Edvard Munch:

The perception of Munch as a fin de siècle artist drinking his nights away in Berlin is only part of the story. For most of his life he was a landscape painter, a student of nature, a pantheistic natural philosopher with a brush. It is no coincidence that over half of his pictures are landscapes: his expressive painterly approach, which supersedes Impressionism and anticipates Expressionism, seeks a path out of modernism and into the realm of the organic, cosmic, and spiritual.
In 1908, a nervous breakdown prompted Munch to leave Berlin and check into a clinic near Copenhagen. There he finally came to terms with his alcoholism, and shortly thereafter returned to his home in Norway. 

Painterly, atmospheric works like House in the Summer Night from 1902 evoke what might be called the poetry of existence. Here there is no civilizational anxiety; it is not the world that is ending, but only a day.

Munch’s conception of nature is pantheistic. He sees the universe in the world, the cosmos in human beings, and each human being as a cosmos:

The art of Edvard Munch establishes a powerful connection between the human figures and the surrounding landscape. He paints anthropomorphic forms into trees, stones, sky, and water — as in View from Nordstrand, where the island in the vivid blue water resembles a mouth.

Edvard Munch’s life was marked by periods of psychological instability. Following a nervous breakdown in 1908 and repeated courses of treatment, he was finally able to overcome his depression and alcoholism. After years of turmoil, he moved to the Norwegian coastal town of Kragerø, where he lived from 1909 to 1915. At Skrubben, his house there, he worked in an open-air studio. Abandoning himself to nature, he gave up the city almost entirely as a motif. 

Munch lost his mother at the age of five and his sister when he was fourteen. The loss and grief that defined his childhood recurs in his art, even in works created decades later. The Magic Forest, painted from 1919 to 1925, is marked by a sense of tremendous forlornness. In other paintings such as Children in the Forest, this drastic quality is less pronounced: while the charming, colorful group of children confronts a vast, dark sea of green trees beneath a turbulent evening sky, the mood of the image is not one of terror, but of adventure.

Created almost two decades apart, these paintings show that the divide between the more tormented and happier phases of Munch’s life is far from clear in his work. Children in the Forest was painted much earlier than The Magic Forest, during the artist’s time in Berlin, a generally darker period than the years after his return to Norway.
This continuity of feeling is also evident when we compare Dark Spruce Forest of 1899 with From Thüringerwald, created six years later. The spruce forest recalls the fairy tales of Norwegian author Theodor Kittelsen; From Thüringerwald, on the other hand, seems like a projection of Munch’s own existential despair onto the landscape.

In the coastal region near the fjord of Oslo, Munch bought and rented various houses in Åsgårdstrand, Kragerø, Hvitsten, and on the island of Jeløya. There he planted gardens: at his house in Åsgårdstrand, he tended berry bushes and apple trees, while in Hvitsten he cultivated an extensive orchard and kept hens, doves, ducks, a dog, and a horse. 
Munch’s last home at Ekely on the outskirts of Oslo was originally a plant nursery. It was still so fertile during his lifetime that he was able to supply his family with fresh produce during World War I — as evidenced by the abundant harvest in Apple Tree in the Garden.

In the late masterpiece Woman with Pumpkin, the female figure in the foreground holds the giant vegetable. The house in the distance, almost completely overgrown, glows in delicate tones of reddish-orange that are also echoed in the woman’s hair. In this work, painted two years before his death, Munch once again united the forms of plants, architecture, and the human figure as if to embody the balance between civilization and nature in the garden.

The color woodcut Melancholy II shows the solitary figure of a woman — an unusual motif for Munch, since for him it is usually the men who are alone. The few impressions of this print were made by the artist’s own hand; for woodcuts like Evening. Melancholy I and Melancholy III, however, he had the images professionally printed in larger editions. 

Some of Munch’s most famous motifs are women or girls on a bridge. He painted many versions and variations of the theme — such as this scene with the Norwegian village of Åsgårdstrand and the artist’s country house of Kiøsterud in the background. There is a hint of mystery about the girls; they seem to giggle and whisper. Most of all, they seem healthy and happy, at peace with each other and the shimmering evening mood. The view of the shore with houses is rare in Munch’s work. He is the master of the middle ground: there is little in the way of a foreground and almost never a background, giving his images a special intensity. This quality was also observed by Munch’s friend, the artist Max Liebermann, especially with the motif of the girls. Munch later reported that according to Liebermann, “this is my best picture.”

The breadth of Munch’s range as an artist — or, as we could almost say, his inner conflict — becomes especially clear in The Scream and The Sun. Both works embody the interpenetration of figure and landscape, earth and cosmos. Yet while the figure in The Scream is clearly experiencing existential distress, the celestial body in The Sun is so radiant and freely painted that its rays seem to pass beyond the work to illuminate both painter and viewer. In Munch’s art, nature itself becomes the locus of the human drama and at the same time a creative plumbline, a cycle of death and rebirth to which we are called to surrender.

Munch loved to paint the world covered in snow — sometimes fairytale-like, sometimes more realistically, as in Winter in Kragerø. He was fascinated by the thawing of the snow, the transition from ice to water. He approached it lyrically and metaphorically in works like Snow Landscape in Thuringia. He once noted: “the streams gushed—the roofs dripped—sparkling liquid pearls — The Earth softened.” 
Munch’s mysterious, almost dream-like images of Nordic winter nights have a special intensity. Works like Starry Night are so atmospheric we can almost hear the crunch of the snow.

Munch was a passionate reader; after his death in 1944, around 1,500 books were found in his house in Ekely. The breadth of his thought and study is manifested not only in allegorical images like Astronomy, History and Geography, but also in the wide range of his reading. His library included books on fertilizer, Norwegian flora, and Einstein’s theory of relativity, along with K. G. Dobler’s Ein neues Weltall (A New Universe), Knut Hamsun’s Markens Grøde (Growth of the Soil), and works by Munch’s writer friend Max Dauthendey, such as his volume of poetry Die schwarze Sonne (The Black Sun).

For Munch, to be integrated into the cycle of nature was a consolation, although in this regard he held some unusual ideas. For him, the universe “belongs to a higher, more powerful human being,” which at the same time is “made up by the same chemical compounds as we are, just as the earth, the sun, the solar system” — concepts taken from Dobler’s Ein neues Weltall of 1892. And then there was the notion of crystallization:

Even during his days of alcoholic excess at the Berlin tavern “Zum schwarzen Ferkel” (The Black Piglet), Munch had attempted his first images of a crystallization that could awaken minerals to life — in grandiose manner in the charcoal drawing Worlds are Within Us, followed somewhat later by In the Land of Crystals and Funeral March. According to Munch, “Everything is Life and Movement — The spark of Life is found even in the Earth’s Bedrock — The Crystals – .” 

Munch’s ideas recall the natural philosophy of Ernst Haeckel, whom he may have encountered on his visits to Thuringia. There, he did meet the art historian Botho Graef, who aptly observed that Munch did not copy nature, but rather clarified it: “If his art appears to deviate from reality, […] it never veers away from nature. On the contrary, it portrays nature’s regularity in a cleaner and purer way.”

The monumental wall paintings for the Aula of the University of Oslo, created at the midpoint of Munch’s life, are a culmination of his art and thought. Here we find the idea of crystallization as well as the love of rural life and union with nature. Even loneliness and the search for love still resonate here, although they are transformed. An especially powerful work is the wall painting The Sun with its two accompanying panels Women Turned Towards the Sun and Men Turned Towards the Sun.

This organic, mythical unity defines the art of Edvard Munch through and through. For the first time, the exhibition Trembling Earth shows him to be a hero not only of alienated modernism, but also of nature. In his Self-Portrait with Palette of 1924, we see it again: like the treetops, Munch’s head towers up into the blue sky.