Art review: Edvard Munch’s Graphic Works from the Gundersen Collection

The angst and isolation distilled by his best-known work pervades all Edvard Munch’s art, and experiments with printing allowed him to make some fascinating and subtle variations on those themes, discovers Duncan Macmillan

Some images have become an integral part of the visual furniture of our minds, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream is one of them. It is universally recognised. Its meaning is clear and needs no gloss. Munch himself described the moment it was conceived: “I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, … I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

And that is what he captured – existential angst, the isolation of pure subjectivity when everything seems balanced, unsupported, on the single, narrow point of your own separate consciousness. Even Hume, normally so calm and equable, confronted the same abyss: “I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude,” he wrote, “… and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster… expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate.”

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The answer Hume found to the terror of his speculative isolation was social. “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends,” he wrote, and so in conviviality his terrors were dismissed as unreal. Munch seems to have found no such solace in society, however.

Much of his work deals with this same aspect of the human condition, the isolation of subjectivity, but also with the difficulty of alleviating it, of finding any consolation. The exhibition of his lithographs and woodcuts from the Gundersen Collection at the SNGMA (supplemented by a small number of additional prints from the SNGMA’s own collection and from two Scottish private collections) is not exactly a cheerful one, then. It is impressive all the same. After all, as the analogy with Hume suggests, these things are universals.

The Scream is here, but it is characteristic of Munch that it is not a unique image. It exists in various versions, both as a painting and as a print. Here it is a print, but as this show demonstrates, the prints themselves do not exist in conventional editions, numbered sets of more or less identical images, but are often unique, or almost so. Indeed, as an art form the print was particularly suited to Munch’s way of working. His art is diverse, but at its heart is a number of frequently repeated compositions. The Scream was one of these. He created these images initially as individual compositions, many of them as part of an ambitious series of paintings called the Frieze of Life, but then he worked numerous variations on them. Prints lend themselves to this. The composition can be repeated, but also worked on to make each print unique. Indeed Munch used his prints like a musician composing a theme and variations.

Five different versions of his woodcut Two Women on the Shore hanging together are a good example of this. All are the same basic print, but each one is different from the next. He constantly varied his prints in this way and did this by reworking the image on the woodblock or stone, by printing it in different inks, or on different papers, or simply with a different density of colour. Often on top of that he then worked on the print with paint or coloured ink, in effect turning it into a painting.

On the face of it the lithographs are more sophisticated than the woodcuts. The Brooch; Eva Mudocci, for instance is a bust-length portrait of a beautiful woman with flowing hair. In black and white, the drawing is refined and exquisite. The same is true of Madonna, another of his images that has passed into our collective memory bank. This is also a beautifully drawn picture of a woman with flowing hair, but in this case she is apparently naked and her flowing hair merges with the background like something elemental. She appears on her own and in black and white, or just touched with colour, but in other versions he adds a border with a foetus and swimming spermatozoa. On her own, the woman might be erotic, but Munch’s title and added border link eros with conception and childbirth and so with the sequence of the generations through birth and death.

Some of the lithographs are much less polished, however, and in them he seems to emulate his woodcuts, which are in contrast deliberately rough. Woodcut was associated with folk art and Munch was inspired by Gauguin’s example to adopt it. The idea was to distance himself from the sophistication of his academic training and pursue instead a kind of primitive spontaneity. In the woodcuts The Kiss and Towards the Forest, for instance, boldly defying all conventions of finish, he uses unpolished wood so that the background of the print is the knotty grain of its plank-like surface. This unifies the composition and so adds to the closeness of the embracing couples that are the subject of both pictures, but also, it is as though it were a lover’s votive cut into a tree and so gives the image a kind of artless authenticity.

In Towards the Forest, however, as he does in a number of his woodcuts, he then takes a fretsaw and cuts around his drawing so that he can ink the pieces of the block in different colours. To print it, he fits the pieces together again like a jigsaw. His model was no doubt Japanese woodblock printing, fashionable at the time, but the effect is quite different.

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In the latter picture, a clothed man and a naked woman in close embrace are heading towards a dark wood. It seems to be an image of sexual anxiety and, anticipating Freud, the forest suggests the unknown that lurks in shadows of the unconscious mind. Much of Munch’s iconography deals with similar themes of erotic and romantic love, but never very happily. It is as though he hoped to find in romantic love solace from the angst that he gave such memorable form, but either love’s uncertainty, expressed in jealousy, a frequent subject, or even death itself always intervenes to frustrate it.

Death is actually personified in Two Women on the Shore, an image of beauty, time and mortality. In the print an old woman, hooded and dressed in black, her face gaunt as a skull, is seated on the shore. Beside her a young woman, a beautiful figure with long red hair and a white dress, stands gazing out to sea. Beyond a curling line of shore, the sun is setting. Its reflection makes a broad, golden path across the calm water. It would be a scene of perfect tranquillity were it not for the troubling presence of the old woman with her black clothes and eerie, shrouded death’s head. Her presence makes the picture a variation on the age-old theme of Death and the Maiden, of death and the transience of beauty.

The exhibition has a coda looking at the exhibition of Munch’s work organised by the Society of Scottish Artists in 1931 and its undoubted influence. It was the first exhibition Munch had in the UK. No pictures of the installation exist, but photographs of what seems to have been much the same show held in Paris do give a tantalising glimpse of what was most likely on view. The rather morose side of Munch seen in his angst-ridden prints was certainly represented, but it was the presence of landscapes like his wonderful Starry Sky, inspired in turn by Van Gogh, that explains the impact the show had. A couple of examples of Gillies’s watercolours painted in the north-west Highlands shortly afterwards confirm this. A selection of cuttings from the contemporary Scottish press also indicate that, predictably, the response to Munch was not all favourable, but it is also clear that the show did trigger a healthy debate about Scottish art and internationalism that raised questions that are still topical now.

Edvard Munch: Graphic Works from the Gundersen Collection,

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Rating: ****

• Until 23 September.