The Mad Munch

When most people hear the name Edvard Munch, the immediately see The Scream in the mind’s eye, as if it were Munch’s own face crying out in front of a blood-red sky. All biography of Munch seems to be psychobiography. Comparing Munch’s reception with that of Claude Monet, Jay A. Clarke in his Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth writes, “Munch’s typecasting as an unbalanced genius has encouraged historians to consider his work as emotional biography, whereas that of the more ‘stable’ Monet has been viewed formally, as so many layers of paint.” In his book accompanying the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition of the same name, Clarke not only recovers the lost history of how Munch became Munch, but also shows the role that Munch himself played in creating that persona. Munch “was perpetually considering his legacy and, wanting to be perceived as a true original, did his best to expunge suggestions that he might have had artistic models of his own,” Clarke argues. “Munch anxiety of influence reaches at once back in time and into the future, on him as the center and from him to the margins, manifesting itself in ways political, psychological, social, and most of all visual.” Munch’s highly Impressionistic Rue Lafaette (above, from 1891), a direct quotation of a work by Gustave Caillebotte’s A Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann, is just one of the many traces Munch and complicit critics covered over in his personal mythmaking that Clarke uncovers to recover a fuller picture of the complete artist who was Edvard Munch.

Munch seems to transcend category because he belonged, however fleetingly, to so many of them: Impressionism, Naturalism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, etc. Throwing all of these influences into his melting pot, Munch cooked up his special blend of personal vision. Munch “recast epics and existing mythic vocabularies in his own idiom,” Clarke explains, “and while these sources are not always obvious, they are a subtle visual presence.” For example, Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan Street (above, from 1892) marries the Impressionist street scene with a Norwegian subject while also adding the new Symbolist touches Munch may have seen in James Ensor’s work. In a separate section, titled “Individual Works: Tracing Influence from [Anna] Ancher to [Anders] Zorn,” Clarke encyclopedically and alphabetically lays out not only the names of artists who may have inspired Munch in some way but also the specific works that Munch might have seen and those works by Munch that may have developed from them. Familiar and obvious names such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne stand next to less familiar Scandinavian influences such as Eilif Peterssen and Frits Thaulow. Seeing how Munch’s Madonna took shape in Munch’s mind following encounters with Franz von Stuck’s Sin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix doesn’t diminish Munch’s accomplishment in the least. In fact, it makes it seem even more amazing as he navigated such visually cluttered waters while charting a course of his own. Unfortunately, the demands of the time were for true originality, and Munch would do anything to meet those demands.

After bumping up against influence after influence, including a nationalist Norwegian movement that longed to claim Munch among its own, Munch’s “art was neither French nor Norwegian, neither Impressionist nor Symbolist—the autonomous stance he took was calculated, defiant but very much of the moment,” Clark writes. “The ‘insane’ Munch… was a product—one introduced both by hostile and friendly critics and later packaged and presented by the artist and his early biographers in a very deliberate way.” In his Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette (above, from 1895), Munch paints himself as he wishes his to be seen—a bohemian artist smoking like all the “cool kids” whose very image is a murky, instable thing that threatens to fall apart. As his unstable reputation grew, Munch played to that audience, giving them exactly what they wanted. Yet, Clarke argues, “while [Munch] wore his strangeness and insanity like a mantle in the wider world, he inhabited quite a different person in private.” Munch knew which works would spark controversy and which wouldn’t and carefully orchestrated exhibitions of his work to fulfill the expectations of the viewing public. Even when Munch finally sought professional help during the famous mental breakdown of 1908, he personally took care of the business side of his art. Art historians love to sever artists from all ties to the real world, but Clarke’s study restores those ties and recovers Munch the shrewd businessman and curator of his own oeuvre. Some may turn away from the idea of a great artist concerned with filthy lucre, but I personally enjoyed the way Clarke deconstructs the myth of Munch to resurrect Munch the man in control of his world despite the very real personal anguish that played a part, but not an exclusive part, in his art.

Clarke really focuses on Munch the marketer in his exploration of Munch’s printmaking. In the same year as Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette, Munch created a print titled Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (above, from 1895). The murkiness is gone, replaced by a deathly black void behind Munch’s disembodied head. A skeletal arm rests below the face, while Munch’s name appears above in tombstone-style script, completing the Halloween-like calling card. Munch knew that macabre sold well and ventured into printmaking to expand his product to markets different from those who could buy expensive oil paintings. “Munch carefully and strategically anticipated market trends and absorbed other artists’ technical tricks while simultaneously elaborating and expanding his own repertoire of images,” Clarke concludes. Munch used different printmaking processes, colored papers, colored inks, the different grains of wood, and even developed jigsaw-like assembled blocks to print multicolored prints all in the name of creating new, must-have images for the collector. As Clarke shows, even when Munch seems his weirdest in terms of subject matter, he always remains within some contemporary trope, such as Munch’s recasting of Rodin’s The Kiss as his print The Kiss.


As much as possible, Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch allows us to see the “sunny side” of Munch, in works such as Munch’s The Sun (above, from 1911-1916), part of his Oslo University Aula decorations. Munch intended for his work to show the whole gamut of human experience, from birth to death with all the love and angst between. Munch’s mythmaking has effectively erased much of the more hopeful side of his work, leaving us with only half of the total picture, and the dark half at that. The Sun represents just one of many late scenes of regeneration, specifically the idea of heliotherapy en vogue at the time. After “taking the cure” at a spa, Munch grew fascinated by the idea of regeneration and recreation of the self by different means. In Becoming Edvard Munch, Clarke cures the diseased popular caricature of the “mad” Munch and recreates the living artist as a thinking visionary always in control of his art regardless of the madness marketed in the art itself.

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Jay A. Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth.]

Grand Entrance

Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man
Before there were junk stores
Before there was junk
He lived with his mother and the torments of Christ
The world was transformed
A crowd gathered round
Pressed against his window so they could be the first
To meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Raise a glass and sit and stare
Understand the man
He lost all his friends
He didn't need his friends
He lived with his mother and repeated himself
The world has forgotten
The world moved along
The crowd at his window went back to their homes
Meet James Ensor
Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man

—“Meet James Ensor” by They Might Be Giants

Introducing a trend towards unconventional depictions of Jesus Christ in late nineteenth century European art, James Ensor’s Christ's Entry into Brussels (above, from 1888) might be the strangest of all. Born April 13, 1860, Ensor struggled with his religious faith for much of his life. Resolving the message of Christ with the modern way of life seemed impossible to him. In Christ’s Entry into Brussels, Ensor depicts just how incongruous Christ would be walking the streets of Brussels, circa 1888. Most of the people flooding the street wear masks, an obsession of Ensor’s and his shorthand way of painting the issues of identity he saw as at the heart of modern alienation. You have to search long and hard to find Christ in the picture. Look for the disc of Christ’s nimbus about his head at the center of the painting, just below the banner stretched across the top. That banner reads “Vive la Sociale” or “Long Live Welfare,” just one of the many texts appearing in the painting, including an advertisement for “Colman's Mustard,” that add a subtext of the political manipulations and commercialism plaguing society. The mayor of the town presides over the parade from a reviewing stand like a modern Pharisee. Such a bizarre image of Christianity hit home later with the German Expressionists and Surrealists who would consider Ensor a father figure.



Ensor suffered from horrible ulcers. Life certainly seemed bleak to him, but he managed to keep a sense of humor about things. Christ’s Entry into Brussels is a bizarre and bleak view of society, but it’s also hysterically funny when seen from a certain perspective. The same perspective allows us to see Ensor’s Skeletons Fighting Over a Smoked Herring (above, from 1891) as a macabre joke. If Christ’s Entry into Brussels serves as a prototype for the Christ-haunted works of German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde (who visited Ensor in 1911), then Skeletons Fighting Over a Smoked Herring looks forward to the skewed humor of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali. The title alone seems like something thought up by the Monty Python troupe. Ensor whistles through the graveyard and plays with the bones with little concern for conventional propriety. That disregard for mainstream mores more than anything else set up Ensor as a hero for later artists of different nations looking for an example to follow.


Ensor had his share of demons. Just look at his Self-Portrait With Demons (above, from 1898). That colored lithograph, almost cartoonish in style, helped open the eyes of other artists to the possibilities of printmaking to capture the devilish pictures dancing in their heads. Alfred Kubin owned several prints by Ensor. Leon Spilliaert, a fellow Belgian, felt the lasting influence of Ensor. Along with Odilon Redon, Ensor set the stage for imaginative art that took advantage of the new field of psychology. Demons no longer were seen as the products of a diseased mind but rather as the consequences of natural psychological reactions to the world. Ensor lived on to a ripe, old age, but he never recaptured the strange elegance of his most fruitful period between 1880 and 1900. I’m not sure it’s possible to sustain such close contact with the darkest corners of one’s mind without losing contact with reality entirely. Ensor stayed tethered to reality and the art world through his admirers, who watched his grand entrance and followed in his footsteps.