Visual Art review: The Power of Print

Published on Monday 29 June 2009 19:28

EDVARD MUNCH: PRINTS **** THE HUNTERIAN ART GALLERY, GLASGOW

THE Scream by Edvard Munch is one of the most universally familiar images in Western art. Having the unusual honour of being twice stolen (although in fact the objects of these thefts were two different versions of the picture from two different Oslo museums) the picture seems to touch a universal nerve, to encapsulate all the feelings of angst and alienation which have pervaded so much of western experience since the Reformation. Munch was Norwegian, but he was a cosmopolitan artist. He studied in Berlin where he was influenced by the morbid art of the German late Romantics. He also worked in Paris. There he became familiar with the very latest ideas and it is the art of Gauguin, Czanne and Van Gogh that provides the context for much that he did. He was especially influenced by Van Gogh and like the Dutch artist his art is pervaded with angst. It is almost its central theme: sexual angst, existential guilt, alienation, illness and a morbid vision of death all feature.

His print of The Scream is one of the stars of the exhibition of his prints at the Hunterian Gallery. It is a stark black-and-white lithograph. Indeed the lines are so bold and jagged that it looks like a woodcut. A pier cuts a sharp diagonal through swirling lines of sea, sky and distant mountains. A figure of indeterminate gender and with features somewhere between a death's head and a foetus is standing facing us, back to the sea. The face is distorted as though itself screaming, but the figure also has its hands over its ears as if against some terrible sound. Munch's original title was The Scream in Nature. He also described the genesis of the picture: "I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and leant against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety. And I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature."

It is clear that the sound implied in the picture is heard, or at least imagined, but if there is an actual sound, two figures further down the pier pass on quite unmoved by it. Thus it becomes a picture of the figure's isolation, of their inner subjective terror at a moment of recognition of the individual's insignificance in the face of nature's vast tumultuous and unremitting cycle of life and death – of angst indeed.

Nevertheless, you might think that a print of a painting which has had such an impact would be second best; that the painting is the main thing. In fact, however, although Munch did paint some remarkable pictures, the prints are in many ways even more impressive than the paintings. Indeed because of its economy, the print of The Scream has an urgency, an almost crude immediacy that concentrates the picture's effect of inexplicable, subjective terror in a way that the paintings cannot really match. It is this fierce economy that is so striking everywhere here. The prints are mostly in black and white, too, or they have only very limited colour, and this further economy deepens their impact. There is a print called simply called Angst, for instance. It is a black and white woodcut of a street scene. The main feature of the image is a group of white mask-like faces. Several are wearing top hats and there is just enough other detail to indicate that they are figures in city clothes. The street itself is only suggested by a couple of lines in the black. Above, a glimmering sky between dark clouds gives no light, but only serves to emphasise the darkness. Munch said the picture was about a rejected lover's feeling of humiliation: "All the people walking by looked so strange and odd, and he felt as though they were all staring at him, all these faces pale in the evening light." Maybe he is talking about himself, but you don't need to know that, nor even the story of the rejected lover to appreciate the profound sense of dislocation that he captures, the oppressive anonymity of an individual among strangers in the streets of a modern city. In his striking self-portrait, although the face is much more finely drawn, it also hangs white, stark and isolated against a black ground like the faces in this print.

The same sense of dislocation is also vividly expressed in one of the most striking prints here, the lithograph Death in the Sick Room. The scene records the death of his older sister, Sophie, from tuberculosis when the artist was 14. His mother had died of the same disease when he was a child. Here the remaining members of his family are gathered around the dying girl who is seated in a chair. The figures are black, the room white. Munch himself is seen in profile. He and his surviving sister make a single shape, but with their backs to each other, though physically close, they are psychologically apart. The whole picture conveys a bleak sense, not just of the loneliness of death, but of life too, even within the family. His sister Sophie appears again in one of the most complex and indeed most harrowing prints here, the colour lithograph called The Sick Child. The effect of the drawing in red and blue is harsh and uncomfortable. The girl, seen in profile, is lying with her emaciated head against the pillow. She is turned away from us and her expression suggests that, with death imminent, in her thoughts she has already left us.

Munch's relationship with women is a frequent theme here. Several prints are autobiographical and this seems often to have been troubled and unhappy, though the extreme implications of an image like Vampire II, where a woman sinks her teeth into the neck of the man she is embracing as her blood-red hair flows over and entangles him, was not so unusual in the art of the time. His Madonna really was controversial, however, though now, along with The Scream, it is one of his most familiar images. The face and torso of a naked woman are seen against a dark ground, all framed with a line of swimming spermatozoa. A foetus sits in the bottom corner. Although the framing device suggests that the woman, for all her evident erotic abandon, is in a conventional portrait pose, the catalogue suggests that in fact she is lying down and we are seeing her from the viewpoint of the artist in the act of making love to her and indeed at the moment of conception. "Thus now life reaches out is hand to death," wrote the artist. "The chain is forged that binds the thousands of generations that have died to the thousands of generations yet to come."

For all its impact, however, the symbolism of the picture seems overloaded when it is compared to the graphic simplicity and power of some of the prints here, above all of the woodcuts, of Moonlight by the Sea, for instance, or The Girls on the Bridge, or perhaps most strikingly of The Kiss, where the grain of the wood into which the outline of two lovers has been cut becomes an integral part of their image. The lines in the wood are made by time itself. Framed by them, the lovers have grown together to become one.

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