“Becoming Edvard Munch,” at the Art Institute through April 26
The Art Institute’s thesis that “the Edvard Munch of popular imagination—a tortured, bohemian rebel who seemed almost a living version of the famous figure in The Scream—was in fact a myth, carefully constructed during Munch’s lifetime by critics, historians, and the artist himself” would be much more interesting if the real Munch was actually a good painter.
Abundantly evident from this show is the fact that the reason these myths are the focus of audiences, critics and popular imagination is because to fixate on the work for its own sake is totally boring. I surmise also that Munch himself invited the myths for certain similar reasons.
The main deficiency in Munch’s work is that the entire canvas is not treated with the same amount of interest and care. The galleries are filled with large paintings in which almost the entire acreage is ignored; one moment of intense interest is repeatedly contained within miles of wasted canvas. Invariably you could cut out nearly the entire painting and be left with the only interesting part. Often you can cut out the entire painting.
The faces are the thing he was interested in; the faces are exquisite and alive — the faces contain the entire expression. But the “backgrounds” and the rest of the scenes are dead and ignored, and different. The paintings aren’t integrated.
A prime example is his Sick Child paintings, of which there were two versions in the show. The dying child’s face is filled with pathos, and a peculiar existentialist sense of the futility of everything (for that’s what this motif is surely about) — everything that these paintings are reputed to say, and uniquely in Munch’s voice. But the rest of the painting — bed, room, parent — don’t contribute. The more famous Anxiety is another. And if the faces are covered, as in Kiss by the Window, there is nothing whatsoever to look at of interest. What we have is just a bad painting.
Similarly, the idea in the show’s thesis that he had other, here-to-fore under-acknowledged influences, such as Monet, would have been more interesting if his unique genius had transformed these influences into something entirely his own. For example, it is fascinating to consider how Van Gogh was impressed with the “scientific” dots of Seurat, and how dutifully he went about incorporating the idea into his own language — and to behold how expressive and unlike Seurat is the product. But Munch never improved on or made his influences his own. “Summer Night: Inger on the Beach” is a derivative corpse compared to the sparkling Monet in the same room, “On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt”.
But it is inaccurate to think Munch had nothing original to say. He was just unable to say it simply, directly, and without apology or extraneous baggage. Munch never really found himself as a painter, in other words. If he had he would have cropped every painting to the face alone and confined himself to portrait painting. He would have left us a body of work as painfully lovely as Kathë Kollwitz if he’d been brave enough to trim off all the empty fat and composed his paintings to be the expression, not contain the expression. He never had the courage to say exactly what he wanted to say, however, through painting and nothing more; in life and in his art there was always the protective veil of extraneous stories to dilute and diffuse. It was like his soul was given over too much to the dread and darkness that he was trying to convey to achieve the alchemical magic of turning darkness into beauty.
Like a Munch painting, the show itself contains isolated wonderful moments, making it worth the trip — Rodin’s Kiss, Van Gogh’s lemon yellow street scene. There is a striking difference when a painter who is actually interested in and who has complete, deft control of perspective as a draftsman tackles the subject of a riverside walkway in Paris with radical perspective. It might have been that the Art Institute was coyly trying to say as much with this show, because invariably the paintings of his “influences” were excellent choices and far outshown the Munchs they hung next to. But this might be giving them too much credit.
This is a thesis that would have been more enlightening if it had been applied to Van Gogh. With him it’s a sad fact that the myths of the popular imagination and the marketing world often overshadow and distract from a truly great painter. The uninitiated often are prevented from enjoying his truly imaginative and spiritual vision for thinking about how it was that he cut off his ear.
Not so with Munch. Myths about insanity and loneliness are much more fun than the paintings themselves.
