2025/09/28 Munch in Oslo
Ive never been much of a fan of Edvard Munch. The Scream is a fine work, but it never made my heart flutter as it has for so many. And unfortunately for The Scream it has entered that higher realm of classical art, like many pieces of Mozart and Beethoven, where theyve been overdone by popular media to the point of exaustion. To the point where, each time I hear one of these pieces, or see The Scream, I can't feel nor appreciate the piece for what it is, but am instead flooded by the brown water of Hollywood portrayals, adverts, and pop culture mud.
That's why, in Oslo today, I've visited the Munch museum. Not to see The Scream, as the hoards of Chinese tourists are, but to see his other works, and get a fully picture of Norway's most famous artist. And I have been impressed. Munch's artistic eye doesn't see the thing, but the spirit of the thing, piercing through mundane appearances to find the and express their essence; and do so in such a style that permits the outer appearance and the inner essence to exist in one cogent image.
This painting of Nietzsche, for example is clearly the man Nietzche, his brow and moustache, the man's charm points, exaggerated to the point of caricature. But we see the man's essence, too. Staring down to the ground, deep and pensive, Munch captures Nietzsche's gravity and solemnity, his disapproval of all he sees around him. But staring at the path, Nietszche misses the bright colours and vibrancy of the world around him. His sharp, thick, contrasting outline places him as a pasted cut-out, a man out of time, at odds with the world around him.
Here's another work of Munch's, of Norway's second most famous artist, the playwrite Ibsen. Munch admired Ibsen, now in old age in his day, and you can see a kind of reverence in the painting, even if at first glance it looks like less than a flattering portrayal. Ibsen looks old and wise, sitting aged in his chair, as if his skin has become leathery. As a writer of emotionally complex characters, such thick leathery skin becomes a necessary defence; but he has an ape-like complexion also, as if he were, through his writing, expressing primordially ancient feelings of mankind. He's surrounded by the greenish smoke of the coffee house, like a genie fresh from the bottle - yet the smoke, his magic, has lingered for a lifetime.
My favourite of the Munch's I saw was a painting called Separation. Here, Munch depicts a boy losing his lover. And the painting is from the boy's perspective, there's no doubt there. The boys sadness, thickly defined, with detail absent elsewhere in the piece, is in juxtaposition to the faceless angel, an inch from the ground, drifting away into the distance. Because, for this man who has lost his lover, though the lover has a face to haunt him with, the feeling is faceless. It isn't just this woman leaving him, but his soul. What he has lost is the memories, the time shared, the future promised, but that sinking vacuum-like emptiness is the loss of something more profound, more fundamental and complex. That gliscening sun-dress and gold-thread hair is in every man cautiously guarded, since any wound takes a long time to heal.
Let's look at a few landscapes also. Above is The Waves, a piece depicting stony waves as solid as land, bombarding the shore as the trees bow and bend by the wind. Looking at this piece, you feel the force of the waves and wind far more than you may in a piece painted traditionally. The work isn't looking to depict, but to evoke, evoking a strong feeling rather than a lost memory.
Another piece here is Two Children On Their Way to the Fairytale Forest. This painting looks proto-surrealist, but it isnt absurdity Munch is trying to convey; Munch is trying to convey the feelings of the children for the forest through the work. These great conical trees without detail are like great impenetrable spikes to a fortress, and in the distance, looming above the treetops, there's what I think is a face. This great ghostly and spiritual being rising above the trees, the king of the forest, like in Princess Mononoke I imagine it to be, this great force and aura of the forest is how the children see it. See is a strong word, but feel.
We see with our eyes, but there are other senses man has without sense organs and without names, for which 'seeing' analogically used may be the best understanding. A favourite quote from Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye". This quote has stuck with me. We spend so much time seeing with our eyes, digesting visual data around us, that we don't see with our hearts. Now, by see with your heart I don't mean to empathesise more, in contradistinction to seeing with your brain. What I mean is seeing the world behind the curtain, a kind of revelation; seeing the world in all it's feeling and symbolic glory in everyday life once the world of appearances is peeled back. Now this may sound quite woowoo. Most people today subscribe to the idea that all feeling are nested safely in the heart (allegorically), and that any supposed seeing the heart does is projection from the heart onto the world. But I feel this does the world outside our minds a disservice. There is mystery out there. Mystery, terror, power, pain, tragedy, joy: we don't just project contents of the mind onto the deer ravaged by the lion, the stength of the trees in the power of the wind, or the glory of the sun at the height of day. These aren't local, nor parts of the human mind projected outwards. It is an observance of these feelings in the world by the heart.
Munch understood this. Painting, Munch looked at the world with a blurry vision so as to enhance this vision of the heart. He sees with his heart the feeling of the enchanted forest, the feeling of the wind and waves, the feeling of heartbreak, and feels the natures of Ibsen and Nietzche. With Munch, form takes the back seat to feeling.
But form remains. On the 11th floor of this art gallery - a humongous building on Oslo's coastline - were various works by those Munch inspired. And they weren't very good. One artist featured called Asger Jorn has attempted to express the passion and feeling of Munch's work but has lost the form which held it together. The vision of the heart is a messy tie-dye without the vision of the eye to give it structure. And proceeding on from these less structured visions, it's only a few hops to the modernism of the Pollock painting of paint sploges without form. With Munch's work, there is just enough form, just enough structure, to grant a vessel for the heart's sight. Because unlike some of these later artists on display, Munch still remembered the purpose of art.
The purpose of art is to communicate. So much emphasis today is placed on self-expression, that we forget we are trying to express ourselves to others. Mere self-expression is simply onanistic. Paintings convey an image, a feeling, a moment, a story, and as such requires structure and form to make it understandable and cognisable to the observer. Much postmodern art, where a novella-sized blurb is required to make sense of it, is communicating nothing. There is an expression by the artist, but that expression as understood in the blurb is not communicated through the work. That's why it fails at art, it fails to communicate. These formless Pollock paintings do communicate something of chaos and its grandeur, but that communication is narrow, limited by its style. Munch hits a kind of sweet spot, able to convey his heart's vision, but not at the expense of the observer. It's a shame the high art tradition after him progressed the way it did.
To end, I'll return to Munch's most famous work, The Scream. Even seeing it in person, it was a bit underwhelming. It was housed in a semi-secluded black box within the main gallery, and this secluded area was packed with people. Particularly Chinese tourists, who were absent in much of the rest of the gallery; I suspect they came all this way to see The Scream - or, less charitably, to say they've seen The Scream. And one group of these Chinese tourists were sitting on the floor as if they were camping out the spot. Very odd behaviour. Like the Mona Lisa, the painting is surprisingly small; and again like the Mona Lisa the hype precedes it. It wasn't too impressive in the end, but I too now can say that I've seen it. Nevertheless, if The Scream is the lure, let it be; if you find yourself in Oslo, visit this gallery of Munch's works. His works are very good.
This painting of Nietzsche, for example is clearly the man Nietzche, his brow and moustache, the man's charm points, exaggerated to the point of caricature. But we see the man's essence, too. Staring down to the ground, deep and pensive, Munch captures Nietzsche's gravity and solemnity, his disapproval of all he sees around him. But staring at the path, Nietszche misses the bright colours and vibrancy of the world around him. His sharp, thick, contrasting outline places him as a pasted cut-out, a man out of time, at odds with the world around him.
Here's another work of Munch's, of Norway's second most famous artist, the playwrite Ibsen. Munch admired Ibsen, now in old age in his day, and you can see a kind of reverence in the painting, even if at first glance it looks like less than a flattering portrayal. Ibsen looks old and wise, sitting aged in his chair, as if his skin has become leathery. As a writer of emotionally complex characters, such thick leathery skin becomes a necessary defence; but he has an ape-like complexion also, as if he were, through his writing, expressing primordially ancient feelings of mankind. He's surrounded by the greenish smoke of the coffee house, like a genie fresh from the bottle - yet the smoke, his magic, has lingered for a lifetime.
My favourite of the Munch's I saw was a painting called Separation. Here, Munch depicts a boy losing his lover. And the painting is from the boy's perspective, there's no doubt there. The boys sadness, thickly defined, with detail absent elsewhere in the piece, is in juxtaposition to the faceless angel, an inch from the ground, drifting away into the distance. Because, for this man who has lost his lover, though the lover has a face to haunt him with, the feeling is faceless. It isn't just this woman leaving him, but his soul. What he has lost is the memories, the time shared, the future promised, but that sinking vacuum-like emptiness is the loss of something more profound, more fundamental and complex. That gliscening sun-dress and gold-thread hair is in every man cautiously guarded, since any wound takes a long time to heal.
Let's look at a few landscapes also. Above is The Waves, a piece depicting stony waves as solid as land, bombarding the shore as the trees bow and bend by the wind. Looking at this piece, you feel the force of the waves and wind far more than you may in a piece painted traditionally. The work isn't looking to depict, but to evoke, evoking a strong feeling rather than a lost memory.
Another piece here is Two Children On Their Way to the Fairytale Forest. This painting looks proto-surrealist, but it isnt absurdity Munch is trying to convey; Munch is trying to convey the feelings of the children for the forest through the work. These great conical trees without detail are like great impenetrable spikes to a fortress, and in the distance, looming above the treetops, there's what I think is a face. This great ghostly and spiritual being rising above the trees, the king of the forest, like in Princess Mononoke I imagine it to be, this great force and aura of the forest is how the children see it. See is a strong word, but feel.
We see with our eyes, but there are other senses man has without sense organs and without names, for which 'seeing' analogically used may be the best understanding. A favourite quote from Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye". This quote has stuck with me. We spend so much time seeing with our eyes, digesting visual data around us, that we don't see with our hearts. Now, by see with your heart I don't mean to empathesise more, in contradistinction to seeing with your brain. What I mean is seeing the world behind the curtain, a kind of revelation; seeing the world in all it's feeling and symbolic glory in everyday life once the world of appearances is peeled back. Now this may sound quite woowoo. Most people today subscribe to the idea that all feeling are nested safely in the heart (allegorically), and that any supposed seeing the heart does is projection from the heart onto the world. But I feel this does the world outside our minds a disservice. There is mystery out there. Mystery, terror, power, pain, tragedy, joy: we don't just project contents of the mind onto the deer ravaged by the lion, the stength of the trees in the power of the wind, or the glory of the sun at the height of day. These aren't local, nor parts of the human mind projected outwards. It is an observance of these feelings in the world by the heart.
Munch understood this. Painting, Munch looked at the world with a blurry vision so as to enhance this vision of the heart. He sees with his heart the feeling of the enchanted forest, the feeling of the wind and waves, the feeling of heartbreak, and feels the natures of Ibsen and Nietzche. With Munch, form takes the back seat to feeling.
But form remains. On the 11th floor of this art gallery - a humongous building on Oslo's coastline - were various works by those Munch inspired. And they weren't very good. One artist featured called Asger Jorn has attempted to express the passion and feeling of Munch's work but has lost the form which held it together. The vision of the heart is a messy tie-dye without the vision of the eye to give it structure. And proceeding on from these less structured visions, it's only a few hops to the modernism of the Pollock painting of paint sploges without form. With Munch's work, there is just enough form, just enough structure, to grant a vessel for the heart's sight. Because unlike some of these later artists on display, Munch still remembered the purpose of art.
The purpose of art is to communicate. So much emphasis today is placed on self-expression, that we forget we are trying to express ourselves to others. Mere self-expression is simply onanistic. Paintings convey an image, a feeling, a moment, a story, and as such requires structure and form to make it understandable and cognisable to the observer. Much postmodern art, where a novella-sized blurb is required to make sense of it, is communicating nothing. There is an expression by the artist, but that expression as understood in the blurb is not communicated through the work. That's why it fails at art, it fails to communicate. These formless Pollock paintings do communicate something of chaos and its grandeur, but that communication is narrow, limited by its style. Munch hits a kind of sweet spot, able to convey his heart's vision, but not at the expense of the observer. It's a shame the high art tradition after him progressed the way it did.
To end, I'll return to Munch's most famous work, The Scream. Even seeing it in person, it was a bit underwhelming. It was housed in a semi-secluded black box within the main gallery, and this secluded area was packed with people. Particularly Chinese tourists, who were absent in much of the rest of the gallery; I suspect they came all this way to see The Scream - or, less charitably, to say they've seen The Scream. And one group of these Chinese tourists were sitting on the floor as if they were camping out the spot. Very odd behaviour. Like the Mona Lisa, the painting is surprisingly small; and again like the Mona Lisa the hype precedes it. It wasn't too impressive in the end, but I too now can say that I've seen it. Nevertheless, if The Scream is the lure, let it be; if you find yourself in Oslo, visit this gallery of Munch's works. His works are very good.