Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Music -- History and criticism
Edvard Munch, the Norwegian, is a much bigger man and artist. The
feminine note, despite his sensibility, is missing. He has control of
his technical forces and he never indulged in such nervous excesses as
Kubin. Besides, he is sincere, while the other is usually cynical. He
deals with the same old counters, love and death, debauchery and
consequent corruption. He is an exponent of feverish visions, yet you
never feel that he is borne down by his contact with dwellers on the
threshold. A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a
more precise vision; in a word he is a mystic, and a true mystic
always sees dreams as sharp realities.
It was Mr. Saintsbury who first called attention to the clear flame of
Flaubert's visions as exemplified by his Temptation of St. Anthony. So
Munch, who pins to paper with almost geometrical accuracy his personal
adventures in the misty mid-region of Weir. And a masculine soul is
his. I can still recall my impressions on seeing one of his early
lithographs entitled, Geschrei. As far as America is concerned, Edvard
Munch was discovered by Vance Thompson, who wrote an appreciation of
the Norwegian painter, then a resident of Berlin, in the pages of
_M'lle New York_ (since gathered to her forefathers). The "cry" of the
picture is supposed to be the "infinite cry of nature" as felt by an
odd-looking individual who stands on a long bridge traversing an
estuary in some Norwegian harbour. The sky is barred by flaming
clouds, two enigmatic men move in the middle distance. To-day the
human with the distorted skull who holds hands to his ears and with
staring eyes opens wide a foolish mouth looks more like a man
overtaken by seasickness than a poet mastered by cosmic emotion.
In 1901 I visited Munich and at the Secession exhibition at the Glass
Palace I saw a room full of Munches. It was nicknamed the Chamber of
Horrors, and the laughter and exclamations of disgust indulged in by
visitors recalled the history of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and the
treatment accorded it by Parisians (an incident utilised by Zola in
L'Oeuvre). But nowadays, in company with the Neo-Impressionists, the
Lampost Impressionists, Cubists, and Futurists, Munch might seem tame,
conventional; nevertheless he was years ahead of the new crowd in
painting big blocks of colour, juxtaposed, not as the early
Impressionists juxtaposed their strokes of complementary colour to
gain synthesis by dissociation of tonalities, but by obvious discords
thus achieve a brutal optical impression.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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