The art of Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian painter, and the extent of his influence are little known in America. The Institute, therefore, has special pleasure in presenting as the first event of its fall program, the Edvard Munch Retrospective Exhibition that opens with a preview for members on October 10th and closes on November 9th. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston, with the active help and generous subsidy from the Norwegian Government, the exhibition is the most comprehensive of its kind ever held outside Norway. It includes sixty-five oils and watercolors and one hundred prints from Norwegian public and private collections. In addition to organizing the exhibition, the Institute of Contemporary Art has published an excellent illustrated catalogue of the exhibition, the most important monograph on the painter to date. This may be purchased at the Information Desk of the Institute.Through his choice of basic human emotions as his theme and through his handling of it, Munch has created an art of universal appeal. Like van Gogh, he abandoned the reproduction of nature and sought to create images that would reflect his most subjective feelings. Although expressionism, based on the manipulation of forms for emotional effect, has always existed as part of the indigenous tradition of the North, Munch was the first to develop it along such purely personal lines. His conception of art contributed both to the expressionist movement in Germany and to the acceptance of an attitude toward visual experience new in his youth but now shared by painters in every country.Munch was born near Loyten in southern Norway in 1863, but spent the larger part of his life near Oslo. He came from an old Norwegian family that included scholars of distinction as well as farmers and seafarers. The son of an army doctor, he was one of five children in a closely-knit family that was consequently severely affected by the death of Munch’s mother when Edvard was only five. This event turned his father into a religious fanatic whose almost insane moods permanently wounded the young painter. The family suffered a second great shock when Munch’s sister, Sophie, died. Munch was fourteen at the time and was never to forget Sophie’s illness and death, which inspired the many versions of The Sick Child and The Death Chamber. One of the latter, a lithograph reproduced in this Bulletin, exemplifies Munch’s use of his background and personal experience in his art.Munch began to paint at seventeen, first at the State School in Oslo, and later with Christian Krohg, a Norwegian realist who worked in the manner of Courbet and Manet. His talent and originality were evident from the start. However, he could not find adequate means of expression for his precocious subject matter in the prevailing academic style. His desire to record basic human emotions prompted him to search for new symbolic forms and an approach in painting comparable to the psychoanalytical approach of the great writers, Ibsen, Bjornson and Jaeger, whose company he frequented in Oslo.Realizing that his success depended on achieving a balance between form and content, Munch turned to Paris in 1885 and again in 1889 in search of new trends. He assimilated impressionism immediately, as may be seen in his Evening Hour and A Spring Day on the Karl Johan, his first popular painting, but he soon abandoned it for other experiments. During his three years in Paris, Munch did not imitate, but absorbed what he could use to increase the meaning of his own art. Although he felt a natural affinity for van Gogh, whose brother and whose works he knew, he actually took more from Gauguin. This is evident in comparing the simplified treatment in his Yellow Boat with that in Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape in the Institute’s collection. By the time Munch left Paris, he had developed a style that he was to employ with variations for the rest of his life. He had also conceived a characteristically ambitious plan to paint a monumental series dealing with life, love and death, called The Frieze of Life.Invited to exhibit in Berlin, Munch went to Germany in 1892. Despite the fact that his work caused such a controversy that the exhibition was closed after one week, he found Berlin receptive to his art and decided to stay there, remaining for sixteen years, the most productive of his career. His decision redirected the course of modern painting, and the successive exhibitions of his paintings in Germany pointed the way for Nolde and Kirchner, Beckmann and Kokoschka. Munch found in Berlin both a market for his paintings and a sympathetic and sophisticated group of friends, which included the Swedish novelist, Strindberg, whose pessimistic philosophy he shared. It was in this atmosphere that Munch continued his series of The Frieze of Life. In addition to The Death Chamber and The Yellow Boat, symbolic respectively of the dejection of death and of loneliness, Munch painted the gamut of human emotions. The titles of his paintings, The Kiss, Man and Woman on the Shore and The Dance of Life suggest his themes and the strength of the human ideas that were the driving force behind his art.Munch completed his greatest masterpieces, The Cry and Anxiety, while in Berlin. They portray man in the grip of something beyond human control and, once seen, they can never be forgotten. The Cry, illustrated in this Bulletin, represents Munch’s ultimate perfection of balance between form and content. Munch has simplified the forms to convey his poignant message, exaggerating the diagonal lines to create the illusion of distance and repeating the curved lines to suggest sound, as successfully as sound has even been suggested in a painting. Munch followed the same handling of restless lines and contrasting colors in Anxiety. While The Cry deals with the suffering of an individual, Anxiety unmasks that of a middle-class group.Although Munch did not turn to printmaking until he had perfected his style in painting, he quickly mastered the technical difficulties and exploited every medium with amazing ingenuity. His first etchings and lithographs make use of the themes he painted in the 1880s and 1890s, the etchings repeating his portraits and the lithographs, subjects from The Frieze of Life. The latter are the more important because the medium afforded him both greater scale and range of contrasts. However, it was in the field of woodcut that he found completely sympathetic that he made his most significant contributions. Impressed by Gauguin’s innovations, Munch continued to break up surfaces with boldness and inventiveness. He also experimented with color printing, which he carried to undreamed of lengths. His Winter Landscape, reproduced on page 119, recalls his debt to Gauguin. Here Munch has distorted space to create mood. No other painter of his time mastered all three fields of printmaking with the outstanding results that may be seen in the one hundred breathtaking examples in the exhibition.After the turn of the century munch turned to the problem of painting the effects of nature in relation to mood. Girls on the Bridge, reproduced on the cover of this Bulletin, represents his successful treatment of a lyrical subject. The setting is the pier at Aasgaardstrand, Munch’s summer home, painted in the light of a mid-summer night. The figures are turned from the spectator, but carefully placed so that they invite the spectator to join their musing. The paintings of this period are more objective than Munch’s earlier works. Melancholia, the very embodiment of loneliness, and Boys, Girls and Ducks, depicting the cruelty of children when organized in gangs, show Munch as a detached, but understanding observer of life.An unhappy love affair resulted in Munch’s nervous breakdown in 1908, when he left Berlin for Copenhagen and then Oslo. The Red-Haired Nude portrays the troublemaker. On his return to Norway he received a knighthood, the honor of a purchase by the National Gallery, and a commission to execute an important series of murals for the University of Oslo. He settled at Ekely near Oslo, repeating the themes of earlier paintings which he had reluctantly sold and painting perceptive portraits and evocative landscapes. One of the last of his remarkable series of self-portraits called Between the Clock and the Bed, showing the aging painter between symbols of death, is reproduced in this Bulletin. Thoughts of death had lurked in the shadows of Munch’s mind, but here he has shown himself a somber figure in the brightly colored surroundings in which he had placed his models a decade before. He is ill at ease standing as if to concentrate all his attention on the ticking of the long-case clock waiting to hear it sound its final tocsin. Although seventy-seven years old when this portrait was painted, he was still a strong man, possessing a strength that was surprising to himself and his sister.When the Nazis took over Germany, Munch broke off his relations with his friends there. In 1939, the German Government removed his works from the State Museums and sold them at auction at Oslo. Unfortunately, Munch did not live to see the liberation of Norway, but died in 1944. Like the English painter, Turner, he left a magnificent bequest, giving to the City of Oslo over one thousand of his paintings and seven hundred prints. The citizens of Oslo plan to build a museum to house the collection as soon as possible. In the meantime, the Municipality of Oslo and the Norwegian Government have made it possible for the Minneapolis public to see Munch’s great works without traveling to Norway.Referenced Works of Art

1. Girls on the Bridge, 1901, by Edvard Munch, Norwegian, 1863-1944
   Lent by The National Gallery of Oslo to The Munch Retrospective Exhibition
2. The Cry, 1893. One of Munch’s best known paintings
   From the Oslo Municipal Collections
3. Self Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed, 1940
   From the Oslo Municipal Collections
4. The Death Chamber, lithograph, 1896. The Munch family at Sophie’s last illness
   From the Oslo Municipal Collections
5. Winter Landscape, woodcut, 1898
   From the Oslo Municipal Collections

In the summer of 1892, Edvard Munch held an exhibition of about fifty paintings in the Tostrup building on Karl Johan, the main artery of life and culture in Christiania, the present Oslo. Included were some works done while a stipendiat in Nice and Paris the year before and during the winter of 1891-1892 that indicated an influence of French Impressionism in composition, color range and content. The major portion of the exhibition was, however, far removed from the realm of sun-drenched vignettes of the out-of-doors; rather, essays cast in somber tones depicting states of mind and emotion. The titles of the paintings give some insight into their content—Kiss, Anxiety, Love and Sorrow—but a few dealt with the gamut of human experience that the artist was attempting to fathom. These were signal efforts in a program which was to occupy the artist for more than thirty years, and the first exhibition of paintings that were to become the nucleus of an ideologically related pictorial series known as the Frieze of Life. The ideas which were to occupy the artist in this long cycle of paintings can perhaps be best explained by Munch's own entry in his daybook of 1889, written in St. Cloud. While in the company of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Danish poet, he wrote: "No longer should one paint interiors and people who read and women who knit. There should be living beings who breathe and feel and who love and suffer. I shall paint a series of such pictures. People will understand the sacredness of them, and they will remove their hats as if they were in church." This first fruits of this program met with a contrary reaction. The storm of criticism and invective bordered on the psychotic. The conservative Aftenposten curiously enough, in spite of derisive intent, approached somewhat Munch's subject matter preoccupations in their statement, "Here there is no longer talk of Nature, only eccentric fanaticism, delirium drunk moods and fever sick hallucinations." The exhibition was a succés de sensation for everyone to see what "mad Munch" was exhibiting. Held over for fourteen days, it was of major importance in the young career of Edvard Munch and was to have considerable impact on the history of art in Germany.Adelsten Normann, a Norwegian who lived in Berlin and painted landscapes in the best Düsseldorf tradition of naturalistic realism, saw the Tostrup exhibition and enthusiastically approached Munch to show his work in the German capital. Normann, as a member of the exhibition committee of the Verein Berliner Künstler, prevailed upon its president, Anton Von Werner, portrait painter to the Kaiser, and the "highly interesting and talented new Norwegian artist" was duly invited to exhibit in November with the finest salons at the Architektenhaus placed at his disposal.Armed with forty-five paintings and the 200 kroner (50 dollars) from admissions, the artist departed in high spirits to reap renown and fortune on the continent, despite the vitriolic reviews and personal affronts in the Norwegian press. Christian Krohg, his former teacher, wished him God-speed with his offer of financial aid but the latter was refused with a significant slap on the billfold.The exhibition at the Union of Berlin Artists opened on November 5, 1892, and within a week the membership of the Union was irrevocably divided into two camps. Munch and his paintings were the stormy feature of the art-conscious press, and after a violent controversy involving both moral and artistic issues a union motion in favor of suppression carried by a vote of 120 to 105. A greater part of the minority resigned in protest and shortly thereafter this group became the nucleus for the famed Berliner Sezession which under Max Liebermann championed Impressionism and modern art in Germany.Munch weathered the storm and wrote to his aunt that it was "unbelievable that something as innocent as painting could arouse such an uproar." He noted as well that he had gained six pounds and never felt better. In the confusion of events, he made the mistake of agreeing to exhibitions of his work in Düsseldorf and Cologne instead of capitalizing on the scandale. However, in January 1893, under a great Norwegian flag ordered from Norway, a second Berlin exhibition was held at the Equitable Palast. This exhibition was very successful and the papers were again full of die Munchfrage. While his paintings were "on tour," Munch rented a studio in Berlin and thus began a very productive and creative exile from his native land lasting, but for summer visits, until 1908.His first painting in Berlin as a portrait of August Strindberg, the Swedish writer, who, together with Stanislas Przybyszewski, a Polish poet and novelist, became his closest Berlin friends. It was through these writers of controversial social documents that Munch was again to be surrounded by men in the advance guard of literature and philosophic thought. In the eighties he had been associated with a group of radicals in the realm of social and ethical behavior known as the Christiania Bohemians. The Berlin group by comparison was more sophisticated, more subjective and perhaps more psychologically oriented. Munch received many stimuli from this new intellectual environment but the character of the themes for his projected cycle of paintings dealing with the great forces of nature—love and death—had been established before his arrival in Berlin. The effect of these new associations was to turn his thoughts into more Freudian channels. This resulted in a more direct expression of mood or emotion on psychic rather than narrative or literary terms. It should be noted that Munch painted his way to expressions of his inner feelings, and the search for forms capable of conveying these feelings without ambiguity was both intense and laborious. Neither was this form—vocabulary static at any time in his career, for he was constantly reworking and reshaping his expressive means to enhance their psychological impact.Three paintings from 1893-94, Vampire, Jealously, and Ashes, are particularly revealing of the artist's struggle for expression and the variations in technical means he used to achieve his ends. He repeats the dejected profile male form in Vampire and Ashes but changes the attitude of the woman completely. But in both the woman's hair figures as symbols of entrapment and expressions of the power of her sex. The forest interior of Ashes increases the remoteness and distance between the couple while the sweeping curvilinear enclosing lines in Vampire sustain the subjection theme. Jealously, which also deals with sexual problems, exploits another phase of subjection or possession, but reveals the man again powerless when confronted by the animalism of woman. The content of these works might appear to be Strindbergian but absence of rivalry or conflict between the sexes in these and other works of the early Berlin period indicates no dependence on his writings. If literary inspiration were to be assessed it might be traced to Jens Jacobsen's Niels Lynne which Munch might have known through Gunnar Heiberg, a Norwegian writer of the Berlin circle.The models for both figures and content in these Berlin paintings spring directly from the Strindberg, Przybyszewski-and-wife, Munch interaction in Berlin. Strindberg in his autobiographical Inferno spells out the relationship of Dagny Przybyszewski to the three men, but it is sufficient for these purposes that Strindberg related that he replaced Munch in her affections before she married the Pole. Dagny was the ideological focus or model for the woman in these paintings and Munch includes himself in Ashes and Vampire as the victim or "the offering" at the altar of all-consuming love. The amazing similarity of Munch's portrait of Przybyszewski to the overwrought man in the Jealousy of 1894 leads one to suspect that he (Przybyszewski) was the inspiration for this representation. Indeed, this observation is borne out by Munch's own admission to his friend, Rolf Stainersen, in an unguarded moment many years later.Historically as well as artistically important, the Institute's Jealousy is more than intimately connected to the subject matter, form and color solutions of these paintings. A work of the period 1895-1897, it represents a summation or synthesis—Munch called the process "crystallization"—of his thinking and his expression on erotic themes. Munch thought of his paintings, again, as ideologically interrelated statements and was inclined to manipulate or orchestrate his established forms into new visual and emotional harmonies. This can be seen in the central head in the Institute's Jealousy, which is a refinement of Przybyszewski used in the Jealously of 1894, which in turn is related to the portrait. Much less naturalistic or detailed in execution, this passage represents the development towards greater freedom in expression as a result of mastery of formal problems. The woman, boldly painted in rich color and enclosed in a mandorla similar to that in the Vampire, is also an advance and consolidation of developments seen in the earlier works. The long hair now falling in great waves of warm color rather than the ropy strands of the earlier works is more emotionally charged and less tentative. The profile view is related to the Eve in Jealously of 1894 and points ahead to the figure of the maiden in the major work, Woman in Three Stages, in the Rasmus Meyer Collection, Bergen. The bearded old man at the left is something of an enigma. Used often as a symbol for the concept underlying "the wages of sin," and in reference to vitality lost in continually giving new expression to love, it alludes perhaps to the state of dejection in Ashes. The confrontation of woman and man—in youth and old age—may be a symbol of the inaccessibility of woman to man throughout his life, which would account for the absence of a contextual setting. The painting is a profound statement of inner emotional experience externalized in means designed to convey the intensity of that feeling, and as such is a very successful work of art.Johan H. Langaard, Director of the Oslo Municipal Collections and of the Munch Museum and recognized as the leading Munch scholar, suggests that the painting is a commemoration of Przybyszewski's death and should therefore be titled "Tragedy." The painting, published here for the first time, has borne the title "Jealously" from the time it was given by the artist to his close friend and champion in the press, Jappe Nilssen. Some confusion might arise if the name is retained, but considering the origins of the painting and the environment of its inspiration, its present title is justified. A part of the Frieze of Life and an excellent example of Edvard Munch's art in the flowering of his expressionist period, this painting will be a fine addition to the Institute's growing collection of important expressionist paintings.Ray A. Boe
Department of Art
University of MinnesotaReferenced Works of Art

1. Jealousy. Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944) c. 1897. Oil on canvas, 30 3/4" x 47". Lillian Z. Turnblad Fund.A deeply personal statement of inner experience synthesizing Munch's ideas on Freudian themes.
2. Jealousy. Edvard Munch, 1894. Oil on canvas. Rasmus Meyer Collection, Bergen.One of Munch's earlier paintings on the Jealousy theme conveying through motifs from the artist's own life the tension and paralysis of inner conflict.
3. Vampire. Edvard Munch, 1893-94. Oil on canvas. Oslo Municipal Collection.Woman's hair as a symbol of man's subjection, a frequent theme in Munch's Frieze of Life.
4. Portrait of Stanislas Przybyszewski. Edvard Munch 1893 or 1895. Pastel. Oslo Municipal Collections.Munch's poet-novelist friend in Berlin.
5. Ashes. Edvard Munch, 1894. Oil on canvas. Oslo, National Gallery.Self-portrait of the artist conceived as a symbol of dejection.
6. Jealousy (detail). Edvard Munch, 1897. Oil on canvas. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.The simplified execution of the man's head and sweeping design of the woman's hair mark a new synthesis of expression and mastery of formal means in Munch's art.