BEYOND ‘THE SCREAM’
Edvard Munch paintings of despair at S.F. Museum of Modern Art
No, “The Scream” isn’t here — that most famous image by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. But the exhibit of 44 of Munch’s paintings at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art may have enough anguish, turmoil, blazing color and melancholy to make up for that omission.
There are two precursors of “The Scream” on display in the show, variations without the same tortured figure that is so familiar and so parodied. These two — “Sick Mood at Sunset: Despair” (1892) and “Despair” (1894) — are similar in composition and have red-streaked skies but with more withdrawn central characters. Still, you can see where Munch was going.
This modest-scale but emotion-packed exhibit takes its subtitle from “Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed” (1940-43) which seems to encapsulate much of Munch’s lengthy career. Its timing is stunning, and not for its subject matter: Munch painted it while Norway was under Nazi occupation.
The show is a collaboration with the Munch Museum of Oslo — which you’d normally have to visit to see a selection like this — and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s on view in San Francisco through Oct. 9, with advance ticketing recommended and a $33 top admission price.
There are two paintings of “The Scream,” both in Norway, and too fragile to travel, as the exhibit’s local curator, Gary Garrels, explained at an exhibit preview. (There is also a version in pastels that’s in a private collection in New York. That’s the one that sold for $120 million a few years ago, and isn’t traveling either.)
Nonetheless Garrels hopes the exhibit will focus attention on the later paintings by Munch (1863-1944), whose career spanned 60 years. In the 19th century he was considered a Symbolist. But about 75 percent of the works in the show date from the 20th century, after he had returned from Paris and Berlin to a studio near Oslo.
One idea behind the exhibit is to focus on
these 44 works as paintings, not just on their emotional, often anguished subject matter. That’s a challenge throughout the galleries. For instance, the deaths of Munch’s sister and mother early in his life lie behind “In the Sick Room” and “The Smell of Death” and “Death Struggle” and “At the Deathbed” and “Death in the Sick Room.”
Munch’s paintings are so rarely exhibited (the last major show in San Francisco was decades ago at the de Young Museum) that this project might have benefited from being less focused. No drawings or prints are included, though Munch made thousands.
Few early works are on view to show Munch’s developing style — he visited Paris in his early 20s and was influenced by the Impressionists. Considering his own influence on artists early in the 20th century, SFMOMA might have added some of its German Expressionist paintings to the mix.
The 44 works, hung in eight of the museum’s galleries, do provide plenty of drama.
They are not arranged chronologically or to tell a biographical story, but by themes — with Munch’s self-portraits dominating. Here he is, looking like a Victorian-era gentleman in “Self-Portrait with Cigarette” (1895), and nude nearby in the harrowing “Self-Portrait in Hell” (1903). Those are among the themed “Confessionals and Self-Confessions.”
“In the Studio” offers a gallery of paintings from 1916 to 1944, including everything from Matisse-like compositions and color to “Weeping Nude” (1913-14), a crouching female figure with her face and torso hidden by her long hair, a symbolic depiction of vulnerability and despair.
The “Nocturnes” gallery includes Munch’s version of “Starry Night” (1922-24), with stars like blobs in the sky, and “Night in SaintCloud” (1893), a moody, mysterious depiction of a figure at a window overlooking the Seine in Paris. The painting’s label adds a bit of biographical material: While living there, Munch wrote his Saint-Cloud Manifesto, vowing to paint “living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.”
“Love” is almost an ironic name for one of the show’s galleries; the introductory text considers Munch’s view of love as “a zero-sum game.”
Munch’s version of “The Kiss” (1897) finds the embracing man and woman dissolving into each other, with something like a distorted face shared between them. And if the exhibit seems incomplete without “The Scream,” there is on view Munch’s well-known “The Dance of Life” (1925), an outdoor celebration that mixes the innocent and the grotesque.
As one of the pioneers of modern art, bridging the 19th and 20th centuries, Munch had an impact on the art world from the beginning of his career to the end.
An exhibit of his work in Berlin in 1892 caused an uproar and was closed down. In 1937 he took part in the Universal Exposition in Paris — while at the same time, in Germany, the Nazi government was seizing his paintings from museums as “degenerate art.”