The Colour of Angst - Edvard Munch at The British Museum

Let's start with the black and white elephant in the room.  Although very much aware that the version of The Scream on show at the British Museum's Edward Munch exhibition, is a lithograph inspired by one of the original 1893 paintings, in comparison to much else on show it is somewhat disappointing.  Don't accuse me of being a philistine - I love prints, monochrome or otherwise - but it has a distinct lack, and that something is colour.  What sets the painting of The Scream alight is that outrageous sunset, those violent waves of orange and red exploding above the sea.  Monochrome is perfect for melancholy and depression, but angst must roar with colour.  Furthermore, and this is easy to miss, a friend told me that the piercing scream is actually external to the figure in the painting.  Therefore blazing fireworks are essential.  By comparison the lithograph is mute. Munch's own words from his diary outline the rubric, both concerning the colour and the origin of the scream:

"I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

The Scream (1895) 

Curiously, and quite easy to miss when your eye is summoned to the figure on the pier, is the oxblood wall that the lithograph of The Scream is mounted on.  This, and a similar print to its left, are the only works in the exhibition that are served up on this dark, violent background.  Everything else is placed against walls that are a neutral olive green.  I'm quite certain that this is a conscious decision by the curators and the suspicion that their show-stopper needs a bit of extra help to rise to the occasion.

To add to this argument, all you need to do is glance at the adjacent wall and the woodcut Angst.  Nine vacant and horrifying faces bear down on you like top hatted zombies with pock-marked features and disintegrating and flattened out noses.  Like The Scream it unnerves.  But it is those vividly apocalyptic bands of dark orange that amplify the fear factor.  They give the image its vital and extraordinary power.

Angst (1896)

Telling then, that one of the few straight-up paintings comes very close to stealing the show.  If angst is best depicted through colour, deadly tubercular fever certainly is.  The Sick Child, a depiction of Munch's dying sister Sophie is a febrile riot of nauseating greens and liverish reds and browns.  The terror of dying slowly and helplessly is unflinchingly captured through the jaundiced skin and the invalid's hair, matted and thinned through sweat.  Even the various prints on show of this subject maintain this latter detail (interesting, too, that this arresting and powerful aspect was also captured in Joseph Severn's sketch of the poet Keats, as he lay on his bed dying, like Sophie, of tuberculosis).  This painting ditches all notions of Naturalism and pushes on ahead into the realm of Expressionism.  Those garish, almost ghastly colours are able to exude the full weight of suffering, conjuring up the horror of feeling certain death tiptoeing around the perimeter of your bed.  Munch's stated objective, that of trying to paint the suffering soul (sjaelemaleri) is fully realised.

The Sick Child (1907)

This impulse of mine towards Munch's painting does not dominate though. I don't really have a choice as prints make up the bulk of what is included in Love and Angst.  The majority of them are stunning.  Self Portrait with Skeleton Arm (1895) that opens the exhibition, declares that death will hold dominion over much of what you are about to encounter.  I love the skeleton arm at the base of this black and white lithograph, a witty memento mori emphasising that here it is the hand and arm that are the locus of the artist's power.  

More often than not, death is coupled with love and sex.  Women in Three Stages is a wonderful etching.  The three figures here depict the same person, Milly Thaulow, a married woman with whom Munch - a proponent of free love in those last decadent decades of the Nineteenth Century - conducted a passionate affair.  Despite the cynicism of its 'ages of woman' theme – the chaste, the sexually realised, and the lonely resignation of old age – it's an evocative piece of art.  The exhibit-label also turned me on to the loaded phallic nature of the moon and its fleeting moonlight coursing across the bay.  This curious and beautiful motif also appears in Summer Night: the Voice (1894) and Two Women on the Shore (1898), both included in this exhibition.  Although, I'm not really sure about the rather didactic colour-coding at the top (the margins of Munch's work are often awash with information): green for naivety, red for lust, and a jaundiced yellow for infertility.  

Woman in Three Stages (1895)

Coupled with death, there's also a lot of booze and wine being drunk in this exhibition.  It doesn't seem to result in much joy.  The lithograph Self-portrait with a Bottle of Wine illustrates the prelude to one of Munch's mental collapses through alcoholism and anxiety.  Despite that, there's something close to comic about the dour resignation on the artist's face.  Look closely and you can just about see the left-eyebrow arching. The woman lying 'hangover helpless' on her bed in The Day After (1894) doesn't bode well for the soul either.  

Self-portrait with a Bottle of Wine (1930)

What else appealed to the paying public?  The colour lithograph Vampire II - the crowd around this piece of work was almost as deep as the one that congregated around the print of the The Scream - flags up another of the artist's tropes, women and their hair and how it ensnares men.  As Munch wrote in his notebooks about the woman who is the subject of this striking image: "She had bowed her head over mine - her blood-red hair had entangled me - coiled itself around me like blood-red snakes …"  Indeed, we're back with that word 'unsettling'.  The composition of the woman and the man summons up the paradox of simultaneous safety and danger.  Look at the way that the woman's mouth – more predatory than comforting – seizes upon the neck of the male.  The free love that the artist and his crowd preached is all well and good, but it clearly troubled Munch.   

Vampire II (1894 / 1902) photograph courtesy of @hellomatthieu

Curiously, and despite my championing of the more colourful works in this exhibition, my absolute favourite is a stark woodcut called The Kiss IV.  The merging of the woman and the man is almost Rodinesque.  For once, colour would delineate too much and something would be lost.  Its simplicity is complemented by the patterns of the wood-grain, a detail emphasising the solidity of the embrace.  In an exhibition filled with anxiety, the spectre of death and the bloodsucking of Vampire II, here is a rare nod to tranquillity. 

  

The Kiss IV (1902)

Undoubtedly, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition.  What I would love to see, though, is a more comprehensive and ambitious show, one that couples the prints with the paintings.  Whether that is logistically possible remains to be seen.  Indeed, the painted versions of The Scream do seem to have an eventful and - for all the wrong reasons - itinerant time of it.  That said, many of the prints have their painted bedfellows and it would be spectacular to see them coupled in the same space.  One of the reasons that I enjoyed The Sick Child - although 'enjoyed' might not quite be the mot juste - is because of the chance to look at the same subject in different mediums.  Not that anyone else at the exhibition seemed to mind.  That even the print version of The Scream achieves what few paintings on Earth manage, that is, not just having the gallery-goers merely pointing their camera phones at it, but actually inserting themselves into the photograph by way of a selfie, is indicative of the enormous cultural power contained in Edvard Munch's most famous image.