The Edvard Munch We’ve Hardly Met

The Clark Institute’s gorgeous Trembling Earth exhibition teaches us that the gloom-and-doom artist also found consolation and pleasure in nature.

T he Clark Art Institute’s gorgeous summer exhibition, Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth, is a revelation. The Norwegian Munch (1863–1944) is as universally known for one picture — The Scream, from 1893 — as Grant Wood is for American Gothic or Whistler for his portrait of his mother. Munch’s anxious, melancholic figures aren’t hard to spot. “Sickness, anxiety, and death,” he wrote, “were the black angels that guarded my cradle,” and he is seen to have expressed this curse in his art and through his life.

Trembling Earth confirms this, in part, but develops and presents another Munch. About half his prodigious production were landscapes and seascapes, or more precisely, shoreline scenes. Many have the human figure as well, but land, sea, and sky play marquee roles. Munch, gloom-and-doom artist as he was, worshipped nature and drew from it not only consolation but pleasure and a new view of life and afterlife.

Let’s not go giddy. Among his many self-portraits, and four are in Trembling Earth, Munch never sports a tan or tosses a snowball. Munch is Munch, dour and autistic. Still, even The Scream is mostly a ghastly sunset, a harbor, and roiling hills. Pictures called Anxiety and Despair have the same setting. These subjects haven’t gotten much attention from scholars or the art-loving public.

Through 75 paintings, drawings, and prints, Trembling Earth enriches our sense of Munch as a man and an artist. I’ve got some quibbles here and there, but it’s well worth seeing. I loved it for the art, the luscious arrangement and wall colors, and my new and deeper education on Munch. The Clark, in Williamstown, Mass., is doing the exhibition with the Munch Museum in Oslo, the biggest lender, and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. With these three partners working together, the best things were bound to be on view, and they are.

The exhibition begins with a smashing entrance, Clark-style. It’s a giant wall-mural detail from The Sun, which we see in the oil-on-canvas flesh later. Sunshine and Munch? Not perfect together but surprisingly simpatico. We like surprises.

The first section displays Munch’s forest scenes. Trembling Earth isn’t chronological. It really can’t be since scenes of nature are consistent subjects from the 1890s until the end of his career and life. At pivotal points there is a self-portrait, a nice touch since most of what he created was what he called “a study of my own self.” The forest gallery starts with a self-portrait from 1926. Munch poses beside his house near Oslo, his longtime and last home. The Yellow Log, from 1912, anchors the space.

This first space circuitously introduces us to Munch, not through The Scream, a rare lithograph of which we find later, but through woodcuts like Ashes and Toward the Forest, projects from the late ’90s. Both depict couples in the dark woods, silent and not so much anxious as solemn, “as though in a church,” Munch wrote. In Ashes we see on the left side the head of a gorgon, the mythological women with snakes for hair and a glare that turns its target to stone. Moody, spooky, titillating Munch, and nature’s cryptologist Munch, are both different from Munch the purveyor of sickness and sadness.

The problem here is Trembling Earth’s push to make Munch what we call today an environmental artist. “While many of these paintings celebrate nature’s beauty, they have come over time to signify the destruction of the country’s natural resources.” These are weasel words since they make weaselly assumptions. “Signify by and to whom?” asketh I. Not, I think, by Munch. He doesn’t strike me as the tree-hugger type.

This is curatorial projection. The Yellow Log depicts a harvested tree, felled and stripped of its bark. Is he pondering, as the exhibition claims, “the mysteries of the forest during a time of rapid industrialization”? I don’t know but don’t think so. Was Norway in a state of rapid industrialization in 1912? It wasn’t exactly Pittsburgh. If Munch was this kind of rebel, the exhibition needs to create a social, political, and economic context, which it doesn’t want to do since Trembling Earth would become less an art show and more a Nordic equivalent of an American-studies show, which no one wants to see. Suffice it to say Munch’s no Thoreau.

But no matter. I like the show for the art, not the pitch, and having raised the point, the exhibition mostly drops it, unlike the catalogue, which, odd as it sounds, suggests Munch was a global-warming activist. Munch might have been crazy, but he wasn’t crazy enough to think we mere mortals can change the weather.

The Fairytale Forest from the late ’20s depicts a small group of children surrounded by spruces made from bands of dark-green and acid-green colors. This is pure nature mysticism and a staple of German art from the time of Dürer and, I think, Scandinavian art and, I know, children’s stories. Two years ago, the Clark hosted one of its best exhibitions: a survey of the work of Nicolai Astrup, the Norwegian artist and Munch’s younger contemporary. He and Munch both did enchanted-forest scenes, inspired, in part, by the work of the German Symbolist artist Max Klinger. Remembering the Clark’s Astrup exhibition as warmly as I do, I have to say that when it comes to landscapes, Astrup’s the better painter though Munch’s got the bigger name.

In the forest section and a section on cultivated landscapes, we see Munch as a pastoral artist whose mood is more religious than hangdog. His palette’s bright, men and horses work, and, surprise of surprises, Munch keeps lovely flower and vegetable gardens, raises animals, and cultivates an orchard. The Munch of The Kiss, The Scream, and Death in the Sickroom, the alcoholic Munch, Munch the beacon light of neurasthenia, mellows and fades. Digging Men with Horse and Cart, from 1920, shows he’s a good horse painter. His handling of paint loosens while his colors brighten. His figures, whether people, animals, trees, or buildings, become more abstract.

Fertility, from around 1900, depicting a man and a woman standing on either side of a tree, might represent, the label says, the Tree of Life, the ecumenical symbol of the link among all people and all forms of life, but also the link between life in the here and now and the afterlife. This seems essential since Munch was so deeply religious, but the curators can’t run fast enough from it. After a single, vague sentence on Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, we jump to “Munch had complicated relationships with women throughout his life and often depicted men and women at odds with each other.”

Yes, I suspect Adam and Eve weren’t exactly lovey-dovey after the Expulsion, but that’s hardly the point. How do these landscapes explore Munch’s profound Christianity? How, and I don’t know the answer, do they draw on Norse mythology and symbolism, which, I believe, foregrounds the Tree of Life?

Art belonging today to the Munch Museum came almost entirely from Munch’s studio and estate. He was prolific — not working constantly like, say, Picasso or Degas, but he’d see an attractive motif and paint it. Munch’s snow scenes and storm scenes, displayed in the same section, never hit the marketplace. I’m a sucker for a snow scene, and his are good, not great. I wouldn’t call pictures like Starry Night, from 1923 or so, a tribute to Van Gogh, but he enjoyed interpreting scenes done years before by artists he revered.

Munch was never rich, but he prospered enough — though not from the art in Trembling Earth — to own his nice, cultivated spread near Oslo. He made a living from portraits, prints, and monumental murals for places like the main auditorium at the University of Oslo and in the Oslo City Hall. Alas, these murals don’t go anywhere, but they have plenty of landscape elements. The Clark did get, though, a version of The Sun, the centerpiece in the University of Oslo series.

It’s fantastic. Pure, intense, and dominant, it rises and glows above a strip of land and sea, its rays reaching everywhere. It’s the closest Munch comes to portraying God. At the Clark, The Sun is the biggest of five sketches, three in oil, one in tempera, and one in watercolor, that, I think, composed a mural project that never happened. The five are, taken together, Munch’s version of, say, Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life. They’re in a space called “Cycles of Nature.” Everything in the cosmos, organic and inorganic, earthly and heavenly, is united, Munch felt. It wasn’t a brand-new idea but had some traction in fin de siècle Europe.

One picture depicts a clutch of people climbing a mountain. Next to it are scenes of geniuses — I’d call them angels — in sun rays, and Death and Crystallization, depicting a skeleton or the Grim Reaper, both symbols of death dating from the Middle Ages, and the dissolution of the body into crystals that are sprinkled, or recycled, or diffused in the world that still lives and grows. Some merge with the rays of the sun, the ultimate orchestrator and facilitator.

Munch seems to have thought of the ensemble as an altarpiece, though not a conventional one. He seems to challenge the concretized Christian views of Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell, inspired, in part, by August Strindberg and other writers and philosophers in Munch’s circle. Trine Otte Bak Nielsen’s superb essay in the book dives into this. I wish more of the essay’s reasoning made it into the exhibition the public sees. Referencing “crystallization” without exploring it, which is the exhibition’s tack, doesn’t do the trick. It’s a tough, thorny, but essential theme the curators believed at the end was too complicated for people to understand.

Munch’s shoreline pictures are exquisite and more, given the Clark’s presentation. A slanted, free-standing wall displays Summer Night on the Beach from around 1902. The wall color’s called Purple Lotus, and it helps the picture glow. The main wall’s dark gray with a hint of blue. There, a group of seascapes in oil and also in woodcuts are the ultimate in serenity. Many show the moon reflected on the water. Whistler’s nocturnes were one inspiration, but Munch’s aren’t art-for-art’s-sake pictures. For him, the shore is the boundary between our world — many of these paintings have figures on the beach — and an infinite world. These worlds are separate but part of an overall whole.

I enjoyed the catalogue. Jay Clarke, one of the curators and for many years the curator of prints at the Clark, wrote the very good lead essay. Jill Lloyd, a Scottish art historian, wrote an essay on Munch and climate anxiety and a short introductory essay in which the ghost of her late mother guides her view of Munch and warns her about climate change. Whatever. Spectral evidence is as good as the “he made me feel bad” standard used in workplace disputes, politics, and the gender wars — or, even richer, the “this is my truth” standard. A ghost, after all, tends to tell you what you want to hear.

Lloyd’s essay on climate anxiety isn’t as bad as it sounds. It deals with fears of a new ice age as well as Munch’s conception of ideal farming. Arne Vetlesen’s essay, “Munch and Grief over Lost Nature,” doesn’t add much. He deplores “our current situation,” the central villain in which is a “thrashing of nature.” If “our current situation” is so grim, it’s because of nuts with atom bombs, fiscal profligacy by governments everywhere, and, yes, somewhere down the line, ecokooks.

Trembling Earth ends with fireworks and razzle-dazzle, which is what we like. So many exhibitions end with a thud. The final gallery, called “Chosen Places,” starts with a self-portrait from 1908. The wall color is a cross between hunter green and deep teal. I’m not sure what the intellectual theme is aside from places where Munch once lived, and this theme was covered in the earlier section on cultivated landscapes. But I was there to look at the art.

And one showstopper is Waves, from 1908, a pure seascape composed of abstract bands of mixed blues and greens, the deepest in the distance, the lightest close to shore and suggesting shallow water dappled by the sun. It’s big (45 by 38 inches), beautiful, and looks like a Rothko given a good shake.

Most of the pictures in this space are variations of Girls on the Bridge from 1902. It depicts a group of young women on a pier in Åsgårdstrand, once a fishing village but, by 1900, a tourist town. Munch’s family vacationed there in the late 1880s, and he bought a house in the town in 1898. They’re nice paintings, but the opus in the gallery is Bathing Men, from 1907 or 1908. It’s a nearly life-size (81 by 89 inches) painting of a group of muscular, nude men, the biggest figures walking toward the viewer while others frolic in the sea.

What the hell is happening here? Around this time, Munch’s anxiety and alcoholism nearly destroyed him. His time in a sanitarium in 1908 and 1909 evened his mental keel, but, as he admitted, “it was touch and go.” Before that, in 1907–08, he lived and painted in Warnemünde, a German town on the Baltic Sea where he took water cures. He painted Bathing Men there as a modello for the centerpiece of a five-panel series on the ages of man, from childhood to old age. I know that around this time Germans, as well as Scandinavians, developed naturism. Nudity, with exposure to sunlight, was seen as a cure for stress and anxiety and much else.

On one level, Bathing Men is very, very gay. Not as gay as the contents Freddie Mercury’s London home, currently in preview at Sotheby’s, but gay enough. On another, public nudity, which I’ve never tried, is meant to diminish the social tensions and expectations arising from eroticism. Sun, sea, and salt air help, too. It’s a fascinating phenomenon.

In the gallery, it’s the 800-pound gorilla. On the one hand, I wish it had more interpretation. How did Munch go from this to a nervous breakdown a few months later and, afterward, a long life of recovery and sobriety? Until he died in 1944, Munch wasn’t exactly Judy singing “Forget your troubles, come on, get happy,” but his obsessions and fears eased. On the other, I’m happy the curators left the visitor to ponder. Each of us will tackle the puzzle in our own way, which is fine.

I’m not sure how Trembling Earth departs or ascends from the 2006 Munch retrospective at MoMA, but that was nearly 20 years ago, so a new look seems right. The MoMA show didn’t focus on landscapes and seascapes but, rather, was heavy on figures and angst. The Clark’s show is narrower and, I think, more intimate.

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Humane Ecology: Eight Positions, also a new exhibition at the Clark, is indeed a show of environmental art with work by eight living artists who consider “cultivation and care, migration and adaptation, extraction and exploitation.” The artists “center humans who have often been marginalized in discussions of the environment.” This prim show’s in three different places — inside and outside — and begins inside with jacquard weavings by Carolina Caycedo. They’re well crafted but tiresome and, honestly, my fire went unlit.

I don’t like exhibitions that play hide and seek, or shows where I need to get back in my car, or shows that involve hikes in the woods, or lachrymose lentil-weaving shows. I’m sure “drill, baby, drill” isn’t among the eight positions. I skipped the rest of it.