Edvard Munch: Prints
12 June - 5 September; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

The last time Scotland hosted a major Edvard Munch show, I wasn’t yet born. A travelling exhibition of the Norwegian artist’s prints touched down in the Kelvingrove in 1972, and since then, there have been few opportunities to see much at all by the father of Expressionism. Munch’s works are rare in British collections, and Norway has recently suffered several high-profile thefts of his most famous paintings.

It would be impossible to put together a show of the artist’s work without access to the Munch Museum in Oslo, and the Hunterian Gallery has pulled that rabbit out of the hat after agreeing an exchange of Glasgow’s Whistlers for Oslo’s Munchs. As a result, we’ll soon be treated to 40 of the artist’s greatest prints, including the iconic image, The Scream. According to the Hunterian, this is the last time that print will be seen outside Norway.

Born in 1863, Edvard Munch was in many ways the archetypal struggling artist, dogged by emotional trauma and financial hardship. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, and his eldest sister Sophie followed when he was 14. Munch’s first love was a married woman, leaving him wracked with guilt, and he was just 25 when his father died.

Munch’s first big exhibition in Berlin was shut down after a week as an “insult to art”, an incident dubbed by the press as “The Munch Affair”. The painter enjoyed the notoriety and settled in Berlin, into a bohemian circle led by writers August Strindberg and Stanislaw Przybyszewski. There, he was encouraged to draw on his own personal experiences, focusing on the themes of love and death.

During these Berlin years, Munch worked on his famous Frieze of Life – “a poem of love, anxiety and death” made up of paintings and graphic works. He plundered “sacred, powerful moments” from his own journals, and the results – free of self pity but full of raw power – include the artist’s most enduring images.

One early painting made for the Frieze was Love And Pain, renamed Vampire by Munch’s friend Przybyszewski. A red-headed female embraces a dark-suited man, her long strands of hair enveloping him like rivers of blood, as her mouth sinks ambiguously into his neck. The two bodies are interlocked, much like Munch’s later composition Kiss, creating a single strong mass of sensuality.

It was during this period – when Munch’s artistic identity was already well-formed – that he turned to printmaking. The artist was desperately eager to reach a wider audience, just as his associates did with their novels and plays.

From the start, Munch’s commitment to printmaking was clear. Rather than simply reproducing his painted works for wider distribution, the artist reinvented ideas and motifs to make the most of the medium. “These prints appear colourful, without any colour,” said a German art historian at the time. Starting with drypoint and etching, Munch soon moved on to lithography, which allowed him the freedom to draw spontaneously on the lithographic stone.

Vampire was one of the motifs which Munch revisited, and his second version, a colour lithograph, will be on show in Glasgow. The image is reduced to three colours: red and black on white, producing an effect even more powerful than the painting (something which can be said of many of his prints).

Munch kept returning to previous works throughout his career – he made nine versions of The Scream in the 1890s alone. The most famous of the prints, to be shown in Glasgow, uses brutally rough black lines to push the scene forcefully into our minds. Munch adopted Przybyszewski’s idea that thoughts could be transmitted as vibrations, and used sinuous waves to create the feeling of torment around the screaming figure.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that the limit of art’s expressive capabilities was its inability to reproduce a scream – and Munch proved him wrong, kick-starting the German Expressionist movement in the process.

While The Scream is Munch’s most famous work, Madonna is his most notorious. Although the artist rejected the free love ethos of his literary circle, he did have radical ideas about sexuality. For him, the most sacred human state was that of conception, and he spent 20 years working on images of an orgasmic Madonna, as seen from the point of view of her sexual partner.

Two versions of the Madonna will go on show in Glasgow: an early drypoint, and the quintessential lithograph, closely related to the best-known painted version. The painting’s frame, with its controversial embryos and semen, had to be removed, but these elements remain in the print. The ecstasy of the naked Madonna is heightened by the luminescence of the print, and the strong, vibrating lines around her.

In 1896 Munch added the technique of woodcut to his repertoire. It was an unusual form of printmaking, but a logical extension of Munch’s art. Some of his earlier lithographs, such as The Scream, are often mistaken for woodcuts due to their apparently gouged lines and their stark contrasts. It was in this medium that Munch would be most influential on the German Expressionist movement, which took the primitive technique to its heart.

Munch strayed farthest, and most powerfully, from his paintings in the woodcuts. One of the first he made was Angst. Like The Scream, it’s set against the Kristiania (the old name for Oslo) fjord, but as seen through the eyes of an anxious, rejected lover. Munch had experienced the vision of a funereal march of dark, suffering faces “relentlessly hurrying” towards him, and to the grave. The chiseled faces are rough and unfinished, the sky a broad streak of white on black. Nervous energy emanates from every gouged stroke.

A later woodcut, Kiss IV, demonstrates Munch at his most reductive. He took an image first painted seven years earlier, of two bodies locked in an embrace; when it was first shown in Paris, the misogynist Strindberg characteristically described it as “the fusion of two beings one of which in the form of a carp [the woman], seems to be about to swallow the larger”.

From that original full colour scene Munch created an almost abstract shape in black, the two bodies now only just legible, having become one entity. Amongst other innovations, Munch was one of the first to carve along the grain of the wood instead of across it, allowing its pattern to show through. This is most obvious in Kiss IV, the natural surface enhancing the raw power of the image.

In the same year that he made Kiss IV, Munch’s tempestuous three-year relationship with wealthy heiress, Tulla Larsen, would end with an accidental shooting. Munch’s left hand was permanently injured, and his nerves were left on edge. Six more years of excessive drink, drugs and moving around, along with increasing paranoia and hallucinations, led to a nervous breakdown in 1908.

Though he continued to work for the remaining decades of his life, it was the raw force of his work up to this point that left an indelible mark on the world of art. We had better grasp this opportunity to see for ourselves: by the time the next exhibition comes along, we could all be dead.

Catrìona Black, The Herald 30.05.09