Northern Light

No longer should you paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. There must be living beings who breathe and feel and love and suffer . . . People would understand the sacredness of them and take off their hats as if they were in church.

When Painter Edvard Munch wrote these words in Paris, in 1890, he was a slick, gloomy art student of 26 with the whole world still to conquer. By the time he died at 80, Munch's unabashedly emotional art was revered throughout northern Europe. Last week, for the first time, it got a comprehensive showing in the U.S.

The exhibition of 171 paintings and prints had been sponsored by the government of Munch's native Norway. Split last week between Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, it will later tour the country for a year. The pictures deal mostly with sex and death, and some mid-century sophisticates may find them overdramatic. But others will take off their hats to them.

More Weight. The son of an aristocratic, violent, and fanatically religious father, Munch grew up in an atmosphere compounded of love, pride and fear. Illness continually interrupted his schooling until, at 17, he went to art school. A few years later he had put on weight and assurance, become the biggest, best and hardest-drinking young painter in Oslo's equivalent of Greenwich Village.

His skillful academic portraits and genre paintings (which looked rather like illustrations for Emile Zola) won Munch a government grant to study in Paris for three years. There he learned to paint sunlight almost as eloquently as the impressionist Pissarro, and to handle line and color with something like Gauguin's fluid grace. When he decided to forget the fashionable philosophy of art for art's sake and paint "living beings" instead, Munch was as well equipped for the job as any artist in Europe.

Less Brilliance. Realistic detail was the first thing to go: in painting a sick child, Munch began with a version showing the bed and the sickroom. His final version accented only the patient's waxen profile and the bowed head of her mother. Next Munch ditched the literary symbolism of the '90s which had encrusted his early works. The early Munch implied death's universality by showing a skeleton embracing a nude. Later he was satisfied to suggest the same theme by painting three girls on a bridge at evening, staring down into the dark, still water.

Munch overcame the brilliant painter's instinct to paint brilliantly. No one looking at his Self-Portrait with a Wine Bottle would be likely to exclaim first of all about Munch's technical skill. The fine painting is rigorously subordinated to the subject: a man, angry, lonely and lost, who stares from the deep perspective of the canvas.

Munch described his self-portrait as a self-examination. Its colors--red and green in the figure, violet and orange in the background--increase the emotional punch. Painted in 1906, when he was already famous, it reflects the melancholia that continually plagued him. Munch's girl had recently threatened suicide because he refused to marry her, and when he tried to disarm her, she had shot him in the finger. He was drinking more & more, and throwing his weight around when he did. He had exiled himself from Norway after almost killing a man in a drunken brawl.

Same Strength. Two years later Munch entered a Copenhagen sanitarium for treatment of his alcoholism. Cured, he returned to Norway, spent the rest of his long life painting in semi-seclusion. His pictures grew steadily bigger and more objective, lost none of their power.

The old man could never have painted The Cry (a canvas bulging with Kafka-like horror which he did at 30), but neither could the young drunk have painted the Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed that Munch did four years before his death. That picture of a human being cornered by old age would stand as one of his finest, freshest works.

Shortly before he died, Munch told his doctor that his path had "always been along an abyss." Perhaps his lifelong habit of hard, passionate labor was what saved him from going over the edge. He bequeathed no less than 1,008 oils to the city of Oslo, along with wagonloads of drawings, watercolors and engravings. It was a rich and illuminating legacy.

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