Expressionism's Father

An historic figure in modern art, little known in the U.S., died last week in Oslo, in his native Norway. Eighty-one-year-old Edvard Munch (pronounced Moohnk) was the founder of the Expressionist school of painting. He was also a legendary eccentric.

Munch was a highly neurotic, misogynous, inward-turning artist who led the revolt of the '90s against the formal, detached, analytical approach of the French Impressionists. Munch and his followers, trying for the highest degree of personal, emotional expression, deliberately set out to step up the passionate style of Vincent van Gogh. Munch's first one-man Berlin exhibition, in 1892, contained 55 screechingly colored, cacophonously designed canvases. Munch's best-known Expressionist contemporaries were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Sombre Man. Erect, frail, handsome Edvard Munch came from a family of civil servants, well established in Norwegian cultural circles. A beautiful but weak child, young Edvard stopped school early to study art. He traveled in France and Italy on scholarships, studied under Pierre Bonnard at Paris.

In Norway, when he was still young, Munch fell in love for the first and last time. In a secluded village where he was painting, he learned that his beloved had shot herself and was dying. Rushing to her, he found the report exaggerated. "Hardly had I entered the room when she sprang out of bed and said: 'You love me, Edvard. I knew you would come.' We quarreled and finally she produced a revolver and threatened to shoot herself. I did not believe her, but of course I had to be chivalrous and put my hand over the revolver. And don't think the bitch failed to press the trigger!" Munch emerged minus part of his left index finger and his desire for marriage.

Munch's hatred of "the public"--which at first responded in kind, though later he got as much as $10,000 for a canvas--lasted a lifetime. Toward the end he worked in a roofless, grass-floored studio surrounded by barbed wire. Only two people were admitted--an expressman and Munch's friend Pola Gauguin, son of the French painter. He named his garden plants after art critics, and gave those who offended him the trowel.

In 1937 Germany banned Munch's paintings. Recently, on his 80th birthday, the Nazi invaders of Norway tried to get local credit by holding an exhibition of his work, but he refused them. Last week, three days after his death, a memorial exhibition was opened in Stockholm. The show's walls could not help suggesting the words of the artist: "Sometime there must be an end to paintings of knitting women and reading men. I shall paint people who love and suffer."

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