An exhibition of Edvard Munch’s work comes to SFMOMA.
In the fall of 1908, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch had hallucinations and a fullon nervous collapse, brought on in part by alcohol abuse. After eight months in a psychiatric facility, the artist, who had lived extensively in Paris and Berlin, repaired to Kragero in his native country. In 1916, he bought an estate in the town of Skoyen, near Oslo.
With the exception of sporadic brief travels, the unmarried and childless Munch spent the rest of his life, steadily painting, in that relatively remote location. Before his death, at age 80 in 1944, he arranged for the bulk of his artistic output, including some 1,100 paintings, to go to the city of Oslo. The museum that housed them was rechristened the Munch Museum in 1963.
Geography can have a lot to do with an artist’s destiny and reputation. Munch’s isolation, at least by cosmopolitan European standards, undoubtedly contributed to the dimming critical esteem of an artist who was routinely compared to Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin in his ascendant years. According to the conventional narrative, Munch was a Modernist outlier who did his best work early on and then declined into a kind of backwater irrelevance, sticking to figurative work as abstraction and other innovations gained ground. Relatively few of his paintings are owned by American museums, another factor in his muted reputation here.
“Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed,” a compact but pointed exhibition of 44 paintings that opens Saturday, June 24, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, looks to rewrite or at least amend the story line.
“The myth is that once the demons were exorcized after the breakdown,” said Gary Garrels, SFMOMA senior curator of painting and sculpture, “the work trails off. Once you’ve seen these paintings, that’s clearly not what happened.”
“Between the Clock and the Bed” (1940-43), the very late work that gives the show its title, offers a dramatic case in point. Even in a catalog reproduction, it registers as a powerful and boldly conceived composition. The artist, in one of his many self-portraits, stands between a faceless clock and a bed covered in a starkly patterned bedspread. A studio bearing some of Munch’s work glows in bright ochres and reds behind him. The haunting, hollow-eyed face is rendered with brashly expressionist colors and brushwork. The bedspread veers toward an angular abstraction. A painted female nude lurks like some psychosexual secret behind a halfopened door.
Garrels and his SFMOMA colleague Caitlin Haskell, associate curator of painting and sculpture, were quick to cite other works that demonstrate Munch’s later-stage vitality. “Weeping Nude” (1913-15), with its loose, almost liquid treatment of paint, prompted Haskell to remark that “the painting itself is weeping.” In “Death Struggle” (1915), praying and stricken figures surround a bedridden patient in a room whose walls seem to be infected by a splotchy pattern. Haskell again: “The whole scene is oozing.”
Always a painter of intense emotional scenes — “The Scream” being the emblematic example, enshrined on dorm room walls and refrigerator magnets worldwide — Munch returned again and again to scenes of isolation, sickness, self-portraiture and a barebreasted “Madonna.”
Neither painted version of “The Scream,” for the record, will be on view here. “Sick Mood at Sunset. Despair” (1892), a work that shares the vertiginous bridge setting of the more celebrated painting, is included in the San Francisco show.
The new Munch exhibition
owes its genesis, in part, to SFMOMA’s Snøhettadesigned expansion. When Kjetil Thorsen, one of the architects who worked on the project and an enthusiast for all things Norwegian, invited Garrels and others to attend a 2013 Munch show in Oslo, the die was cast. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and Oslo’s Munch Museum, which loaned about half the works, joined forces with SFMOMA to mount “Between the Clock and the Bed.”
The show will be hung thematically rather than chronologically, opening with a double gallery of self-portraits. Other rooms are devoted to the studio, the sickroom, hallucination, death and love and “Around the Bed.” Munch’s exploratory techniques included thinning paint with turpentine, scraping and gouging at the canvas and even “weathering” his works outdoors. Whatever he’s doing,” said Haskell, “there’s a real thoughtfulness in the way he puts down paint.” For Garrels, the “deeply emotional” character of Munch’s work is inseparable from “how gorgeously they are painted.”
In a catalog preface, Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the multivolume autobiographical “My Struggle,” calls Munch a “confessional artist” who “stands naked, with his guard down, even in his landscape paintings. There is nothing between him and the world.”
Munch himself might not have put it so bluntly, but in a journal entry, the artist wrote of landscape as a means of accessing “an image of one’s mood — it is the mood that is the main thing — Nature is merely the means.”
No matter how overt or encoded the subject, painting, for this persevering artist, was always the doorway into himself.
The show will be hung thematically rather than chronologically, opening with a double gallery of self-portraits. Other rooms are devoted to the studio, the sickroom, hallucination, death and love and “Around the Bed.”