The vociferous Edvard Munch at the National Gallery

Most people only know Edvard Munch for The Scream. A garish and psychedelic desperate cry. And this theme is subtly echoed throughout all his haunting paintings – displayed at London’s National Gallery. 

The sad scenes he depicted hung on the palatial, neo-classical walls of the National Gallery immediately transported you to a sombre, expressionist land. Even the most mundane of vistas felt hopelessly dejected. Like there was a little scream in every one of his paintings.

The Norwegian artist had a lot of heartache in his personal life to draw on. He lost his mother to tuberculosis when he was five years old, followed by his sister 10 years later, his younger sister was committed and his brother died shortly after his wedding. Disease and insanity seemed to plague his 80 years.

As a sickly child, he occupied himself during long, bitter winters by drawing. And his art was clearly influenced by his staunchly religious father, who taught him history and literature. Munch, enchanted by the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe and having inherited his father’s pious stance that angels of sorrow, fear and death were by his side, created an ordinary world shrouded in gothic woe.

Artists can’t help but create work that is autobiographical. Knowing Munch’s story, I looked upon every image with his eyes. A little girl covering her ears, faces staring out from bleak promenades and a forlorn mother tending a nonchalant, bed ridden child all echoed Munch’s own story.

Melancholy and despair ran through each and every canvas, especially the ones titled Melancholy and Despair. Every ghostly figure staring out at you, longing to tell you their story. Almost grabbing at you as you walk passed.

Every alien-faced human, even when making love, looked pained. In The Kiss, naked misshapen bodies intertwine and cling onto each other in ecstasy as their faces merge to become one entity. At first glance, the intimacy in this monochrome drawing is palpable, but the darkness that weighs heavy on it reveals something else. The male envelopes his lover in a hard embrace, almost pushing her against the windowsill. The female’s pelvis pivoted away from his and her arms on his shoulders create a delicate barrier between them. Could this be a scene of frenzied desire or of a dead relationship grasping onto the final ripples of love?

  

The painting shown above is one of three. A nude woman pacing in her bedroom portrays a familiar tableau. A feeling of desolation, angst and deep contemplation covers her featureless face. Each painting in the triptych was virtually identical, only slight nuances to canvases differentiated one from another. Each illustrating that Munch saw something good in everything. This was almost a little pep-talk to his subject.

From the sultry Madonna who invites you in with her brooding sensuality looks like she’s masking a grave secret of love and loss, perhaps using her sexuality as a way of dulling the pain.  And even his Nosferatu type self-portraits show a man entrenched in battle with himself. 

Munch himself was tortured by his demons. His breakdown and recovery result in decades of solitude. A man who, in his 70s, had to hide his work from the Nazis during their occupation of Norway as they deemed his art (much like other modern masters like Picasso, Gaugin and Matisse) as “degenerate art”. Much of his work, including his most famous pieces were recovered and returned to Norway. To add insult to injury, the Nazis staged his funeral leaving many of the locals to believe he was a Nazi sympathiser.

Whether he was or not is something we’ll never know, but judging by the harrowing undertones of every frame he produced, Munch was well-versed in being oppressed by a brutal overlord. Depression is something you can't escape. It's always there. And Munch illustrated it in the faces of the children, rooms full of people and even the rugged coastlines – ever omnipresent, like god (or Hitler) himself.