ON EDVARD MUNCH

5 8 Y O N E D V A R D M U N C H W . S . D I P I E R O Whenever I visit the Getty Center, that travertine-and-aluminum shrine high above Interstate 5, I nod to Mantegna’s mineralized Adoration of the Magi and Masaccio’s mournful Saint Andrew, then speedwalk to Edvard Munch’s Starry Night, the most sumptuously dire nocturne I know. Expanses of blue-green space – Norway’s summer nights are said to be bluish silver – nearly erase the small smears of stars and planets. The mountainous tree rising by the sea is a loamy hump riven by a seam of violet starlight. As our vision strains to see the stars, what really beckons is that forbidding mass which to my eye expresses a fast-failing desire to rise beyond the gravities we live with and are. It is a picture without agonies but fat with muΔed, one-day-at-a-time anxieties. It might be better titled Just Barely a Starry Night. It is not standard-issue Munchish emotional extremity but a sober essay on the boundaries separating land from sea, planet from cosmos. Munch made it in 1893. In 1889 he had attended the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where van Gogh showed Starry Night, Arles, and the Getty picture is a tensed-up, baleful answer to van Gogh’s rolling crests of pulpy celestial matter. Van Gogh’s energy floods and storms, Munch’s lids and contains. 5 9 R Compared to the great moderns, Munch has been assessed, if not quite in baby steps, at least in a sluggish catch-up. Becoming Edvard Munch, which I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2009, followed on the Museum of Modern Art’s 2006 Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul. An exhibition at the Berkeley Museum of Art in 1996, The Artist and His Models, cracked open the overlooked later period of Munch’s career, when he spent enormous energy examining the relationship between himself and his models. We forget that this artist so associated with trauma, dissoluteness, and derangement actually lived a very long life. Born in 1863, devoted to painting by the age of seventeen , internationally successful by 1902, and included in shows with Cézanne and Matisse, Munch lived to see his work in Germany ’s exhibition of ‘‘degenerate art’’ in 1937. (He died in 1944.) Yet he remains for many an artist arrested in a narrow range of moods established early in his career: sexual fears and voracities; sorrow and depressiveness; the terrifying immediacy of unreason. In the copious diaries he kept throughout his life, he wrote, ‘‘I do not believe in an art which is not forced into existence by a human being’s desire to open his heart. Art is your heart’s blood.’’ An 1898 woodcut, Blossom of Pain, illustrates those poetics: a scarf of blood runs down the chest of an emaciated naked figure and waters ground from which rises a plant topped with a rhyming red blood. No modern has been held so hostage, in so many silly ways, to one image. The Scream expresses what Kynaston McShine, in his MoMA catalogue essay, called the ‘‘existential agitation’’ in Munch’s work. Fair enough, though Munch did not hold copyright on the soul’s griefs and grievances. He did publicly identify himself with such agitations, though, not just because he was authentically alarmed by his own o√-ness but because it helped advance his career. (More on this later.) The Scream fashions a new nervous sublime in nature and the human order. Munch reconstructed the occasion: ‘‘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.’’ In the picture Munch separates himself from his companions because 6 0 D I P I E R O Y the...