Edvard Munch: The Anatomist of the Soul

Ill.23 The Anatomist Kristian Schreiner I 1928-29

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of portraits by Edvard Munch. (The National Portrait Gallery, London until 15 June.)

Munch is renowned for his images of anguish and alienation. But over his long career he also painted many intimate portraits of family, friends, lovers and patrons, along with a good number of self-portraits. 

Born in 1863 in the Norwegian village of Ådalsbruk, Munch came from a distinguished family of clerics and had an austere religious upbringing. When he was 5 his mother died of tuberculosis, and his older sister subsequently fell victim to the same disease - prompting a lifelong preoccupation with mortality.

'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.’ 

In a naturalistic style, Munch paints his grey-bearded father puffing on a pipe, avoiding his son’s gaze. His soberly dressed aunt, black hair neatly tied, also looks down. His brother, studying to become a doctor, works with a skull on his desk. Here’s sister Laura on summer holiday by a lake. In blue striped dress and straw sun hat, she stares into the distance as the evening light fades. You can just make out the ghostly figure of another sister standing nearby. Munch has painted over her, emphasising Laura’s isolation.

 'Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... It also includes the inner pictures of the soul.’

Edvard Munch - Evening (1888)

We see the Bohemian writers and artists with whom Munch socialised in Kristiania (modern day Oslo), Paris and Berlin. In gloomy cafes they discuss free love, atheism and women’s emancipation over cigarettes and alcohol. Artist Karl Jensen-Hjell leans nonchalantly on a walking stick, a cigar in his gloved hand. In jade green jacket and fedora, anarchist Hans Jaeger looks tired and sceptical, seated on his own with a drink to-hand. Playwright August Strindberg, with high forehead, buttoned up and serious, regards us with a severe stare. 

Munch was fond of double portraits, and here’s one of married couple Aase and Harald Norregaard - he in profile, she fixing us with her bright blue eyes. Aase was one of the few women in Munch’s life that didn’t threaten or disturb him. 

Munch called his work ‘soul art,’ since he was seeking to reveal inner feelings and motivations; to convey psychological intensity. In a lithograph self-portrait his disembodied head emerges from the black background with a blank expression, a skeleton arm running along the bottom of the frame. He was often prone to melancholy.

‘The greatest colour is black…It is the tabula rasa for pure expression. Nothing prostitutes it.

Edvard Munch - Hans Jaeger

Gradually Munch made a name for himself, and was commissioned to paint portraits by wealthy, liberal collectors. His naturalistic technique gave way to a more expressive style of bright colours and energetic brushstrokes. 

Munch was certainly not seeking to flatter his sitters.

'When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.'

With folded arms, banker Ernest Thiel looks proud and defensive. Painted against a bright red background, physicist Felix Auerbach is caught as if in conversation. 

Here’s a dandy in a white suit, the artist Ludvig Karsten, with whom Munch had a fractious relationship.

‘Strange guy that Karsten – the big wide-brimmed hat tilted to one side – that slightly roguish expression. The mouth always ready for some sarcasm.’

Edvard Munch - Ludvig Karsten

In his later years Munch asked his friend, the anatomist Kristian Schreiner, to take him to the morgue, so that he could observe an autopsy. In a subsequent lithograph, Munch portrayed Schreiner standing over the artist’s own dead body. Schreiner later recollected that Munch said:   

‘Here are two anatomists sitting together; one of the body, one of the soul. I am perfectly aware that you would like to dissect me, but be careful. I too have my knives.’

I like this thought.

In the world of commercial communication, we are often on transmit: presenting, projecting, persuading. Sometimes we would be wise to step back; withdraw, observe and listen; scrutinise and survey. 

Like Munch we too should seek to be ‘anatomists of the soul.’

'Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears, without crying.
Now I want to understand.
I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding.
You must help me if you can.
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise
To leave them open for so long?
Because I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
I've been waiting to awaken from these dreams.
People go just where they will,
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That it's later than it seems.
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see.
I hear their cries
Just say if it's too late for me.'
Jackson Browne, 'Doctor My Eyes'

No. 516

‘A Craving for Crystallisation’: Themes Suggested by Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, The Scream, detail of lithograph, 1895.

‘I shall no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They will be people who are alive, who breathe and feel, suffer and love.’
Edvard Munch

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the prints of Edvard Munch. (British Museum, London, until 21 July)

Munch was a troubled genius. Born in 1863, he grew up in Kristiania (modern day Oslo), a city that like many others at that time had been shaken by industrialisation, political upheaval, poverty and disease. His father was a medical officer, severe, pious and dogmatic. His mother died of TB when he was 5 and his sister died of the same illness when he was 13. Another sister was taken to an asylum. He was himself a sickly child and he worried throughout his life that he had inherited his family’s mental health issues. As a young man he fell in with Bohemians and nihilists. He took to drinking and brawling, and became an alcoholic. He couldn’t sleep. He thought about death all the time and contemplated suicide. 

'The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side from the day I was born.'

Munch channelled all this stress and anxiety into his art. A self-portrait has skeleton arms. A mother despairs over a sick child. A crowd walks towards us with blank, empty faces. A melancholy man cradles his head in his hands. A woman stands alone on a shoreline with her back to us. A naked couple kiss by an open window. An anxious figure puts its hands to its ears and screams.

‘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.'

We may find it hard to identify with Munch as an individual – he just seems too tortured, confused and self-pitying. But he certainly captured something of the modern condition: isolation and angst; feeling alone in the crowd; struggling for identity and belonging, for a sense of meaning and purpose; worrying about love and death. 

Young Woman on the Beach, 1896 by Edvard Munch

Munch also teaches a number of lessons for people working in the creative industry. From the outset he was an artist with ambition. He was not afraid to cast aside the conventions of the category and set himself lofty objectives.

‘We want more than a mere photograph of nature. We do not want to paint pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want to create art, or at least lay the foundations of an art, that gives something to humanity. An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one’s innermost heart.’

Such was Munch’s conviction, that he was untroubled by setbacks. When in 1892 his first one-man exhibition in Berlin closed after one week, he regarded the critical outrage as a badge of pride, a confirmation of his radicalism.

'Never have I had such an amusing time - it's incredible that something as innocent as painting should have created such a stir.'

In his art if not in life Munch was admirably resilient. He recognised that his difference represented his greatest creative asset.

'My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are?’

A vampire feasts on her prey. Image courtesy The Savings Bank Foundation DNB

Munch also embraced conflict and ambiguity. He wanted to express raw feeling and emotional truth in his work, and he was drawn to articulate his own intense paranoia and uncertainty.

This is particularly evident in his troubled encounters with women. For Munch women were frail and innocent, sinister and threatening. He desired them and he feared them. He was possessive and jealous, in awe and in doubt. 

No surprise perhaps that Munch’s relationships tended to be tempestuous and short-lived. Flame-haired Tulla Larsen was so besotted that she followed him round Europe. But he couldn’t face marriage. When they separated he shot himself in the hand and cut their joint-portrait in half.

A woman’s long hair wraps itself around her lover. Is it an embrace or an entrapment? A woman puts her arms around a man’s shoulders, his head bowed. Is she consoling him or preying on him? 

'My afflictions belong to me and my art - they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship. My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life.’

We can also learn from Munch something about the power of the repeated image. He returned again and again to the same themes: the melancholy loner, the jealous lover, the femme fatale, the sick child, the haunting moonlight, the enchanted forest, the existential scream.

He explored these themes in paintings, lithographs and woodcuts; in etchings, drypoints and mezzotints. He experimented with bold colour washes; with heavy outlines, sharp contrasts and simplified forms; by cutting the print block into jigsaw pieces and reassembling them.

With every new articulation of a subject Munch brought a fresh perspective, and the images gained resonance through repetition.

'The point is that one sees things at different moments with different eyes.’

Munch sold more than 30,000 prints in his lifetime. They gave him access to a broad public, made him famous, financed a comfortable later life and enabled him to keep hold of many of his paintings - which he loved so much that he called them his ‘children’. 

So, although it’s hard to identify with Munch the individual, his art echoes with profoundly modern themes; and he teaches people in creative professions some powerful lessons: hold lofty ambitions for your craft; be resilient in the face of criticism; channel your emotional conflicts into your work; celebrate your difference; and embrace the power of repetition.

‘Art is the opposite of nature… Art is the human craving for crystallization. Nature is the infinite realm from which art takes its nourishment.’ 

Munch spent a good deal of his life travelling around Europe. But for his last 27 years he lived, comfortable and alone, on his estate outside Oslo. Despite all his paranoia, hypochondria and melancholy, he reached the ripe old age of 80. He died in 1944 confident in his own immortality.

'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.’

'Oh, it's not easy to resist temptation,
Walking around looking like a figment of somebody else's imagination.
Taking ev'ry word she says just like an open invitation,
But the power of persuasion is no match for anticipation.

Like a finger running down a seam,
From a whisper to a scream.
So I whisper and I scream,
But don't get me wrong.
Please don't leave me waitin' too long,
Waitin' too long.’

Elvis Costello, 'From a Whisper to a Scream'

No. 231

(Don’t) Turn Your Back On Me

I attended an Edvard Munch show at the Tate Modern. Dark, melancholy, awkward stuff. Angst, loneliness, jealousy. A difficult relationship with society in general and women in particular.

It was striking that he painted quite a lot of pictures of women with their backs to the viewer. A powerful expression of exclusion, loneliness, unrequited love.

I spent my youth being turned away from London’s elite nightspots. Perhaps it was the sleeveless plaid shirt, the white towelling socks, the caked on Country Born hair gel. But the bitter sense of disappointment hasn’t left me. I can taste it now. And I learned more about clubbing from Spandau Ballet videos than actual experience…

‘He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’

Handel, Messiah

As a young executive I was invited to apply for an Amex card. I applied and was duly rejected. Naturally I was confused and disappointed and I never spoke to them again. I’m sure consumers often feel a similar sense of exclusion from brands. Refusal and denial are shaming, embarrassing. The fear of rejection is almost as powerful as rejection itself. And then there are the coded gestures, the arcane language, the gender and cultural specific semiotics. The feeling that you don’t belong, that you’re not welcome here. It’s a private conversation, you wouldn’t understand.

I guess that’s why strategists so often recommend that brands are more open, inviting, transparent. We want brands to look us in the eye, to reach out from the canvas with a knowing glance and a welcoming smile. Easier said than done, of course.

Yet the turned back does not have to be all bad.

The Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi often painted a solitary woman with her back to the viewer. She goes about her daily routine in a quiet middle class home, lost in private thought. Hammershoi’s subjects seem more loved than feared. This distinctive reverse view gains its power in part from being so unusual. But also from the sense of intrusion on private time. The sense of seeing, but not being seen. It’s a little awkward, but also intriguing. Am I encountering her truest self, her identity freed of relationships, social constraints and concerns about appearance?

It reminds me of the oft’ cited quote from George Bernard Shaw: ‘Ethics is what you do when no one is looking.’ (I’ve uncovered versions of this quote from many sources. Henry Ford said ‘quality means doing it right when no one’s looking’. And of course, most recently Bob Diamond suggested ‘culture is how we behave when no one’s watching.’)

So how do brands behave when no one is looking? What would the brand encountered in a quiet room be up to? Would we find it dutifully engaged in customer-centric endeavours? Would its jaunty personality be sustained when there’s no one to impress? Would we discover an honest engagement with issues of citizenship and responsibility?

I’m worried that we’d most likely find the brand plotting a marketing and PR plan. I’m worried that in business as in politics too much thought nowadays is given to how things will play, how they will be perceived and reported. I suspect that too often the brand’s instinctive ethical and commercial compass has been replaced by recourse to brand image tracking and favourability ratings.

I appreciate this may be a curious thing for an adman to say. I should perhaps celebrate the triumph of modern marketing, the inevitable victory of perception in the All Seeing Age. Perhaps like a modern celebrity the smile must always be on, the guard must always be up. But it still makes me a little melancholy…

And what of Agencies? How do we behave when no one’s looking?

We are often perceived as conventions of feckless youth and superannuated yuppies. And I confess I was a little uncomfortable when Clients first started plugging in laptops, decanting lattes and working at our offices. I worried that they’d disapprove of our timekeeping, that they’d be offended by our cussing.

But as more Clients have made the Agency their mid-week home, I think the Agency has benefitted. The Embedded Client often sees passion, industry, talent and integrity. They get to see our truest self. And it’s not as bad as they, or we, may have expected.

In the words of the great Brit Soul luminary, David Grant…‘I’ve been watching you watching me. I’ve been liking you, Baby, liking me…’

First published BBH Labs: 10/09/

No. 15

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