Munch and Expressionism. London and OsloReview by: Jill LloydThe Burlington Magazine, Vol. 148, No. 1234 (Jan., 2006), pp. 47-49Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20074282 .

Accessed: 02/06/2014 14:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend accessto The Burlington Magazine.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Mon, 2 Jun 2014 14:31:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

6o. King Arthur's Castle, Tintagel, Cornwall, by Samuel Palmer. 1848-49. Watercolour, gouache, graphite, black chalk and brown ink on paper, 30.2 by 44.2 cm.

(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; exh. British Museum,

London).

(nos. 10-15; Fig-57) which one had believed were too fragile ever to leave the Ashmolean

again; the two groups of 'blacks' (nos.30-39 and 72-79), convincingly divided as between ci826-30 and ci831-32, the last three of

which are carefully placed across a corner

from the related paintings of The white cloud and The bright cloud (nos.86 and 87); the three

works in watercolour and gouache that hymn the richness of nature, In a Shoreham garden, The magic apple tree (Fig. 59) and Pastoral with a horse chestnut tree (nos.66, 69 and 70);5 the

perhaps over-rich visions of Italy (nos. 105a and b and 106), together with a contemporary

watercolour by Palmer's wife, Hannah; and

the final Milton group of studies, water

colours and prints (nos. 146-5 5; Fig.5 8). The works of the first half of the exhibition,

up to 1835, need no gloss. The late works, however different, are beginning to earn

general acceptance, as they did for Palmer's

contemporaries, as 'a learned . . . synthesis of

the stern [to some 'Dorian'], the classical, the

simple, the natural, the harmonious and the

refined' (p. 192). What is particularly clear in this exhibition is the influence and absorption of J.M.W. Turner's later work, not only in the late skies and sunsets (for example, nos.116, 123, 148, 150 and 153), but also in

the almost Ruskinian geological observation

of King Arthur's Castle, Tintagel, Cornwall of 1848-49 (no. 122; Fig.60). While related works by Blake, Linnell,

Calvert and Richmond are included in the exhibition, together with examples by pre cursors such as D?rer and Lucas van Leyden, Palmer's significance for the twentieth centu

ry is relegated to a small wall-panel at the end

and, more importandy, a catalogue essay by Colin Harrison. His influence can be seen not

only in the obvious similarities of the early

prints of artists such as F.L. Griggs, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland and, more generally, in the Neo-romanticism of the middle of the

century, but also, more deeply assimilated, in

the later, more mature works of these artists.

The recent Sutherland exhibition at Dulwich

gave proof of this: Sunrise between hedges of 1939 and Dark hill of 1940 each echo a

page in Palmer's 1824 sketchbook at that time

untraced in Western Canada.6 Palmer was not

just an important artist in his own right; his contribution to a whole tradition of visionary

landscape underlies much British art of the twentieth century.

1 Catalogue: Samuel Palmer: Visions of Landscape.

By William Vaughan, Elizabeth E. Barker and Colin

Harrison, with contributions by David Bindman, David Blayney Brown, Alexandra Greathead, Marjorie

Shelley and Scott Wilcox. 256 pp. incl. 206 col. pis. +

18 b. & w. ills. (British Museum Press, London, 2005), ?25. ISBN 0-7141- 2641-1. 2

Sale, Christie's, London, 9th June 2005, lot 45; repr. in colour; the fact that it did not sell is a reflection of

the continuing lack of appreciation of this period of Palmer's art. 3

J.H. Townsend, ed.: William Blake: The Painter at

Work, London 2003, pp. 144-48. 4 A. Wilton and A. Lyles: exh. cat. The Great Age of British Watercolours, 1750-1880, London (Royal Aca

demy of Arts) and Washington (National Gallery of Art) 1993, no.224. 5 The question of tides now given to Palmer's works deserves study. His own tides, given in exhibition cata

logues and on labels on the back of certain works are

simple and descriptive, for instance A rustic scene, Late

twilight, A pastoral scene or The harvest moon, whereas

titles such as The magic apple tree derive, at best, from

Palmer's son A.H. Palmer. 6 See M. Hammer: exh. cat. Graham Sutherland:

Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924-1950, London

(Dulwich Picture Gallery) and Nottingham (Djanogly Art Gallery) 2005, nos.25 and 28. The related Palmer

sketchbook pages are pp.96, 97 and 103, and pp.181 and 182 respectively; none of these was among the pages removed from the sketchbook and given to the V. & A.

in 1928. The Dulwich exhibition was reviewed in this

Magazine, 147 (2005), pp.630-31.

Munch and Expressionism London and Oslo

by JILL LLOYD

EDVARD MUNCH'S SELF-INVOLVEMENT ? not

to say self-obsession -

contributes to the

remarkably contemporary impact of his pow erful imagery. His Symbolist view of woman

(as either temptress or saint) has become seri

ously outdated, but Munch's determination

to reveal the murky corners of his soul con

tinues to strike a chord today. It is therefore

surprising that the recent exhibition Edvard Munch by Himself it the Royal Academy of Arts, London (closed nth December), was the first to be devoted to the central theme of

Munch's self-portraiture. The show's curator,

Iris M?ller-Westermann, developed her thesis on the subject into a scholarly exhibition

catalogue1 and a powerful visual display that

spanned the whole of Munch's long career.

Drawing on the important collection of

work in the Munch Museum that the artist

bequeathed to the city of Oslo (including many rare prints and drawings as well as

famous paintings), the exhibition presented the story of Munch's troubled and frequendy lonely life. We expect self-portraiture to involve a

quest for identity, but in Munch's case the loss

of both his mother and sister from tub?rculo

sis, the burden of illness and anxiety he inher

ited from his family and an unhappy initiation into the rites of love, seem to have provided the young artist with a strong sense of purpose and identity. We are told that an early self

portrait of 1886 shows how Munch used the handle of his brush to scratch away the surface of his realist painting, to reveal the thoughts and feelings behind the fa?ade. In fact, there is little sense of an artist searching for intimate

personal truth. On the contrary, Munch

projected his personal fate onto a universal

plane, drawing on trends in literature and

psychology to evolve a pessimistic vision of

the relations between men and women. The

distinctive formal language he developed can be seen in several wonderful examples of his

early work. Prints like The woman II (1895), combining aquatint and drypoint on copper

plate, or the lithograph Self-portrait with skele ton arm (1895), with its velvet black shadows, demonstrate both Munch's technical and

stylistic inventiveness and the innovations of

his imagery. Certain motifs, like the blood red hair spilling over the man's shoulders in

Vampire (1893) or the ubiquitous Scream (rep resented in the exhibition by the 1895 litho

graphic version) have passed into the visual

coinage of our times; yet whenever we see

them we are convinced anew of their origi

nality and power.

6i. Study for Self-portrait between clock and bed,

by Edvard Munch, c.1940. Pen and black ink on paper, 28 by 22 cm. (Munch Museum, Oslo; exh. Royal Academy of Arts, London).

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE CXLVIII JANUARY 200? 47

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Mon, 2 Jun 2014 14:31:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, when

Munch moved resdessly between Oslo, Berlin

and Paris, he painted a number of self-con

scious and theatrical self-portraits. One of the

challenges of the exhibition was where to

draw the limits of self-portraiture; in a sense,

all Munch's work is a self-portrait, and from

this point of view the boundaries of the exhi

bition were necessarily arbitrary. What stands

out in the early work is Munch's extreme self

dramatisation: the incident following a row

with his girlfriend Tulla Larsen, which ended with him shooting a bullet into his own hand, is wildly exaggerated in the blood-soaked On the operating table (1902-03). A few years later

the unfortunate Tulla is recast as the murder

ess Charlotte Corday in Munch's two versions

of The death of Marat (1907). The first version is one of the most exhilarating paintings in the

exhibition: Munch's expressive use of colour

and his ability to bring every surface and space to life show how positively he responded to the new painterly styles of the twentieth cen

tury. This spectacular painting nevertheless

dominated a room of rather mediocre self

portraits, with the exception of Self-portrait with a bottle of wine (1906). Shortly after paint ing this haunting image of loneliness, Munch

checked himself into a clinic suffering from dementia paralytica brought on by drink.

The trouble with the self-portraits in the

earlier part of the exhibition is that when they are not outrageously theatrical they are frankly

boring because they lack psychological depth. When Munch emerged from electric shock

treatment at Professor Jacobsen's clinic, he

returned to Norway from Germany, acquir

ing an estate on the Kristiania Fjord where he

led an increasingly reclusive life. In the self

portraits from this second half of his life, Munch confronted his human vulnerability more directly. Looking at his naked, ageing

body in the mirror, or staring at his face,

ravaged by Spanish flu, he began to engage psychologically, not so much with the viewer

but with the reflection of his own face. Build

ing on the success of The death of Marat, he

achieved a wonderful series of paintings about

the artist and his model, where coloured space bends around the figures, separating and join

ing them at one and the same time. By him

self, particularly after the Nazi invasion of

Norway in 1940, Munch became increasingly

introspective and took to wandering around

his estate at night, surrounded by the silent

and magical landscape of the fjord. In his

moving representations of human loneliness, as seen in Self-portrait, the night wanderer (1923?

24) or Self-portrait between clock and bed (1940 42), both shown with related studies (Fig.61),

Munch created images of his own mortality and human destiny that rank among the great

self-portraits of the modern age. With so much of its collection on loan to

the Royal Academy, the Munch Museum,

Oslo, has used its own exhibiting space to

organise Expression! (to 8th January), which charts the relationship that Munch and other

Norwegian artists developed with German

Expressionism. The story of Munch's recep

62. Dagnyjuel Przybszewska, by Edvard Munch.

1893. 148.5 by 99.5 cm. (Munch Museum, Oslo; exh. Royal Academy of Arts, London).

tion in Germany was, indeed, a subplot of the

Royal Academy exhibition for - like Van

Gogh ?

Munch's reputation was established

earlier in Germany than elsewhere in the

world. The scandal provoked by his exhibi tion at the Berlin Society of Artists in 1892 led to the foundation of the Berlin Secession, and

his cycle of paintings, The frieze of life, was first shown in Berlin in 1902. During the 1890s,

Munch belonged to the circle of bohemian writers in Berlin who met in the Black Pig bar, including August Strindberg, the Polish poet Stanislaw Przybyszewski and the young Norwegian woman Dagny Juel, whose sexual

magnetism Munch evoked in a haunting por trait displayed in the Royal Academy show

(Fig.62). Munch acquired patrons in Germany who bought his work and commissioned new

paintings, including Gustav Schiefler and Rosa Schapire (Fig.63) in Hamburg, who also

supported Ernil Nolde and the young artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner who formed the Br?cke group. When Munch was pre sented alongside Van Gogh, C?zanne and

Gauguin as one of the founding fathers of

modern art at the Cologne Sonderbund exhi

bition in 1912, his reputation in Germany reached its apogee.

From the outset, the Br?cke artists had

attempted to persuade Munch to exhibit with their group. Although he admired their work,

Munch refused their invitations, possibly, as

Arne Eggum suggests in his valuable catalogue

essay, because he feared his work would look

pass? alongside theirs.2 In fact, the expression istic brushwork and colour that appear in

Munch's paintings such as The death of Marat are evidence of his direct response to C?zanne

and Matisse rather than the young Germans.

In this sense, the juxtaposition of lesser

known works by Munch dating from the 1910s and 1920s with German Expressionist

paintings needs more explanation. Indeed, the

lack of information for the public in the form of panels or explanatory labels renders the

exhibition in Oslo generally difficult to understand.

The influence of Munch on the Br?cke artists is nevertheless well demonstrated, part

ly through thematic comparisons, for example in a room devoted to Br?cke variations on

Munch's famous image Puberty (represented in the exhibition by a 1914 version). Gener

ous loans from the Br?cke Museum in Berlin,

alongside stunning prints from the Munch Museum's own collection of works on paper,

show the influence Munch had on Expres sionist woodcuts. Although Kirchner, who

was strongly influenced by Munch's tortured

self-portraits and images of sexual aggression, is under-represented in the exhibition, a

section devoted to Karl Schmidt-Rottluffs

Norwegian landscape motifs dating from 1911, and an exemplary selection of his later

paintings, show the sustained influence

Munch had on his work. In an intriguing twist of fate, we learn that young Norwegian artists in the 1930s like Gert Jynge and

Sigurd Winge were influenced by Schmidt Rottluffs work. For many, Munch was too

overwhelming a presence to be approached

direcdy, and it was through the mediation of

German Expressionist art that the next gener ation of Norwegians found their way back to

Munch's work. One of the discoveries of the

exhibition is the German artist Rolf Nesch, who was influenced by Kirchner in the 1930s and emigrated to Norway immediately after

Hider's rise to power in 1933. Nesch's subde,

haunting coloured etchings draw together various threads of the exhibition, combining influences from Kirchner and Munch in an

increasingly original vision. In comparison,

many of the Norwegian artists look painfully

63. Portrait of Rosa Schapire, by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

1911. 84 by 76 cm. (Br?cke-Museum, Berlin; exh. Munch Museum, Oslo).

48 JANUARY 2OO6 CXLVIII THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Mon, 2 Jun 2014 14:31:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

derivative, and one questions the wisdom of

placing them alongside giants like Kirchner and Munch. A more fitting finale to the exhibition would have been a comparison between these two artists' late studio paint

ings, including the self-portraits in the studio that reflect their comparable situations of

historical and psychological isolation. With so

many important works on loan to London, the Munch Museum has had trouble fulfilling the promise of Expression!. One can only hope that a future occasion will see the relationship between Munch and Kirchner explored in

greater depth.

1 Catalogue: Munch by Himself. By Iris M?ller

Westermann with Ylva Hillstr?m. 208 pp. incl. 201 col.

pis. + 22 b. & w. ills. (Royal Academy of Arts, London,

2005), ?19.95. ISBN 1-903973-65?1. The exhibition was seen in 2005 at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm

(19th February to 15th May), and at the Munch Mus

eum, Oslo (nth June to 28th August). 2 A. Eggum: 'Die Br?cke und Edvard Munch' in

exh. cat. Ekspresjon! Edvard Munch - Tysk Og Norsk

Kunst I Tre Tia. 246 pp. incl. 154 col. pis. + num. b. & w. ills. (Munch Museum, Oslo, 2005), Kr.250. ISBN

82-90128-49-5. The catalogue also includes the texts in

German translation.

Degas, Sickert, Toulouse-Lautrec London and Washington

by MERLIN JAMES

one could envisage several ways in which

the exploration of Sickert's Continental influ

ences and affinities might produce a stimulat

ing exhibition. One obvious strategy would

be to offer a representative core of his work, with relevant satellite selections from his

European (mosdy French) contemporaries. If one wished to highlight some major names

(as the curators do here, in line with T?te

Britain's earlier Turner Whistler Monet), one

might opt simply for a strong body of images by each of the principals, whether given separate spaces or intermixed. That their

shared concerns such as the depiction of

modern urban life or interest in compositional

cropping (both emphasised in the current

show) were common to other artists in Britain

and Europe could perhaps be brought out in a room of mixed works by secondary figures. In various possible formats such an exhibition

- large or small

- could offer both a scholarly

study and, for a general audience, a breath

taking display of artistic expression. Alas, the exhibition Degas, Sickert and

Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870?igio, on view at T?te Britain, London (to 15 th

January),1 does not show its star artists to their

best advantage and illuminates their connec

tions only confusedly. A relatively small num

ber of really powerful works (which could nevertheless have been shown effectively and succincdy) is over-extended across eight rooms, diluted with numerous mediocre or

bad pictures. In the early sequences a few

familiar Degas ballet pictures (from the T?te

64. Woman washing her hair, by Walter Sickert. 1906. 45-7 by 38.1 cm. (T?te, London).

or other British galleries) are lost among busy social and street-life scenes by James Tissot,

George Clausen, Sidney Starr and Giuseppe de Nittis, and portraits by Whisder, Fantin Latour and William Orchardson. Another

scant scattering of pictures and fan designs by

Degas (again the three most major works - a

theatre, a racing and a circus subject - are all

familiar from British public collections) is crowded out by domestic period pieces and

chintzy portraits by Philip Wilson Steer, James Guthrie and Elizabeth Forbes. Sickert's music-hall oils, and some of Toulouse

Lautrec's graphics and paintings on board,

mosdy of theatrical and domestic subjects (Fig.65), are introduced amid a flurry of dance and revue-bar sketches by Charles Conder,

William Warrener and Arthur Melville. A section is devoted to full-length 'dandy' and

evening-dress portraits, in which Sickert's

well-known figure of Aubrey Beardsley (T?te) slips quiedy away from flashy society figures by Boldini, Whisder's faux-informel self-portrait, J.-E. Blanche's empty emula

tions of Manet and William Rothenstein's

stagily 'unconventional' picture of Conder

turning on his heel in a top hat and overcoat.

Things improve with an ensemble of Sickert's

figures in domestic interiors (Fig.64) juxta posed with genuinely kindred pictures by Bonnard, Vuillard and Degas, including a few less predictable loans from private collections and foreign museums. A finale is provided by the juxtaposition of two major compositional

performances, the Tate's version of Sickert's

Ennui (1914; cat. no.in) with Degas's Interior

(the rape) from Philadelphia (no.no). Degas's famous L'Absinthe (1875-76; no.42), from the

Mus?e d'Orsay, Paris, is isolated as a midway

punctuation point in the exhibition. Not all works in an exhibition need be

equally fine. There is a case for letting better

ones shine by contrast with lesser ones, for

showing noble failures or works that have

65. Woman curling her hair, by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. 1896. Board, 56 by 39 cm. (Mus?e des

Augustins, Toulouse; exh. T?te Britain, London).

character though not greatness. But this is not

the case with the inferior things that pad out the present show, which are given equal status

with the masterpieces. The foreword to the

very scholarly catalogue speaks of the project's

investigation of how international dialogue between artists makes an impact upon 'the

creation of great works of art'.2 Thereafter,

however, the question of the relative merit of

individual exhibits is avoided, and great works

are nowhere identified or. differentiated from others. This is partly the result of a strong socio-historical emphasis, whereby subject

matter alone (be it urbanism, dandyism, bohemian decadence, theatre, domestic life) qualifies works for consideration. A similar

inclusiveness is permitted by an omnivorous

art-historical concern with the known con

tacts between individual artists, their shared

milieux, critical and commercial fortunes, documented references to each other, possible or verified knowledge of each others' particu lar works and so on. The catalogue offers

close-grained discussion of the cross-Channel

art market, collectors, contemporary critical

writing, Sickert's famous pro-Degas crusade, his profile in Paris, Toulouse-Lautrec's and

Degas's early exposure in England, contem

porary controversy surrounding L'Absinthe, and much else that is in itself absorbing. Such scholarship however, though it carefully reports artists' and critics' judgments on

works, remains itself essentially agnostic with

regard to artistic quality. Not that the authors here do not also

discuss some formal aspects of works such as

unusual viewpoints, the framing and cropping of moti?, the manner of paint application and

the use of colour and tone. They touch too on

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE CXLVIII JANUARY 200? 49

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Mon, 2 Jun 2014 14:31:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions