'Edvard Munch: The Modern Life Of The Soul' At The Museum Of Modern Art

Prior to "The Sick Child," as a young, largely self-taught artist, inspired by the art of Norwegian naturalists, Munch turned out academic portraits and genre scenes. Mingling with lively bohemian intellectuals in Kristiania, however, he began to look for more daring, evocative aesthetic models.

Traveling to Paris several times on state scholarships starting in 1889, he studied with establishment stalwart Leon Bonnat, was introduced to Symbolist philosophy and aesthetics and was stimulated by the innovations of such artists as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. In Berlin in the 1890s, he participated in an avant-garde group involved in mysticism and promoting free love.

During frequent stays in Norway, he exhibited his works, which were often ridiculed and sold only modestly. Constant bouts of illness, heavy drinking and turbulent relationships with various women further complicated his life.

Munch's unique, expressionistic style, filled with a sense of psychological urgency, evolved in Paris and Berlin, and manifested itself in both paintings and graphic work.

Seeking to express a state of mind, in "Melancholy," 1891, he depicted a seated, downcast man, his chin resting on his hand, on a stretch of undulating beach. He is the embodiment of despair.

Eventually a version of "Melancholy" became part of a series of intense, emotion-filled images called the "Frieze of Life," which sought to trace the progress of a soul through life.

Among the first was "The Kiss," 1892, in which the lovers seem to melt into each other as they embrace. Woodcuts in the MoMA and Cantor Arts Center exhibition, the latter dating to 1902, offer almost abstract views of the melded couple. The etching-and-drypoint in the Scandinavia House show is more explicit.

Drawing on the episode in which he lost his virginity to a married woman, "Summer Night's Dream (The Voice)," 1893, Munch shows Milly Thaulow offering herself to him for their first kiss amidst pine trees at the shore. In "Ashes," 1894, Munch depicted himself immediately after lovemaking, slumped and exhausted, while his lover rises above him, energized and triumphant. "The foundations were laid for the sexual act to be associated with melancholy, remorse, fear and even death," in these paintings, writes biographer Prideaux.

"Despair," 1892, a key work set against the bay of Kristiania, has been interpreted in several ways. Munch himself is either the featureless figure leaning over the railing as his companions walk on or he may be the figure with his back to us walking against the flow of the crowd. In either case, the image reflected Munch's conclusion that his work in France was a failure and that he must return to Norway, where he faced an uncertain future. This was, he later recalled, "my first scream."

Growing directly out of "Despair" was Munch's celebrated "The Scream," whose several versions were created in the 1890s. In recent years, it has become infamous for being stolen from Norwegian museums. A 1994 museum heist was solved and the painting retrieved. More recently in a brazen, daylight raid on the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2004, another version of "The Scream" and "Madonna" were stolen.

"[H]e insisted...['The Scream' reflected] his own experience and...represented his own psychological state of despair and anxiety, bordering, so he felt, on insanity," writes art historian Reinhold Heller in the exhibition catalog. "I was walking along the road with two friends," Munch recalled. "The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired...and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city....I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."

Under the blood-smeared sky Munch created what Heller calls "the screaming specter of a depersonalized humanoid creature," white hands clasped against a skull-like head, mouth frozen in psychic pain. The bridge stretches behind; Kristiania Harbor is to the right.

The first painted version of "The Scream," 1893, owned by Norway's National Museum of Art, is a tempera and oil on cardboard, measuring 3513/16 by 2815/16 inches. It is not in the current exhibition, but two lithographic versions of the iconic work are at MoMA. The version with color additions, measuring 17 by 1213/16 inches, on loan from the Munch Museum in Oslo, most closely replicates the painting.

An iconic panic attack that never fails to startle viewers, "The Scream" has come to symbolize a variety of modern society's concerns, ranging from sexual repression and urban alienation to the futility of war and fear of nuclear holocaust. Endlessly reproduced in artistic media, this image of agitation and stress has also become a staple of popular culture, appearing on everything from T-shirts to neckties to inflatable plastic dolls.

Similarly agitated motifs recur in the alarmed faces in "Angst," 1894 (which also repeats the red sky and setting of "Despair" and "The Scream"), and the crowd of detached, haunted individuals on Kristiania's main thoroughfare in "Evening on Karl Johan Street," 1892. In these and other images, Munch "turns decisively from the customary appearance of reality to the depiction of psychological urgency," observes McShine.

In "The Dance of Life," 1899-1900, Munch recalled festive outdoor evenings when lovers or would-be lovers, among them women who were invariably attracted to him, either danced with him (in this case his married friend, Milly), stood nearby (Tulla Larsen on both sides), or danced with a lecherous acquaintance in the background. The painting, says McShine, "evokes the moonlit summer nights of the north, the passions of lovers and people enjoying the shore - but also foretells their fragile and tragic futures."

Arguably Munch's second most-recognizable work, "Madonna," 1894-95, is a lush depiction of a nude female apparently lying on a bed, as her lover might view her. Around her, pulsating bands of color suggest her ecstasy. In a lithographic version, 1895-1902, Munch added a border with sperm and a fetus, heightening the sexual tension of the image.

Among the most interesting of his numerous likenesses of himself is "Self-Portrait (with Skeleton Arm)," an 1895 lithograph featuring his ghostlike, disembodied head suspended against a black background, with a skeletal arm at the bottom of the image. Dramatically lit from below, in "Self-Portrait with Cigarette," 1895, the 32-year-old Munch presented himself as a rather debonair figure amidst swirls of bluish smoke. Standing nude and enveloped in the fires of hell, he committed himself to eternal damnation in "Self-Portrait in Hell," 1903. In 1916, he posed above a busy city street in "Self-Portrait in Bergen."

In the late 1930s, 82 of Munch's works in German museums and private collections were declared "degenerate" and were confiscated by the Nazis. When the German army occupied Oslo in 1940, Munch refused to have anything to do with them or their Norwegian collaborators.

During this time, the aging artist painted "Self-Portrait by the Window," circa 1940, in which his turned-down mouth and split gaze suggest his unhappiness with his nation's situation and his advancing age. In Munch's last major self-likeness, "Between the Clock and the Bed," 1940-42, the pale, thin artist stands between a public space - his bright yellow studio - and a private realm-his bedroom, highlighted by the cross-hatched coverlet on his bed.

Munch's will bequeathed his paintings and works on paper, as well as personal artifacts, to the city of Oslo, a bequest that formed the basis of the Munch Museum, which opened in 1963. He died peacefully in 1944 not long after his 80th birthday.

This is a wonderful retrospective for those who have some understanding of the man who created "The Scream" and want to explore the magnitude of his other achievements. Covering a litany of emotions that still connect with today's viewers, Munch utilized his personal traumas to depict universal themes. As curator McShine concludes, "It is Munch's great triumph that in so many works he is able to pictorialize an extraordinary range of intense human passion and in so doing delineates for the viewer the life of the modern soul."

The 256-page catalog contains commentaries on color plates from the exhibition, historical photographs, a chronology of Munch's life and a selected bibliography. Scholarly essays by McShine and four other Munch authorities provide in-depth analyses of the artist's life and work. Published by MoMA, it sells for $60 hardcover and $40 softcover.

The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 West 53rd Street. For information, 212-708-9400 or .

Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America is at 58 Park Avenue (between 37th and 38th Streets). For information, 212-879-9779 or www.scandinaviahouse.org.

The Cantor Arts Center is on the Stanford University campus off Palm Drive at Museum Way. For information, 650-723-4177 or www.stanford.edu/dept/ccva.