Edvard Munch's images of women

Scandinavian Review, Autumn 1997 by Epstein, Sarah G

Stopping I leaned against the rail, nearly dead with fatigue. Over the blue-black fjord, hung the clouds red as blood and like tongues of fire. My friends left, and alone, trembling with fear, I experienced the great infinite scream of nature.

It is said that the second most recognizable image after Leonardo's Mona Lisa is The Scream by Edvard Munch (1863-1944). The Norwegian artist poured his feelings, life experiences, and personal relationships into his art throughout his long lifetime. Today's angst about atomic bombs, ethnic wars, uncontrolled violence, and inner anxieties effectively animate the 1895 lithograph of The Scream (fig.1), bringing to the surface the current viewer's memories and anxieties.

Collector's Viewpoint

The first time I ever saw the work of Edvard Munch-in 1950-I was a student at the Simmons School of Social Work. There on the walls of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston were images I could relate to, so similiar to situations that I or my fieldwork patients encountered. There were scenes of lovers; of a child realizing his mother was dead; a jealous man eavesdropping on the conversation of a couple behind him; a dying girl in a chair with a despairing mother beside her; an old man praying; and anxious, lonely looking individuals in a crowd-all recorded by an artist, not by a social worker. I was so taken by these images that Munch immediately became my artist for life. On the spot I invested in the catalogue, which made clear to me that all Munch's images were connected to events in his life.

In the many years since, my former husband, Lionel Epstein, and I have put together an Edvard Munch collection of about 270 graphics, drawings and a few oil paintings. As a social worker I wondered, what are the emotional and cultural influences on a person's behavior? As a collector I wondered, what lay behind the work of this perceptive artist that today draws crowds whenever his work is shown?

Over the years on numerous trips to Norway, Germany and France, I taped interviews with many people who had known Munch and many whose portraits he painted. They could inform me about 19th century Norway, about Munch family members, and other details. From this material emerged my understanding of the man, which differs from that of earlier writers who were usually male, and whose analyses of Munch were based on a few harsh paintings. These writers dwelled on Munch's dark past, a brief period in a sanitarium, and difficulties with women.

They learned to keep house. They might eventually teach these "gentle arts"' or become school teachers. On Sunday afternoons, young women of the educated class in Christiana [Oslo] might walk with gentlemen callers along Karl Johan Street, where they were well chaperoned by the older strolling residents. Educated women who threw over the traces to join young male artists and writers to drink and discuss life in a cafe setting were frowned upon as radicals. Munch knew a number of these independent young women in the artistic groups that gathered in Oslo, Berlin and Paris. Love affairs resulted and jealousies were rife.

For sexual experimentation young men turned to prostitutes, and Munch was no exception. In his art, he portrays such women. Munch was also linked with a number of educated women from respectable families. As a young man he had an affair with Milly Thalow, a married woman, who tortured him emotionally by telling him about the other men in her life. This liaison angered Munch's puritanical father, Dr. Christian Munch, and haunted Munch even after he won a government scholarship and left Norway in 1889 to study in Paris. Later, he met Dagney Juell, a free-spirited Norwegian poetess, and introduced her to his bohemian circle in Berlin. She married Stanislaw Przybyszewski, a Polish poet and medical student. After two children, she ran off with a young Russian who murdered her and committed suicide.

A Devastating Affair

Munch's affair with Tulla Larsen, the daughter of a Norwegian wine merchant, was perhaps the most devastating. She wanted to marry him, but he broke off the engagement. The story goes that to recapture him, Tulla had friends tell Munch she was dying. He rushed to her bedside, only to discover it was a hoax. The final episode took place in 1902 at Munch's cottage in Asgardstrand on the Oslo fjord. A gunshot wounded his left middle finger, and Munch was taken to the hospital. Tulla left for Paris with friends and soon married a younger Norwegian artist, Arne Kavali. When Munch painted a large oil he called The Death of Marat, he pictured himself as a bloody corpse with Tulla standing naked and rigid beside him. To a friend Munch wrote, "Tell the enemy [as he called Tulla] I have been pregnant with her deed for nine years and have now produced the child."

A love affair with the British violinist, Eva Mudocci (fig. 3), came to a better ending. She and Munch remained friends. In a later interview, Mudocci reported that the lithographic image, in which Munch portrayed himself almost smothered under her head and hair, caused their only row because he named it Salome (fig. 6).