Suggestive of his state of mind, the paintings bore such titles as Melancholy , Jealousy , Despair, Anxiety , Death in the Sickroom and The Scream , which he painted in His style varies dramatically during this period, depending on the emotion he was trying to communicate in a particular painting. He turned to an Art Nouveau sultriness for Madonna and a stylized, psychologically laden Symbolism for Summer Night's Dream In his superb Self-portrait with Cigarette of , painted while he was feverishly engaged with The Frieze of Life, he employed the flickering brushwork of Whistler, scraping and rubbing at the suit jacket so that his body appears as evanescent as the smoke that trails from the cigarette he holds smoldering near his heart.
In Death in the Sickroom, a moving evocation of Sophie's death painted in , he adopted the bold graphic outlines of Van Gogh , Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. In it, he and his sisters loom in the foreground, while his aunt and praying father attend to the dying girl, who is obscured by her chair.
Across the vast space that divides the living siblings portrayed as adults from their dying sister, the viewer's eye is drawn to the vacated bed and useless medicines in the rear.
In , on a visit to Kristiania, Munch had met the woman who would become his cruel muse. Tulla Larsen was the wealthy daughter of Kristiania's leading wine merchant, and at 29, she was still unmarried. Munch's biographers have relied on his sometimes conflicting and far from disinterested accounts to reconstruct the tormented relationship.
He first set eyes on Larsen when she arrived at his studio in the company of an artist with whom he shared the space. From the outset, she pursued him aggressively. In his telling, their affair began almost against his will.
He fled - to Berlin, then on a yearlong dash across Europe. She followed. He would refuse to see her, then succumb. He memorialized their relationship in The Dance of Life of , set on midsummer's night in Aasgaardstrand, the seaside village where he once trysted with Millie Thaulow and where, in , he had purchased a tiny cottage.
At the center of the picture, a vacant-eyed male character, representing Munch himself, dances with a woman in a red dress probably Millie. Their eyes do not meet, and their stiff bodies maintain an unhappy distance.
To the left, Larsen can be seen, golden-haired and smiling benevolently, in a white dress; on the right, she appears again, this time frowning in a black dress, her countenance as dark as the garment she wears, her eyes downcast in bleak disappointment. On a green lawn, other couples dance lustfully in what Munch had called that "deranged dance of life" - a dance he dared not join.
Larsen longed for Munch to marry her. His Aasgaardstrand cottage, which is now a house museum, contains the antique wedding chest, made for a bride's trousseau, that she gave him. Though he wrote that the touch of her "narrow, clammy lips" felt like the kiss of a corpse, he yielded to her imprecations and even went so far as to make a grudging proposal.
Then, when she came to Germany to present him with the necessary papers, he lost them. She insisted that they travel to Nice, as France did not require these documents. Once there, he escaped over the border to Italy and eventually to Berlin in to stage The Frieze of Life exhibition.
That summer, Munch returned to his cottage in Aasgaardstrand. He sought peace, but drinking heavily and brawling publicly, he failed to find it. Then after more than a year's absence, Larsen reappeared. He ignored her overtures, until her friends informed him that she was in a suicidal depression and taking large doses of morphine.
He reluctantly agreed to see her. There was a quarrel, and somehow - the full story is unknown - he shot himself with a revolver, losing part of a finger on his left hand and also inflicting on himself a less obvious psychological injury. Prone to exaggerated feelings of persecution - in his painting Golgotha of , for instance, he depicted himself nailed to a cross - Munch magnified the fiasco in his mind, until it assumed an epic scale.
Describing himself in the third person, he wrote, "Everybody stared at him, at his deformed hand. What are we? Where are we going? Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building. Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The first modern photograph? Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage. Stieglitz, The Steerage. Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss. Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 second version , From early age, painting had been a way to be isolated from the sadness he perceived in the family. Growing up, Munch saw in artistic expression a way to represent anguish and despair like no one else had yet done: repreenting them as the only true protagonists of life.
His art was not a form of catharsis: according to Munch, in fact, nothing else existed in life. The original title that Munch gave his most iconic painting was The Scream of Nature. Basically there is not much difference between these two visions.
The desperate cry of nature involves every single thing into the same anxiety. The human being and the landscape are one only thing: the red-blooded sunset, the fjords and the human figure follow the same wavy forms, the same loss of focus, the same dissolution of reality.
They share the same condition: coming out of the condition of disgrace is impossible. Despair exists also for them. The second wall is already about the decadence of the fruits: Flowering and Passing of Love , where the natural evolution of life leads to scenarios like Vampire , Jealousy and Melancholy. But is the person in the painting really Edvard Munch?
Based on photographs available of the artist, it doesn't really look like him. Is it a man or a woman? Someone young or old? You or me?! The sexless, anonymous person depicted in The Scream may be Munch, or it may be Munch's sick sister, hospitalized in the asylum nearby. In fact, it really could be anyone…. What is the meaning of Edvard Munch's modern art painting The Scream? When it all comes down to it, a "scream" is above all a sound — a physical, auditory experience.
The screams of dying animals at the slaughterhouse and the cries possibly overheard from the nearby insane asylum add a moving, personal layer of meaning to the painting's simple title.
Was Munch's "scream of nature" a haunting mix of all of the above? While the painting has obvious autobiographical and personal significance for Munch, one reason why The Scream painting is still so famous even today is because it is so universal in its meaning.
The Scream has evolved into a symbol of modern existential crisis for everyone who at times feels lost, stressed, or threatened by their own thoughts and past. Anyone can look at The Scream and feel something.
Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night is one of the most famous pieces of art today. But what is the true meaning of Van Gogh's masterpiece? The futurist movement in particular was dedicated to capturing both time and motion in art, creating paintings of movement.
What is the meaning of the famous Surrealist artist Salvador Dali's melting clocks painting "Persistence of Memory"? What is the meaning of the painting American Gothic by Grant Wood?
Interpretation and analysis of this famous example of 20th century American regional art. What is the meaning of artist Edward Hopper's diner painting Nighthawks? The scene seems to come straight out of classic Hollywood film noir.
0コメント