Why Edvard Munch is a painter for this time of great anxiety

Opinion: the Norwegian artist recognised that his experience of anxiety, dread, illness and death were necessary for his art

By Manus Charleton, Sligo Institite of Technology

Edvard Munch's paintings were shaped by both anxiety, that stemmed in part from a virus as well as illness and death, and a salutary appreciation of nature. When he was five, his mother died of tuberculosis, and his older sister Sophie, to whom he was particularly attached, also later died of it. His only brother died from pneumonia and a younger sister Laura spend much of her life in a mental institution.

Munch himself was ill as a child, and he spent a period in a sanitorium in 1908 after a physical and psychological breakdown. Until then, his paintings had predominantly expressed anxiety, but this marked a turning point to acceptance of the world and himself.

He recognised that his experience of anxiety and dread were necessary for his art. He painted these emotions in paintings such as The Sick Child and Death in the Sickroom. He also painted related emotions of longing and desire, notably in Melancholy and Jealousy. Anxiety is particularly evident in his most famous and iconic painting The Scream. Here, his brushstrokes enclose a gaunt figure with horror-struck eyes clasping his face between long hands, while an uncontrollable shriek issues from the dark inside his wide open mouth. The figure’s location on a precarious-looking bridge, with swirling water beneath and swirling red-raw sky above, increases the fear and dread.

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From the Tate, curator Nicholas Cullinan introduces Tate Modern's 2012 Edvard Munch exhibition

Munch drew from the symbolist movement in painting. In Evening on Karl Johan, as in The Scream, there is an obvious symbolism of a darker reality lurking behind social convention. It lies in the almost skeletal faces of the fashionably-dressed, well-to-do pedestrians with their piercing dots for eyes, and in the haunted pale yellow light in the windows of the houses.

While his personal anxiety is explicit, the paintings are not reducible to it. In art, raw experience and intuition are transformed into works that can endure and attract universal recognition. Munch’s works achieve this effect. They project the kind of anxiety that acts on us subliminally, with its underlying source remaining hidden. They may project social and political undercurrents. His paintings have been seen as a weathervane for something deeply disturbing that was about to emerge in human affairs, such as did emerge in the horrors of the First and Second World Wars.

From Sotheby's, how The Scream became one of the most iconic artworks of all time

Today, we are saturated with anxious messages about health, the economy, society and politics and Munch's paintings come across more readily now for having picked up on something deeply disturbing. It is a measure of their power that it is easy to connect the anxiety in them to anxiety about the detrimental ways in which we are exploiting nature, and to the horror of the Covid-19 pandemic. A source for the virus has been linked to holding wild animals in captivity for sale in food markets.

Of course, art is not reducible to social and political signalling. It main value is aesthetic and, for Immanuel Kant, the aesthetic consists in providing us with a sense of the unknowable purpose of nature though some manifestation of it.

A sense of this unknowable purpose comes out strongly in Munch’s earthy painting The Cabbage Field from 1915. It features rows of twilit green-blue cabbages in rough outlines divided by dark channels, with dark unmoving clouds on the horizon and greyish light above them. In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Munch’s fellow Norwegian and exponent of putting his own life into his work, Karl Ove Knausgård, described this painting as being charged ultimately with an inexplicable meaning that comes from its expression of emotions of longing as well as reconciliation and peace.

From Louisiana Channel Denmark, Karl Ove Knausgård on the work of Munch

In his later paintings, Munch managed to free himself from the oppressive grip of anxiety and paint harmonious scenes from nature. One is The Apple Tree with its atmosphere of a sun-soaked summer garden in which a man and a woman tend the tree, the man bent over a spade, the woman kneeling down to remove a stone or pluck a weed. In paintings such as these, Munch was able to find and express a sense of the miraculous in the ordinary, a sense of wonder at the existence of the presence of everyday life that, in our time, tends to get obscured behind an increasingly technology-mediated world. It’s a sense of wonder expressed also in much literary writing, such as for bogs and wells in some of Seamus Heaney’s poems.

In a late painting, Self-portrait: Between Clock and Bed, Munch shaded out his eyes. It gives an effect of self-effacement before the greater sway of time and nature. This accords with his belief in a pantheistic life-force coursing through all the matter in the universe. "From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity."

Manus Charleton is a former lecturer in Ethics, Politics and Morality & Social Policy at Sligo Institute of Technology

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

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