The Master of the Anxious Eye

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Washington's National Gallery, a major Munch show

In art as in life, the world is full of bad expressionism. The bore relentlessly baying "This is me" has his pictorial equivalent in the artist who decants his steaming guts on the canvas and asks you to admire their authenticity. In our post-psychological culture there are not many artists who make something aesthetically pleasing, let alone compelling, from the repetitive pattern of their own neuroses and fears.

The confessional splurge works against the kind of detached, highly wrought structure that art needs. There have been exceptions, of course.

From Van Gogh to Francis Bacon, the unease of some artists could reach such obsessive dimensions that it transcends mere dis play and becomes exemplary. In modern art, the father of anxiety was a Norwegian, Edvard Munch.

The show entitled "Edvard Munch, Symbols and Images," which opened Nov. 11 in the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is a great event. As Art Historian Robert Rosenblum writes in its catalogue introduction, "Even the most Paris- centered interpretations of the history of postimpressionist art have been obliged to consider the grand and disturbing presence of the strange Norwegian master."

Some of Munch's paintings -- notably The Scream, 1893, with its genderless homunculus squalling in loneliness on a bridge against the thick ropy sky of evening--are among the most reproduced images in early modern art. Yet Munch's major paintings are not well known here in the original because most of his best work stayed in Norway, distributed among several museums. The National Gallery's show, which will go to no other museum, has 245 paintings, prints and drawings on loan from Norwegian collections; it is the most complete Munch exhibition ever held in the U.S.

Munch was born in Norway in 1863.

He gloomily expected to die young, like Seurat or Beardsley. In fact he lived on to a great age, until 1944; but the main themes of his work were all set forth well before World War I, and it is on the period from 1880 to 1914 that the show concentrates. Few painters have had more difficult beginnings than Munch. They might have crushed his talent; instead they gave it a permanent irritability. His family was sunk in a kind 'of permanent neurasthenia, the petit-bourgeois provincial twilight known to every reader of Strindberg or Ibsen. He was, almost literally, raised in the family sickroom, in a dreadful atmosphere of whispers, enforced silences, vomit, snot and the cold stink of carbolic acid.

His father was a violently strict religious maniac; his mother died of TB when Munch was five, as did his favorite sister, Sophie, nine years later. "Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle," Munch recalled later. "In my childhood I felt always that I was treated in an unjust way, without a mother, sick, and with threatened punishment in hell hanging over my head." Not surprisingly, a great deal of Munch's creative life was spent exorcising the demons of childhood. The sickroom, the immobile praying faces, the small twisting hands of anxious women, the terrible apprehension that went with Munch's use of illness as a central metaphor of visionary insight -- these surface in the paintings over and over again. In this exhibition Munch's chief image of illness, the wasted and vulnerable head of Sophie turned on the pillow like a profile on a Renaissance medallion, has a whole gallery devoted to its numerous versions, and rightly so: fatal illness of children was one of the big themes of 19th century art and fiction. But, unlike the death of Dickens' Little Nell, the tremulous and despairing tenderness of Munch's loss continues to affect us.

Munch's unsparing art was part of a larger cultural context. It was painting's equivalent to the fundamental insight that Freud, in the 1890s, was developing in Vienna: that the self is the product of a battle between insatiable desires and unyielding social structures. Munch gave shape to experiences which were fresh to the point of prophecy in the late 19th century but have become such commonplaces of 20th century culture that they are barely paintable today. The mass city engulfs the village; the social group breaks up into isolated figures; the watcher replaces the participant. Munch was the first painter of the lonely crowd, and if paintings like Anxiety and Ashes, both in 1894, are still disturbing (as they are), it is no longer because their radically simplified pictorial structure affronts taste, but because of the sheer intensity of Munch's feelings. The self was frail; in works like the great proto-expressionist Self-Portrait in Weimar, 1906, Munch becomes an intruder in what, for another painter, would be the hospitable space of his own fiction.

The continuous surface of shared pleasure the world presented to the impressionists in 1870 had cracked open in Munch's work by 1895, revealing fissures of discordant color, strange tiltings of space, isolations of form, and a deep pessimism about the very possibility of satisfaction. Nowhere was this more evident than in Munch's treatment of love and sex. There are two kinds of women in

Munch's art, or rather two aspects of the same castrating type, and neither bore a trace of hope. To Munch, women were forces, not social beings. A man was either rejected by a virgin or devoured by a femme fatale. The distant virgin was given her most concise form in The Voice, 1893. The silence of this columnar creature, matched with the solemn verticals of the tree trunks and the glistening phallic track of the moon reflected in the fjord, conveys an almost religious sense of inaccessible purity. Munch's second kind of woman is the femme fatale, the vampire who uses up men, the mantis who eats her mate. His sexual Liliths are the most compelling embodiments to be found in painting of a fear which, however irrational, seems built into the very nature of sexual struggle. In their anxiety and emotional claustrophobia, they are liberating -- not because they propose a stereotype, but be cause they identify it with such sacrificial, unreserved frankness.

--Robert Hughes

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