 122-23. 42 L. M. Newman, "Reinhardt and Craig?", in Margaret Jacobs and John Warren, editors. Max Reinhardt : The Oxford Symposium, Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic, 1986, p. 14. 43 Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 187. 44 Paal Hougen, "Munc h and Ihsen," in Reidar Dillman, translator and i-ditor, Edvard Munch and Henrik Ibsen, Northheld, MN: Saint dial College, 1978, p. 16. 45 See Hougen, "Munc h and Ibsen," p. 16, or Krieger, Edvard Munch: Der Lebensfries, p. 15. 46 Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays: Volume II, p. 95. 47 Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 33. 48 Arne Eggum, "Henrik Ibsen as a dramatist in the perspec tive of Edvard Munch," an on line catalog essay that accom panics "From Stage to Canvas: Ihsen's plays reflected in Munch's work," an Internet exhibition of the Munch Museum (http://www.museumsnett.no/munchmuseet/net tutstillinger/munch og ibsen/english/english index.htm). The on line exhibit provides a thorough overview of Munch's many treatments of Ibsen plays, scenes, and char alters, including the studies of Ghosts wliicfi are the pri mary concern here. 49 Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, p. 485. 50 Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 52. 51 Ibsen, Eour Major Plays: Volume II, p. 87. 52 Stang, Edvard Munch, p. 187. 53 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 190. 54 Arthur Kahane, "Edvard Munch and Gustav Knina,” in Boeser and Vatkova, Max Reinhardt in Berlin, p. 271. 55 Hougen, "Munch and Ibsen," p. 15. 56 Hougen, "Munch and Ibsen," p. 17. 57 Ibsen, Four Major Plays: Volume II, p. 112. All subsequent quotes from Ghosts come from the last few pages of the play (pp. 112-14). 58 McFarlane, The Oxford Ibsen, p. 13. 59 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 209. 60 McFarlane, The Oxford Ibsen, p. 13. 61 Kirsten Shepherd-Barr argues that Reinhardt’s engage- ment of Munch was "not only a startling break with his previous practices but a prescient attempt to align the the- atre with modernist tendencies in general, specifically Expressionism." While prescience is hard to disprove and Reinhardt often drew on the modernist avant-garde for ideas and inspiration, this seems to overstate the case, par- ticularly regarding any specifically Expressionist inten tions on Reinhardt’s part. Shepherd Barr, "Ibsen, Munch and the Relationship between Modernist Theatre and Art," Nordic Theatre Studies, vol. 12, 1999, p. 52. 62 Siegfried Jacobsohn, Die Schaubuhne, no. 46, November 15, 1906, in Fetting, Freien Biihne zum politischen Theater, p. 320. Translation by Elizabeth A. McLain. 63 Wilde, in Fetting, Freien Biihne zum politischen Theater, p. 319. 64 Alfred Klaar, Vossiche Zeitung, no. 528, November 10, 1906, in Fetting, Freien Biihne zum politischen Theater, p. 327. Translation by Elizabeth A. McLain. 65 For the Edvard Munch exhibition at the McMullen Museum, Crystal Tiala and I created a scale model of what Munch’s design studies for Ghosts might have looked like had they been more or less literally translated to the Kammerspiele stage. Unfortunately, this experi- ment was not completed in time to be illustrated here in the catalog, 66 Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, p. 198. 67 Hougen, "Munch and Ibsen,” p. 22. 131 NOTES ON THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A SCENIC DESIGNER’S MODEL FOR IBSEN’S GHOSTS CRYSTAL Tl ALA The invitation troin tlie McMullen Museum to explore the works of Edvard Munch in relation to the works of Henrik Ibsen was, for Scott Cummiirgs and me, an exciting opportunity to explore the con- nection between modernist painting and theater. We quickly focused on Munch's 1906 studies for the production of Ibsen’s Ghosts at Max Reinhardt’s Kammerspiele.^ Although the broad outlines of this historic collaboration are well known, there are still many unresolved issues. The deeper we probed, the more we were intrigued by basic questions about the purpose, art and practice of scene design. Contrary to many reports. Munch did not create detailed design drawings for the set of Ghosts, but produced instead a series of mood-sketches from which Reinhardt and his staff of designers might derive inspiration. But, how did they translate Munch’s two-dimensional render- ings into three-dimensional scenery? No documentary evidence, no photographs, plans, or detailed ver- bal descriptions have survived, so the look of the actual production is unknown. This absence of primary source material led us to pursue an alternative form of theater research: we used our inter- pretation of Munch’s Ghosts sketches to build a scenic designer's model.^ A scenic designer’s model assists the director, lighting designer, costume designer, actors, and other members of the production team in visualizing the play. The director must imagine the changing stage picture from moment to moment and image to image as it progresses through the script. A costume designer needs to coordinate color palettes, textures, and styles with the scene designer to create a uni- fied and visually balanced production and to define each character through clothing and accessories. The lighting designer must enhance the mood and atmosphere, make the actors visible where appro- priate and complement the color in the scenery with the color gels in the lights. As a material tool in the production process, a good model operates as a bridge between the production as imagined (the ideal) and the final product (the real). The effectiveness of a design will be immediately recognizable once tbe model is finished. Robert Edmond (ones, one of the most influential scene designers of the twentieth century, wrote in his book The Dramatic Imagination: A good scene design should be, not a picture, but an image. Scene-designing is not what most people imagine it is: a branch of interior decorating. There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to he dead. Everything that is actual must undergo a strange metamorphosis, a kind of sea-change, before it can become truth in the theatre.^ A set that is appropriate to the production will transform an empty stage into a new world and com pel the audience to accept that world completely, automatically, almost subconsciously. As in a paint ing, the story is told within tlie image. Just as a person's facial expression tells us more than the words, an effective set can cf)mrnunicate more than tlie spoken dialogue. 132 Although Muucli is known for his ability to convey the emotional content ol a tnoment to the viewer, building a set from his sketches is a challenge. The sketches suggest a lloor plan that combines walls, doors, archways and windows into a conventional realistic scenic design known as a "box set.” Here the audience watches the performance through an invisible hut implied lourlh wall. The floor is flat, and the furniture is arranged as it would be in a real house. Although Munch included realistic ele ments in his sketches, he drew the furniture and the architecture with an exaggerated [U‘rs[)e( tive and distorted shapes that emphasize the intense emotions of the [)lay. To what extent was Munch's ex|)res sive style actually captured in production? Would the furniture placed onstage have the misshapen equalities found in the sketch, or did Reinhardt's designers use stock furniture pieces from the theater's props storage? From Reinhardt’s letters, we know that he asked Munch for more sketches detailing the treatment of the furniture, wainscoting, and windows, and that he instructed his staff to look for a wall paper to match the greenish-yellow hue of Munch's painting. These requests suggest that Reinhardt translated the mood-sketches into a traditional, realistic set rather than imitating Munch's distortions. In scenic shops of today, Munch’s images could be executed exactly as drawn. Cotnplete jtlates, sim ilar to a set of architect’s drawings, would define the detail of every constructed item. To diq)licate Munch’s sense of distortion, a variety of shapes could be carved from hard-foam insulation, or molded from fiberglass or heat-sensitive plastics. These techniques, relatively efficient and affordable today, were not available in 1906. But what if they had been? The historical evidence suggests that Munch did not participate in the hands-on construction and decoration of the Ghosts set, even though he was on the premises of the Kammerspiele during part of the production process. But what if he had? Scott and I sought answers to these questions by building a model that represents tbe set of Ghosts as it would have looked if Munch’s mood-sketches if had been implemented literally. Evidence from critics and collaborators can tell us something about Munch’s unusual partnership with Reinhardt and its results, but we could learn even more by experiencing Munch’s scenic design visually. While this experiment is speculative, we believe that it helps us to peer back at Ibsen’s play as Munch envisioned it in 1906. It allows us to imagine the human form of Reinhardt’s actors interacting with the fluid strokes of Munch’s canvas. We can see whether or not Munch’s images retain their impact when trans- lated into three dimensions. Munch’s expressive style creates intense and emotional images that seem to match Ibsen’s drama. Actualizing the artist’s designs helps us learn whether they still move us in the same manner as his painting, leading us to a better understanding of bow to use images for our own theatrical purposes. 1 See also the essay by Scott T. Cummings: "'A Strange Boulder in the Whirlpool of Theater': Edvard Munch, Max Reinhardt, and Ghosts” in this catalog. 2 This model will be included in the exhibition, but was not ready in time to be reproduced in the catalog. 3 Robert Edmond Jones, The Dramatic Imagination |i94i|, New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1969, p. 25. 133 SEX AND PSYCHE, NATURE AND NURTURE, THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL! EDVARD MUNCH AND GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM f CLAUDE CERNUSCHI All in all. 1 think 1 will make out well here in Germany. — Edvard Munch 1 possess the cold joy of power now that Germany has been conquered for my art and that, at least away from home, there is an interest in it, — Edvard Munch I. INTRODUCTION In 1982, the German painter Georg Baselitz paid a direct homage to his Expressionist predecessor, the Norwegian Edvard Munch, by entitling one of his own canvases Man with Sailboat — Munch (hg. 89 ). Eor Baselitz, referencing Munch in the title of his work must have been both generally and topically appropriate. Generally, because Baselitz became widely known, not only for painting figures or land- scapes upside-down, but also for being at the forefront of what is now referred to as Neo Expressionism, a movement that began percolating in Germany as early as the 1960s, and receiving international recog- nition in the 1980s. The significance of Neo-Expressionism, as its name implies, lay in its deliberate res- urrection of an artistic idiom believed to be specifically, if not indigenously, Germanic. The sudden recuperation of this "national" style drew keen critical attention because, after World War II, the dom- inant tendency in art, both in the United States and Europe, was abstraction. Initially, German artists were only too happy to join this tendency. Widely seen as an international movement, abstraction was construed as transcending geographical and national boundaries, as politically and philosophically neu- tral, and as steering clear of anything reminiscent of the ideological excesses of the Nazi regime. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, younger German artists began to resent this deliberate repression (even if it was self-imposed). Avoiding all references to things Germanic struck them as arbitrary at best, and, at worst, comparable to the denials of what transpired in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Reacting against this unspoken mandate, artists such as Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Markus Liipertz not only adopted a conspicuously Neo-Expressionist style, but also began treating specifically German themes. This con troversial shift was not, however, an attempt to glorify — but to come to terms with — the burden and guilt of a traumatic past. It was incumbent upon artists, so they reasoned, to expose this history — not to hide it from public view. The resurrection of the Expressionist style was integral to this strategy. Ever since its emergence in Germany before World War I, historians have described Expressionism as a highly personal, emo five, and self revelatory aesthetic, one whose use of exaggeration and distortion, immediacy and loose- ness of execution, allowed artists to translate subjective states of mind on caiwas with as little mediation 89 Georg Baselitz, Mart with Sailboat Munch, 1982. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. 134 as possible. But Expressionism was appealing (or another reason. Although lre(]uenlly rt'presenled as typically Nordic or Germanic, Ex[)ressionism’s visual distortions and blatant disregard lor aesthetic idealization drew fierce condemnation Irom the Nazis. Ironically, the very formal and philosophical characteristics that, for many aestheticians, endowed Ex[)ressionism with its emotional power and Ger man character, were, for the Nazis, the indices of foreign, degenerate, and Jewish influences. In ly^y, the Nazis organized an exhibition of “Degenerate Art" in Munich where Ex[)iessionist artists took cx'ii ter stage. For Baselitz, then, re-engaging the Expressionist style had significant general and topical implications. In direct opposition to the cerebral detachment of I’op Art, Minimalism, and Gonceptual art. Expressionism allowed for the reintroduction of [jersonal subjectivity, and, in opposition to the international dominance of abstraction after World War 11 , Expressionisrti allowed that reintroduction to dovetail with the resurrection of a lost national tradition. And although the fontier West Germany distrusted any hints of nationalism — practicing a kind of political correctness avant la lettre — the revival of Expressionism managed to steer clear of any such accusation because of the ruthless sup pression of that tradition by the Nazis. Since Munch is by most accounts considered the father of the Expressionist movement, then Baselitz, by paying homage to him, made his own artistic allegiances perfectly clear. In the present intellectual and cultural climate, however, Neo-Expressionism could not completely avoid the accusation of reengendering German nationalism, or of pandering to the ideological interests of the powerful. Critics on the Left have interpreted the return to subjectivity in painting — and, more specifically, the return to figuration typical of the Neo-Expressionistic work of Baselitz — as an aesthet- ically conservative and politically reactionary move. Benjamin Buchloh, for one, declared that the "rediscovery and recapitulation" of "modes of figurative representation in present-day European paint- ing . . . cynically generate a cultural climate of authoritarianism." Totalitarian governments, he argues, abjure the difficulty of modernist abstraction and hope to contravene its transgressive nature by encouraging a more comforting and easily accessible realistic style: i.e., one whose very intelligibility helps uphold and sustain the established order. For Buchloh, there is an "actual system of interaction between protofacism and reactionary art practices."^ This argument comes dangerously close to over simplifying the complex nature of aesthetics and politics, and obfuscates the remarkable subtlety with which these two forces potentially interact — after all, modernist abstraction is no more inherently pro- gressive than figuration is inherently repressive. But although Buchloh's account is less than persua- sive, he nonetheless raises an important and often neglected question about the political implications of Expressionism. Expressionism is frequently represented as a personal and subjective art form whose primary purpose is to provide the recalcitrant, alienated artist with a vehicle for direct expression and communication. But just as Baselitz had nationalistic reasons for re-invoking the Expressionist style. Munch explored certain themes in his work that reinforced the agendas of nineteenth- and twentieth century German nationalistic movements. These movements, in turn, espoused an ideology that was eventually to have a disastrous impact on both European and world history. Intriguingly, although Munch’s first exhibition in Germany was a disastrous affair, he found a recep- tive audience in Germany well before he found one in his native Norway. Especially receptive were the artists who were later to spearhead the Expressionist movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, a movement that — even now — is often touted as quintessentially Germanic. (When the Guggen- heim Museum in New York organized an exhibition of Expressionist work in 1980, it subtitled the show: "A German Intuition.")^ As will be argued below. Munch not only exerted a decisive influence upon the development of German Expressionism, but, paradoxically, the ideological edge of his work, as well as that of his Expressionist followers, often echoed the worldview of intellectuals in Germany 135 whose politieal inelinations anticipated those oi the Nazi regime- the very regime that, ironically enough, was later to reject Expressionism as ''degenerate. ' This, of course, is not to argue (as Huchloh came close to doing with Baselitz) that Munch's w'ork was fascist in any way. But it is to explore the curious wa\s in which Expressionism found itself at the crossroads of multiple and sometimes con- trvufictorv intellectual and political forces in the early twentieth century. By using the scope and nature of Munch s influence on German Expressionism as a springboard for such an investigation, this essay will endea\or to make the nature and implications of these connections more intelligible. Before these connections can he made to emerge in sharper relief, however, it is imperative to sketch out the historical sequence of Munch’s influence on the Expressionist movement. Munch’s first impact on German art predates Baselitz's painting by nearly a century. And although this impact is fre- quentlv mentioned in the literature and the history of Munch’s visits to Germany and his interactions w i th artists and intellectuals there is amply documented, the extent of that influence in formal, icono graphic, and ideological terms has received less attention than it deserves.^ Our story begins in 1892 when Munch, already a controversial figure in his native Norway, was unexpectedly invited to exhibit in Berlin by its most prestigious aesthetic organization: the Verein Berliner Kiinstler (Association of Berlin .Artists). The exhibition so scandalized the public (not to mention the very artists who had invited .Munch without any foreknowledge of his work) that it was closed within a week of its opening. Accord- ing to Walter Leistikow, a Verein member, his conservative colleagues were so infuriated over Munch's work as to have exclaimed: "Oh misery, misery! Why, it’s entirely different from the way we paint, ft is new. foreign, disgusting, common! Get rid of the paintings, throw them out!”'' The show was an orga- nizational fiasco, but it also gave Munch instant notoriety. The German artist Lovis Corinth even stated that Munch had, in fact, "won the greatest victory. Overnight he became the most famous man in Ger many; his show immediately moved to Munich, and from there to other German cities.”^ Indeed, soon thereafter. Munch was invited to exhibit in Cologne and Diisseldorf. Given the consequences, the motivation of the Verein to invite Munch in the first place has intrigued art historians. The original invitation came from Adelsteen Normann, a compatriot of Munch famous for painting Northern seascapes and sailing scenes highly popular with the German public. Yet his uncontroversial style had nothing in common with Munch’s. Some scholars have therefore specu- lated that members of the German art establishment held no genuine interest in Munch, but had ulte- rior motives for engineering a scandal.^ Since long-standing disagreements were reaching a fever pitch among members of the Verein, the invitation was extended because certain members sought a pretext to provoke a final, irreparable rift among the organization’s warring factions. Exhibiting Munch’s work, they must have reasoned, would surely do the trick. After all, even Impressionism was still considered radical in Berlin at the time and was rarely shown in the German capital (perhaps because of its for eign — i.e., French — origin). As the conservative members marshaled their forces, others retorted (irre- spective of their loyalty to Munch) that closing the exhibition was an ina[)propriate way of treating an invited guest. After bitter discussions, the conservative members prevailed by a vote of 120 to 103. Some 70 members then stormed out of the hall in protest. The "Munch Affair” — as it was called in the press thus provided the dissenting members with the perfect excuse to establish a new group: the Freie Vereinicjuncj Berliner Kiinstler (or Free Association of Berlin Artists). Unwittingly, Munch had thus been ensnared in Berlin artistic [)olitics. And a[)propriately. Max Liebermann, one of the Free Asso ciatif)n s most forward-looking members, would, alter establishing the Berlin Secession in 1898, rein vile .Munrh in 1902 to exhibit in the very city that had lirst been so scandalized by his work. Whether the srandal of 1892 had been [)re-calculated or not, it made Munch an overnight sensation in Germany. It is there ifiat his work would eventually have its most immediate and lasting impact, especially on a 136 group of younger artists wliose artistic and pliiloso[)hical motivations were' remarkably similar to those of Baselitz a century later. What proved so influential (and controversial) about Munch’s work on a formal level was his intro tluction of radical distortions in the realm of anatomical form and local color, as well as his rough phys ical execution and exaggerations of spatial perspective. On a [)hiloso[)hical level, Munch also reject(>d empiricism — the central premise of the two most important artistic movements of the time: Realism and Impressionism — and insisted on art’s responsibility, not to record visual sensation passively, hut to translate subjective psychological states. Observation, he posited, is never dispassionate or objective, but always predicated on an individual's state of mind. "One perceives everything quite differently," he declared, "when one is warm than when one is cold. And it is precisely this, this and this alone, that gives art a deeper meaning, ft is the person, life, one must bring out. ... ft isn’t the chair which is to be painted, but that which a man has felt by seeing it."^ Munch further dismissed Naturalism as mere "craft,” insisting that "salvation” would only come from Symbolism, i.e., from an art form that, in his own words, "places mood and thought above everything and only uses reality as a symbol."* Munch’s deci- sion to take "leave of Impressionism and Realism”^ was underscored in his Saint-Cloud Manifesto, notes that summed up his philosophy of art as an attempt to capture the range of experiences that comprise a person’s inner life. "There ought no longer to be painted interiors, people who read and women knit- ting," Munch wrote, "They ought to be living human beings who breathe and feel, suffer and love.”^° For younger German artists maturing during the first decade of the twentieth century, and who were later to spearhead the Expressionist movement, Munch’s example (in concert with that of van Gogh and Matisse) provided the very stimulus that Munch would later provide for Baselitz. A pivotal event in the development of Expressionism was the founding of the artistic group Briicke (Bridge) in 1905 by four architectural students in Dresden: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl, and Karl Schmidt (who later added his birthplace, Rottluff, to his name). Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller, and Emil Nolde, among others, also joined the group before internal strife and disagreement caused it to disband in 1913. Briicke did not have a specific program except an exaltation of youth and a rejection of con- ventions, be they artistic or societal. Impressionism, even as it came to be accepted in Germany, struck these younger artists, as it did Munch, as scientifically objective, emotionally neutral, and ultimately superficial. "Flow things appear to us," Kirchner wrote, "is what intrigues us in nature, not the objective form and configuration. And it is around appearance that art revolves, not around the actual objective form.”^^ Analogously, Nolde admitted that the "techniques of Impressionism suggested to me only a means, but no satisfactory end. Gonscientious and exact imitation of nature does not create a work of art. . . A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one’s own spirituality.”^^ Whether any art form (even Impressionism) can actually achieve an "exact imitation of nature” is, of course, a problematic assertion. But it is not a question with which the Expressionists were unduly concerned. Munch provided them not only with a formal example to follow, but also with a powerful rhetorical tool to legitimize their formal distortions on the basis of the psychological insights those very distortions allegedly revealed. These links and similarities notwithstanding, it is imperative to note that many of the Expression ists later denied having been influenced by Munch, or claimed to have seen Munch’s work only after having already invented their mature styles. While writing his pioneering study of German Expres- sionism, the art historian Peter Selz corresponded with some of the aging but key figures of the move- ment to set the record straight. He quotes (not without suspicion) Heckel’s insistence that he first came across paintings by Munch only around 1908 or 1909.^* In a later interview, Heckel maintained that had he and his colleagues been aware of Munch during their formative years they would surely have invited 137 liim to participate in their exhibitions. Selz also quotes Schmidt Rottlnfl’s recollection that although works hv \ an Gogh and Munch were readily available in Dresden around 1906, he "was not able to do much with them at the time.”^^ Selz even relates that Kirchner would ostensibly fly into a rage at the very mention of Munch's name.^^ 'let Selz warns that these accounts should not he accepted at face value. Pechstein and Nolde never denied seeing Munch’s work in their early years; and Briicke is known to ha\e indeed invited Munch to participate in an exhibition as early as 1906, although how or even whether Munch answered is unknown.^* Many Expressionist artists, in fact, have become infamous for backdating their works, presumably to give the impression that their styles had matured independently of external intluences.^^ Denying Munch’s impact was simply part of the same strategy. Munch is equally important for having sensitized the Expressionists to earlier tendencies in North- ern art that circumvented the idealization associated with the measured and restrained Classicism of .Antiquity. Since Classicism was increasingly seen as foreign to German culture and incapable of reflect- ing contemporary conditions, the Expressionists' attention turned to German art of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance — e.g., the works of Lucas Cranach and Matthias Griinewald — and, most notably, to German hfteenth- and sixteenth-century woodcuts. Not only was this aesthetic tradition an indige- nous one, but its formal exaggerations also anticipated tbe very experiments tbe Expressionists were themselves making. Since those distortions were believed to exacerbate the emotional and commu- nicative power (rather than the purely descriptive function) of art, then Munch's call to reject the pas- sive transcription of appearances in favor of evoking psychological states could have struck his Expressionist followers as typical of a specifically Nordic or Germanic worldview. On this account, art splintered along various geographical, chronological, as well as cultural and philosophical fault lines; North/South, antique/medieval, Classical/Romantic, rational/emotional, ide- alized/distorted, Apollonian/Dionysian, material/spiritual, and so on. Given the Expressionists’ disillu- sionment with the empiricism of Realism and Impressionism, it is therefore hardly surprising that the alternative approach evidenced in German medieval art (and its alleged ability to suggest subjective experience) would have been particularly appealing. On one level, of course, the prototypes artists chose to emulate may simply reveal their own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes. But at the time the Expres- sionists were painting, many art theorists and critics were also pondering how artistic styles reflect the specihc characteristics of a nation, people, or race. The German nationalist critic Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, for example, an acquaintance and great admirer of Munch, drew a marked distinction between Erench and German art. French art, he wrote, is "objective, precise, real" on account of a French "skeptical" turn of mind. Conversely, it "continues to be Germanic," he adds, "to have an inner eye for the inner being, to understand the universe not critically but to feel it fantastically — and nowhere was this power more strongly preserved than there where the Germanic essence was most strongly pre- served, in the North, in Scandinavia."^* Yet Moeller’s distinction was more prescriptive than descrip- tive. If he admired Munch, it was, arguably, because the Norwegian’s celebration of subjectivity intersected his own nationalistic interpretation of art. No less importantly, a similar mentality was strongly entrenched among the artists of the Expressionist movement. The "recognition” of "the divi sion of foreign and German,” according to Emil Nolde, was "the first decisive step towards a new spir itual order.’’^* Expressionism, therefore, was not simply an artistic attempt to convey the intangible realm of emotion and psycbological states, it was also j)art and parcel of a broader strategy of drawing artis- tic and philosophical distinctions on the basis of national character. Yet those distinctions did not describe "objective” pro[)erties of works of art; on the contrary, those distinctions were inextricable from, and direct reflections of, the biased, patriotic sentiment of the persons making them. Reinforcing the im|)ortance of these divisions was the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. To be siire, Nietzsche was no German |)atriot, and all forms of nationalism were anathema to him. But this 138 90 90 Edvard Munch, Portrait of Nietzsche, 1906. Private Collection. 91 Erich Heckel, Portrait of Nietzsche, 1905. Private Collection. did not prevent German nationalists like Moeller Irom daiming him as one ol tiu'ir own. l or the Hxpres sionists in {tarticular, Nietzsche's rejection ol deductive rt'asoning and penchant lor making categori cal declarations bolstered their own celehralion ol instinct and intuition. Niet/.sch('’s call lor l)ionysi;m "agitation" and "intoxication,” which he proclaimed "indisptmsahle" for "any sort ol aesthetic activity or perception, made an equally powerful impression. Like Moeller, Munch was also a great admirer ol Nietzsche, and executed several posthumous [lortraits ol the (ierman philoso[)h(>r (fig. 90 ) at the re(]iu‘st of the Swedish hanker Ernst Thiel, who was translating some of Nietzsche's works into Swedish, and helped found the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar.^^ Nietzsche [ilayed so important a role in Munch's worldview that Michael Strawser and others have persuasively argued that Nietzsche's "|)hiloso[)hy ol art and psychology" provides a key "hermeneutical hypothesis to better exfilain" Munch's artistic [)ro duction.^^ Munch had probably been exposed to Nietzsche's ideas as a result of his association with the cultural critic Hans jaeger and other bohemian intellectuals in his native Kristiania (now Oslo). For young intellectuals staking a position at the margins of society and critical of what they saw as the hum drum monotony and hypocrisy of bourgeois existence, the German philosopher's exultation of the Ubermensch (an individual who is not the product of his culture, but overcomes its limitations and restrictions) must have been especially attractive. The Kristiania Bohemians' rejection of strict moral codes (and of all aspects of Christian teaching) also mirror Nietzsche's severe philosophical criticisms of Christianity and desire to move beyond the confines of conventional morality. In addition, Niet- zsche's claim that Ubermenschen were most likely artists, saints, or philosophers would have provided artists who, like Munch, were first rejected by peers and misunderstood by their public,^^ with the for- titude to persevere. Nietzschean ideas about the superiority of the Ubermensch, in fact, even embold- ened artists to attribute any dismay over their art — conveniently — to the "inferiority" of their audience. This disdain was likewise fed by Nietzsche’s view that freedom was achieved only at the cost of great emotional suffering. Analogously, Munch claimed his personal isolation to be a prerequisite for, if not the source of, his ability to create — a highly Nietzschean point of view. Along similar lines, Munch’s first biographer. Curt Glaser, wrote that "the isolation that he needs is the greatest luxury Munch permits himself."^'' Ragnar Hoppe even recalls Munch having said the following; "With the pass- ing of the years, 1 have become more and more unsuited to the company of my fellow men ... for six years I haven’t been to a single party, or even a guest at the homes of my best friends.”^^ Separateness from society may result in alienation, but it also provides, according to Nietzsche, a privileged point of insight from which to evaluate that society more incisively. Munch, of course, may not have been quite as isolated and unappreciated as the image of the misunderstood genius he wanted to project. Many of Munch's early supporters and biographers, as Patricia Berman has recently remarked, have stressed "the gulf between Muiich's production and the work of his contemporaries by virtue of psychologi- cal complexity and alienation.”^^ But this account may be more fiction than fact. The creation of this image — what Berman calls the "mythic Munch" — can be attributed, at least in part, to attempts by Munch’s supporters to paint the artist as a kind of Nietzschean Ubermensch. In a particularly hyper- bolic example, for instance, Costa Svenaeus went so far as to claim that "one can without reservation characterize Munch as a Nietzschean overman."^^This is not, of course, to say that Munch did not think of himself in these terms. But acknowledging Nietzsche's influence does not necessarily imply that the philosopher's ideas should be accepted uncritically. Nietzsche was as influential as he was, arguably, because his concepts could be construed as valorizing many of the artist’s own visual experiments, and, no less importantly, because those same concepts could be used to turn public criticism into unintended praise. Not surprisingly, Nietzsche also held a strong fascination for the members of Briicke, who like Munch also executed posthumous portraits of the philosopher (fig. 91 ). When Kirchner first met Heckel, the latter was allegedly declaiming entire passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustrm^ And it is a 139 common assumption in the literature on German Expressionism (although some scholars are in dis- agreenumt)‘* that the very title Briicke was horrowed Irom the following line in Zarathustra: ‘‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”^° Nietzsche used this meta{)hor to stress that the con- trast between Mensch and Uhermcnsch (“man” and "overman”) was equivalent to that between ape anti man. The members of Briicke. given their own rejection of academic conventions, anil desire to estab- lish a new society based on youthful principles, must have taken to Nietzsche's pronouncements like ducks to water. “Living apart and shy," wrote Nolde, "in ascetic self-denial, brooding and alone — this was mv lot."^^ Like Munch, they fashioned their self image after Nietzsche’s views that art lies not at the margins of cultural concerns hut at their very core, that art plays a crucial role in renewing a per- son s inner life, and, most notably, that great artists cpialify as Obermenschen. Nietzsche’s exultation of genius (artistic as well as philosophical), and his unceremonious disdain of those he called “incurably mediocre” and "the mob,” thus encouraged artists to cultivate their indi- \ idual personalities at the expense of what connected them to a broader social fabric. As a result, art was seen in highly individualistic, even self confessional terms. Echoing Nietzsche’s famous dictum that one "should write with blood,” Muncb proclaimed that "All art, literature and music must be born in your heart ’s blood.”^^ He also told Ludvig Ravensberg: ‘‘My pictures are my diaries.”^^ Among the themes most amenable to this purpose is, of course, the self portrait, a recurring thematic obsession among the Expressionists. We will turn our attention to this theme shortly, but, before we do, it is also instructive to stress that, for Munch and the Expressionists, individuality could be also be communi cated by formal means. ft was a common assumption among these painters that an artist’s psychological and emotional state could be directly translatable througb the artist's bodily movements while working on the can- vas. Individual and idiosyncratic, physical activity was believed to be so closely reflective of an artist's mental condition as to be unimitatible and unrepeatable. To be sure, Munch’s looseness of execution, his proclivity to scratch and lacerate the surface of his paintings, and to allow multiple corrections to remain visible in the hnal work, were construed as signs of ineptitude by hostile critics. But for artists sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of an artist’s individual touch, these were clear manifestations of the artist’s emotional as well as technical involvement in his work. For the German Expressionists, spon- taneity and impulsiveness were the only means of circumventing traditional modes of execution and heeding Nietzsche’s call for "intoxication,” "extreme agitation," and a "discharging of emotions.”^'' In a let- ter to a patron, Emil Nolde admitted to employing a "certain amount of carefree playfulness” in his pieces. Yet if he “were to ‘correct,’ in the academic sense” traces of his mistakes, or changes of mind, then “this effect would not even be vaguely approached.”^^ Similarly, Ericb Heckel proclaimed that "every- thing programmatic is to be rejected.”^^ Of course, thick applications of paint and deliberate looseness of execution were as much indebted to Vincent van Gogb and Henri Matisse as to Munch. But Munch's example in print-making along with that of Paul Gauguin and lesser-known figures such as )oseph Sattler and Paul Herman became partic- ularly influential for rekindling an interest in tbe expressive possibilities of the woodcut. Munch’s prints were widely known in Germany, mostly due to the efforts of Gustav Schiefler, who, in 1906, compiled and published the first volume of what was to become the standard catalog of Munch's graphic work. In addition to championing Munch's cause in Germany, Schiefler also had close ties with Briicke artists, and even introduced Munch to Nolde. In Munch’s treatment of the wood, the Expressionists must have recognized an attitude strikingly similar to their own. First, unlike etchings or engravings (which .Munch and the Expressif)tiists also practiced), woodcuts allowed the grain to be visible to great efiect in the final {)roduct (see The Kiss, no. 31 ); and, second, because wood cutting is a subtractive process. 140 the entire task becomes an arduous operation. As a result, tlie [)hysical strain ol the process can be made into an integral part of tbe work’s final appearance (see Mnnch’s Self l\)rtr