Trembling Earth -Edvard Munch at the Clark Institute
The Magic Forest. Edvard Munch. 1919–1925
Trembling earth, haunted forests, bleak shores and white nights express Edvard Munch’s eco-melancholia, paintings of prophecy mixed with nostalgia for a world in harmony. Munch worshipped nature and the stark allure of his Norwegian and German imagery shows us a soul thoroughly imbued with the notion that human essences bloom only in Earth’s embrace. Industrial culture encroaches, looming at the edge of consciousness that is alert to impending harm. Energy surges, vibrations wobble and magnetism goes wonky in Norway, so near the North Pole. Earth manifests its powers in the extreme conditions of the north. Munch himself suffered from alcoholism and mental illness, succumbing to bouts of despair alternating with bursts of productivity.
One of my favorite images, The Yellow Log of 1912, features a felled purple spruce whose yellow gash glares straight at the viewer. The irreverent palette actually invokes the somber sovereignty of the northern forest, enduring through winter days without sun as it defies frost, snow and ice. Bordering the North Sea, the Barents and the Baltic, rugged shores belch rock and pebbles to bleach in sun and salt. Munch drank deeply from this drama of wracklines, returning again and again in paintings and prints to shores seeming to run away from forests to exult in the infinite touch of sea and sky. Often Munch paints billowing silhouettes of female figures against the half light of white nights, with a moon perched on its own pedestal of shadow reflections in the water. The human presence testifies to a grief that seems to reside deep within the natural elements, as if landscape were ever the mirror of troubled souls.
The vibrant horses in Spring Plowing are from Munch’s vitalist period when strong colors define clashing forces that suggest Nature’s unruly assertiveness. Contagious color is a key unspoken element of the conversation between painting and viewer. In this particular selection of Munch, we feel the intense vibration of hues as the painter’s conviction, offered to us over time and touching us personally in each encounter. Summer Night by the Beach from 1902 bathes us in strange moonlight that suggests even tidal rocks are ready to rise up. When he depicts nude bathers in large scale work, based on his sojourns in a healing nudist camp, Munch underlines his embrace of the body as tightly bound to its materiality.
The wavy concentric lines of the tree trunks in Spring in the Elm Forest announce the arrival of a shuddering present: in this phase of Munch’s art the viewer witnesses the means of expression matching what is expressed. Karl Ove Knausgaard talks of how the artist’s work “destroys or ignores stable collective space,” in his astute book on Munch So Much Longing in So Little Space. The lonely terror of the woman leading a child by the hand into Magic Forest likewise plunks viewers in a peculiar experiential warp where ancient forces threaten to erupt, as emotion paints our insides on the face of nature.
Trembling Earth also enlightens us about Munch’s woodcuts, helpfully displaying various prints using different colors. The artist often cut apart his wood blocks to ink different sections, and the installation of versions of the same woodcut offer a pathway inside the process.
