Paintings

We offer three different versions of Edvard Munchs biography. We encourage you to take a look at each one and perhaps even discuss the differences between them in our forums!

munch5

‹‹

No comments on this photo. comment(s) on this photo:

Why to define Edvard Munch's symbolism as "private"? To this extent, the term "private" is used to point out two aspects of the Norwegian painter's pictorial activity. First, to separate clearly Munch's symbolism from classical art symbolism (still present at that time), about which whole manuals have been written. "Munch's symbolic image, finally free from represent faithfully and banally reality, it visualizes through its expressive tension the tragical essence hidden behind the surface of things of the world"[6]. Second, symbolism develops for Munch an expressive andemotional function. Memories, past experience and other recurrent themes take shape in Munch's art through symbols overfilled with anguish and restlessness; Munch's works could be considered, to an extreme point, nothing else but an art shattered into thematic-symbolic elements rotating around the eternal themes of pain, loneliness, disease, death, existential failure"[6]. That's why it is absolutely necessary to emphasize the "private side" Munch's symbolism. For, as seen in the previous chapter, Munch's pictorial work is a direct expression of his innermost experience. His life was marked by pain, death, suffering, disease, abandonment, loneliness. These are the essential themes of his compositions, and they take life trhough symbols emerging as anxious and recurrent presences from his past. And that's why his paintings are populated by regular, recurrent, almost obsessive presences. It doesn't have to be forgotten how Munch in his writings declared that he paints not "looking", but "feeling": and, unfortunately, what he mostly felt inside were his dead father and mother, his sick sisters, his loneliness.

These regular presences and these recurrent situations can be thought as a further proof of the peculiar function that the act of painting had for Munch; a function that goes well beyond the aesthetic one. It's as if in every painting Munch brought back to present a painful event of his life. And, at the same time, painting has a function for him that we could, perhaps improperly, call "catharsis": a violent moment in which his anguish is unloaded, thrown out,with violence on the canvas. As if the artist wanted to set himself free from those tormenting ghosts, and paradoxically the only possible way to do this is to bring them back to life, obsessively. For behind pain, behind those masks of death covering those ghosts' faces, are hidden the love and the sweet memory of those persons too. To this extent it is interesting to remember how some psychoanalytical studies about dreams seem to point out that "repetition", especially color repetition, would correspond to the repetition of the trauma and, therefore, to a discharge of the distressing tension. In fact, a recurrent color seems to correspond to a recurrent dream

"The camera cannot compete with the brush and the palette so long as it cannot be used in heaven or hell," observed Edvard Munch in one of his better-known aphorisms. Although the artist himself never regarded the camera as a competitor to his brush, he nevertheless made use of it throughout his career in various ways.

Munch himself was the most important subject of his photographs. In his self-portraits he sometimes appears as a transparent shadow, an effect caused by moving from his pose to cover the lens of the camera. This feature is typical of a series of self-portraits taken by Munch in 1908-1909, which he called "photographs of fate".

The artist had thus discovered a way to merge into his surroundings. The room and everything around the subject blend into a whole in a silent, melancholy manner. The photograph is no longer a fleeting moment in time but a medium of meditation. Munch did not capture the moment in his photographs, but let time flow into them in a unique way.

He went to make a long series of self-portraits in the 1920s and '30s, observing that "when I grow old some day, and have nothing better to do than to write my autobiography, all my self-portraits will come to light".

After Edvard Munch's death a large collection of his works was donated to the City of Oslo to become the Munch Museum . The photographic self-portraits came to light in this connection and have now became a recognized part of the art of photography.