Mercatorfonds
1
‘In part myself’: Edvard Munch
and Vincent van Gogh
Compared
Reinhold Heller
To depict a strong emotional state solely by working
directly from nature – or [rather from] nature seen
during a strong emotional state [–] is terribly nervewracking work [.…] To absorb during a few hours the
comparative indifference of nature into oneself [.…]
After that, during these few hours to make it visible
again [in a painting] after it was filtered through the
chambers of the eye – the mind – the nerves – the
heart – glowing in the fires of passion – [from] the
soul’s hellish oven – [all this] is extremely taxing on
the nervous system[.] F[or example] Van Gogh [and]
in part myself[.]
Edvard Munch, c. 1908 1
It is commonplace in the chronologies of art
history to consider the work of Vincent van Gogh
and Edvard Munch as related. The two artists never
met, but ever since the 1890s Van Gogh has been
regarded as a major stylistic and conceptual source
for Munch.2 Munch clearly knew the Dutchman’s
art as early as 1889, and effects found in Van Gogh’s
art started to appear in his work the following year.
The term ‘influence’, however, may not be the most
appropriate to describe the Van Gogh–Munch
interaction. It implies either an involuntary or
unconscious acceptance or incorporation of one
artist’s practice by another, or otherwise a
deliberate borrowing – whether abject imitation or
intentional misapplication – of a different artist’s
vocabulary.3 After the 1880s, Munch never
submitted his work to such a direct injection of
another’s practice or technique, but rather
persistently applied a selective, creatively eclectic
pastiche or bricolage of means absorbed and
dramatically altered from diverse prototypes
simultaneously. This is most notably evident
during the years 1890–92, when he entered a virtual
apprenticeship without imitation to the artistic
innovations of Post-Impressionism in Paris,
extending from Georges Seurat and the NeoImpressionists to Paul Gauguin and the Nabis, in
order to give shape to his own unique vocabulary.4
However, Munch never copied, reinterpreted or
made sketches after the works of his prototypes, as
Van Gogh and other artists at the time commonly
did to varied effect. Rather he subjected the art he
saw to an intense process of transformative
memory that selected, combined, fused and
metamorphosed variably according to his own
intentions.5 For Munch, his dictum ‘I paint, not
what I see, but what I saw’ applied not only to the
visible world or to his biographical experiences as
sources for his imagery, but also to the art he
admired and emulated.6
Misprisions and Parallels
33 Edvard Munch
Rue Lafayette, 1891
Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
2
Munch’s process of recollection involved a strategy
of strong, deliberate misinterpretation or
misunderstanding, what Harold Bloom identified
as ‘poetic misprision’ or ‘clinamen’,7 in order to
give shape to his own work. The systematic, small
touches of colour arranged calmly into the
cohesive web of an image employed by Seurat and
his Neo-Impressionist adherents, for example,
became misapplied and transformed in Munch’s
Rue Lafayette (fig. 33) into a hailstorm of blurring,
broad, directionally oriented strokes of paint that
suggests dynamic movement, not stasis, even as
3
the general compositional organisation with its
spatial bifurcation readily recalls Gustave
Caillebotte’s Homme au balcon (fig. f16).8 Munch
applied a stylistically disjointed amalgam that
diametrically juxtaposed, without transition, his
misprision of Neo-Impressionism with a rush of
defining linear strokes, jumbled patterning and a
vertiginous thrust into exaggerated perspectival
depth that also echoed the precedent of Van Gogh,
as in his Garden of the Asylum (fig. 112), but without
adopting the latter’s preferred impasto paint
application or intense contrasting colour.9
From his memory of the innovative techniques
of Caillebotte, Neo-Impressionists and Van Gogh,
Munch abstracted those he desired in order to
generate the misprision of his own uniquely
signifying effects. Filtered through memory, they
were no longer tied to the specific practices and
material appearance of his prototypes, as copies
and imitations would be, but rather they became
personal independent means and techniques,
transformed and alienated from their origin.
Meaning and content were altered as well.
Although forcing his recollections of NeoImpressionism and of Van Gogh into a new union,
Munch’s painting possesses neither the serenity of
a Neo-Impressionist landscape or city view, nor the
colouristic subjectivity of Van Gogh’s asylum
f16 Gustave Caillebotte
Homme au balcon, 1880
Oil on canvas, 116 x 97 cm
Private collection
4
garden. The garden at Saint-Rémy, as described by
Van Gogh in his letters, was imbued with almost
religious, psychological meaning that recalled
depictions of Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane
through a ‘combination of red ochre, of green
saddened with grey, of black lines that define the
outlines, [… that] gives rise a little to the feeling of
anxiety from which some of my companions in
misfortune [at the asylum in Saint-Rémy] often
suffer, and which is called “seeing red”’.10 Munch,
still employing a relatively naturalistic colour
palette, instead used his compositional spatial
bifurcation to render the agitated movement of a
Parisian street juxtaposed with the stable figure of
a lone man standing on a balcony, leaning on its
railing, gazing at the street below. Ironically,
however, the railing that is his support appears as a
Van Gogh-like sharp diagonal sweep towards the
horizon and shares, even enhances, the instability
and activity of the street, seeming to endanger the
very stasis and stability of the man leaning upon it.
It is an uneasy confrontation between the
anonymous agitation of the modern city street and,
within it, the illusory stability of the individual, who
is implicitly threatened by the encroaching urban
environment. Through his wilful bricolage and
misprision of diverse, newly discovered and then
recalled art vocabularies, Munch established a new
vocabulary specific to the meaning he sought to
communicate.
The communication of the content and
meaning of his images to their viewer became
Munch’s primary goal in his art. ‘Taken as a whole,
art derives from one person’s need to communicate
with another,’ he pronounced. ‘I do not believe in
an art that has not been forced into being from a
person’s need to open their heart.’11 This aesthetic,
which demanded both an artist committed to
revealing deep subjective involvement – identified
by him as offering up his ‘heart’s blood’ – as well as
a viewer capable of recognising this subjective
involvement, was first formulated by Munch early
in the 1890s. The means of making the image – the
subject matter, composition, colours and other
physical and conceptual elements of a painting –
should accordingly be ordered in such a fashion as
to facilitate the viewer’s empathetic recognition.
‘During an intense emotional state,’ he observed, ‘a
landscape will have a particular effect on you[;] … in
depicting this landscape you will arrive at an image
of your own emotional state … [and] this, your
mood, is the main concern [of the painting].’12 The
conviction that an artwork echoes the personality
of its maker extends as far back as Ancient Greece
but became particularly accented in the nineteenth
century during the era of Romanticism. Later,
112 Vincent van Gogh
Garden of the Asylum, 1889
Oil on canvas, 72 x 91 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
5
around 1890, Munch shared it with numerous
artists and critics as well. He is distinguished from
most others, however, in his insistence that the
primary concern of the artist, prior to any other
consideration, should be to communicate this
subjective identity. All else is subordinate to this
task. ‘An artwork derives solely from a person’s
interior,’ he wrote. ‘Art is the pictorial form [of what
was] generated through a person’s nerves – heart –
mind – eye.’13
While Munch shared with numerous other
progressive artists at the end of the nineteenth
century his conviction that an artwork’s forms and
structure need not be dependent on the
appearance of the visual world, the closest parallel
to his accentuation of the direct linkage between
pictorial form and the emotional or subjective
responses of the artist to the particular scene or
experience depicted appears in the writings of
Vincent van Gogh. Like Munch, Van Gogh argued
that his paintings rendered with ‘a colour […] that
isn’t locally true from the realist point of view of
trompe l’oeil, but a colour suggesting some
emotion, an ardent temperament [….] [I]f we made
the colour very correct or the drawing very correct,
we wouldn’t create those emotions.’14 To transmit
verbally the emotional inspiration and effect of
‘one of the ugliest [paintings] I’ve done’ – a work
titled The Night Café (fig. f17) – Van Gogh resorted
to a detailed physical description linked to
f17. Vincent van Gogh
The Night Café, 1888
Oil on canvas, 72.4 x 92.1 cm
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Bequest of Stephen Carlton
Clark, B.A. 1903
6
indications of the colours’ emotive effects on a
viewer:
I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions
with the red and the green.
The room is blood-red and dull yellow, a green
billiard table in the centre, 4 lemon yellow lamps
with an orange and green glow. Everywhere it’s a
battle and an antithesis of the most different
greens and reds; in the characters of the sleeping
ruffians, small in the empty, high room, some
purple and blue. The blood-red and the yellowgreen of the billiard table, for example, contrast
with the little bit of delicate Louis XV green of the
counter, where there’s a pink bouquet.
The white clothes of the owner, watching over
things from a corner in this furnace, become
lemon yellow, pale luminous green.15
Considering this verbal description inadequate,
Van Gogh augmented it through a watercolour
drawing after the oil painting as the sole means of
communicating its forms, space, colours and
composition. Existing visually within the painting
through their suggestive function, the components
of the image no longer corresponded directly to the
experienced and verbally describable interior of
the café but rather they were manipulated by Van
Gogh to achieve a coherence of emotive meaning
transmitted through their own inherent associative
properties. What Munch would have identified as
the ‘mood’ that Van Gogh recognised within the
night café, ‘this furnace’, was the determining
factor in what was depicted and how it was
depicted.
Ugly Paintings
For Van Gogh ‘the terrible human passions’ of his
experience demanded an ‘ugly painting’ of
unresolved colouristic antitheses, of ‘battles’
between blood red, sharp lemon yellow, dirtied
yellow-green, dulled purples and blues, with
touches of pink and white intruding
anachronistically.16 All comforting, traditionally
desirable colour harmonies to lessen the ‘ugliness’
and resolve the antitheses were rejected in order to
remain true to the inspiring original mood found in
the café:
In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to
express the idea that the café is a place where you
can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes.
Anyway, I tried with contrasts of delicate pink
and blood-red and wine-red. Soft Louis XV and
Veronese green contrasting with yellow greens
and harsh blue greens.
All of that in an ambience of a hellish furnace, in
pale sulphur.
To express something of the power of the dark
corners of a grog-shop [assommoir].17
A viewer unaccustomed to this manner of painting,
one who continued to consider Impressionism
radical, Van Gogh mused, ‘Looking at my painting,
[…] he’d say that it’s a full-blown case of delirium
tremens’.18 Van Gogh’s hypothetical judgement
focused on his patterns of divided brushstrokes
and undulating linear patterns, but he also
eschewed other traditional painting skills and
compositional practices still maintained by
contemporary artists such as Edouard Manet,
Edgar Degas or Jean-François Raffaëlli, even as
they radicalised their depictions of café interiors.
When he painted the interior of the night café Van
Gogh turned instead to effects seemingly
unskilled, primitive and ugly according to
traditional criteria but emotively all the more
powerful.
For Munch, too, a major and difficult strategy to
discover a pictorial vocabulary adequate to the
demands of his subjective responses to a particular
scene or situation consisted of rejecting the
standards and refinement even of experimental
contemporary avant-garde painting, whether
Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist or Synthetist. As
for Van Gogh, beauty and harmony in colour, form,
composition and finish ceased to be necessary
criteria. Ugliness, distortion, disjuncture and lack
of finish became equally suitable goals so long as
the ‘mood’ depicted demanded them. Analogous to
both Van Gogh’s Garden of the Asylum and The
Night Café, Munch’s iconic painting The Scream
(fig. f19) similarly transformed a motif treated by
numerous contemporary artists – a landscape at
sunset – into a personal statement of anxiety that
defied virtually all established criteria of artistic
skill, beauty and harmony. Evening landscape
representations, with or without human figures in
them, generally used the ambiguity of diminishing
light and colourful skies as day gives way to night
in order to generate a sense of melancholic quiet,
stillness and contemplation. Munch recognised
this tradition with its overtones of meditative
poetry, but sought its antithesis according to an
experience he repeatedly identified as the source of
his painting in various prose poems and other
texts.19 Summarising the experience fifteen years
after he completed the painting, in 1908, he wrote:
One evening I was walking along a hillside road
near Kristiania – together with two friends[.] At
the time life had ripped open my soul – The sun
went down – had retreated full of fire below the
horizon – Then it seemed as if a flaming sword of
blood slashed through the heavens’ vault – The
air became like blood – with piercing strands of
fire – The fjord – glared in cold blue – yellow and
red colours – bloody red screeched – on the road
– and on the railing – My friends’ faces turned
glaring yellow-white – I felt a great scream – and I
actually heard a great scream – The colours of
nature broke up – the lines of nature – the lines
and the colours – quivered in motion – These
oscillations of light not only caused my eye to
vibrate – they also brought my ear into vibration –
so that I truly heard a scream – I then painted the
picture [entitled] Scream.20
To paint his sky streaked with red and yellow
clouds, Munch rejected sunset paintings’ standard
harmonic, muted tones and wisps of softly
illuminated clouds. Instead he painted it with crisscrossing, unstable, streaks of oil paint, tempera and
pastels, flat, not nuanced, that look – in his words –
as if made of ‘real blood’,21 textured like encrusted
wounds on the picture’s cardboard support, itself
left partially bare and exposed within the
coagulation of built-up paint or barely covered with
thin, transparent strokes of watery, turpentinethinned paint.22 Even without considering the de7
f18 Edvard Munch
Despair, 1892
Oil on canvas, 92 x 67 cm
Thielska Galleriet,
Stockholm
f19 Edvard Munch
The Scream, 1893
Oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard, 91 x 73.5 cm
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
8
115 Edvard Munch
The Scream, 1893
Crayon on cardboard,
74 x 56 cm
The Munch Museum,
Oslo
9
boned, undulating figure with skull-like head and
gaping mouth centred in the landscape foreground,
Munch’s painting is an ugly painting when judged
by artistic standards at the time he created it, much
as Van Gogh’s Night Café was.23 The kinship
extends beyond such critical judgements of
ugliness, moreover, so that The Scream might well
be considered another of Munch’s wilful
misprisions, heavily indebted to Van Gogh’s
prototypical images and attitudes while not
directly imitating them.24
If The Scream in its deliberate ‘ugliness’ and
disquieting mood of anxiety that borders on
madness closely reiterates aspects of Van Gogh’s
Night Café, it relates visually even more closely to
Van Gogh’s Garden of the Asylum. Both paintings
employ a sharpened perspective rush into depth
that contrasts to an otherwise fundamentally flat
rendering of a landscape whose outlined forms
organise large areas with sinuously undulating
linear patterning, and use a range of sombrely
muted – ‘saddened’, Van Gogh called them –
colours except for areas of bright yellow. Both
paintings, too, recognise a thematics of anguish in
the transforming light of dusk, the disappearing
sun illuminating sky and clouds as the day ends.
Even Munch’s central de-humanised figure in The
Scream functions to concentrate the despairing
mood of the image much as does Van Gogh’s
foregrounded pine tree, ‘an enormous trunk, but
struck by lightning and sawn off [… with a] side
branch [that] thrusts up very high, [… but that] falls
down again in an avalanche of dark green twigs,
[…] like a proud man brought low’, focuses his
painting’s ‘impression of anguish’.25 This is not to
say, however, that as he painted The Scream
Munch either knew or emulated directly Van
Gogh’s Garden of the Asylum. Both artists were
immersed in the same practices and theoretical
justifications of the contemporary French avantgarde and both appropriated and misappropriated
from them freely for their own differently
innovative works, so that a commonality of
painting practice and appearance when they
sought for a similar emotive effect is to be
anticipated. It is more revealing, instead, to
consider how the two artists differ even as their
images approach each other in Garden of the
Asylum and The Scream, and as their intentions
coincide.
This becomes intriguingly apparent through
their divergent concepts of ‘ugly’ as well as how
they addressed the issue of their inspiration and
intent. In his letters, Van Gogh identified the
‘ugliness’ of his paintings primarily by referring to
his choice of colours, his manner of painting with
10
individualised brushstrokes, and how in total his
compositions ‘expressed an idea’ which would be
uncomfortable or even repulsive to their viewers.
Significantly, what he described consisted of his
paintings and the effects they produced on a
viewer. He argued that they represent, not
specifically his own personal subjective state of
mind or emotion, but rather such emotive,
associative qualities as he discovered in the
subjects and motifs he depicted as he experienced
them. Whether the painting was completed or in
progress, its appearance and meaning was his sole
concern. Munch’s approach in texts about his
paintings is virtually antithetical to Van Gogh’s.
They are not contained in letters, serving as verbal
analogues of his paintings, but rather they appear
as short notes, prose poems or narrative texts,
many repeated numerous times in varied forms.26
These texts did not describe his paintings or their
emotive effects, as Van Gogh’s did; instead they
narrated personal emotional situations that gave
rise to or inspired the paintings. The image served
to encapsulate and communicate the subjectively
shaped memory of an experience visually but it
was solely the generative experience, not the visual
painting, Munch chose to capture verbally.
Unlike Van Gogh’s letters, Munch’s writings
thus do not present the painting; they present the
motivation, the inspiration that gave rise to the
painting. For Munch, the success of a painting was
determined by how effectively it fulfilled the
demands of his subjectively formed memory. If the
recalled experience was unpleasant or ugly, as was
the terror and anxiety associated with The Scream,
then the painting too had to be unpleasant and
ugly. He did not reach this conclusion quickly,
however. The motif of The Scream tormented him
for several years as he worked it through numerous
pencil and charcoal sketches, an initial oil painting
on canvas – entitled Deranged Mood at Sunset or
Despair (fig. f18) – in an Impressionist-like
technique injected with a dominant tone of blue for
the mood of melancholy and with the sky streaked
in garish red and yellow, a large-scale rendering in
crayon on cardboard that first displayed the
twisting open-mouthed foreground figure (fig. 115),
followed by yet another unfinished painted sketch
on cardboard, which Munch finally flipped for his
now well-known painting with its unprecedented,
unorthodox mixture of media (fig. f19).28 Whereas
Van Gogh remained true to the historical artistic
practice of employing oil paint alone on his canvas,
cohesively offering the single ‘noble’ medium
arranged into an image to cover a standard, usually
pristinely white canvas support, Munch rejected oil
paint’s viscous sensuality to opt for diluted oil
paint and matt tempera ‘dirtied’ with tracks of
pencil and crayon on the common, base surface of
a piece of cardboard, parts of it left obtrusively
bare. In order that The Scream function optimally
to communicate its originating mood to a viewer,
the ‘ugliness’ of Munch’s painting extended from
the initial unsettling experience of the ‘scream’
itself to the very material components and visual
appearance of the final image outside others’
current, historical, conventional working methods
and aesthetics. For both Munch and Van Gogh,
despite differences in their approach, ‘ugliness’
became a newly valid means of enhancing their
works’ expressiveness.
Sun, Madness and Starlight
Both artists rejected the concept of a perpetuated,
identifiable style for their work that would carry
over from one painting to another, but rather
altered and adapted their painterly idiom
according to motif, subject matter, content and
mood. At the same time as he painted his Garden
of the Asylum, Van Gogh worked on a group of five
paintings of olive orchards. From one to the other,
according to differing light and atmospheric
effects, he altered the colour palette and his
painting idiom to generate sharply differing
emotive qualities (figs 104, f20). Viewing the
representation of the olive groves experienced by
him much as he did the asylum garden paintings,
he considered them a counterpoint and corrective
to Gauguin’s and Bernard’s ‘abstract’ paintings of
Christ in the Garden of Olives, which were rooted
in biblical texts rather than experience, in
preconceived ideas rather being personally seen:
So at present [I] am working in the olive trees,
seeking the different effects of a grey sky against
yellow earth, with dark green note of the foliage;
another time the earth and foliage all purplish
against yellow sky, then red ochre earth and pink
and green sky. See, that interests me more than
the so-called abstractions.
And if I haven’t written for a long time, it’s
because, having to struggle against my illness
and to calm my head, I hardly felt like having
discussions, and found danger in these
abstractions. And by working very calmly,
beautiful subjects will come of their own accord;
it’s truly first and foremost a question of
immersing oneself in reality again, with no plan
made in advance, with no Parisian bias. […] I’ve let
myself become thoroughly imbued with the air of
the small mountains and the orchards. With that,
I’ll see. My ambition is truly limited to a few clods
of earth, some sprouting wheat.29
Van Gogh apparently considered the act of
painting to be a palliative, warding off recurrences
of his mental attacks, but only if it intersected with
submission to the experience of the landscape he
depicted. Neither the idea-based ‘abstractions’ of
104 Vincent van Gogh
Olive Grove, 1889
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
11
Notes
1. Munch sketchbook MM T 2785, pp.
124–25, English translation modified by
the author. The sketchbook is dated
1908, but Munch also added notes to it
during 1925.
2. Among the first to do this was
Thadée Natanson in an exhibition
review in La Revue Blanche, no. 1, 1 May
1897, p. 460, where he identified the
influences of Van Gogh, Cézanne,
Gauguin and the Ecole de Pont-Aven on
Munch. I thank Maite van Dijk for
sharing this reference with me.
3. The paradigmatic exploration of
patterns of influence, while devoted to
poetry, remains Bloom 1997. See also the
introduction to Fort Worth 1998, pp. 10–
24, concerning the interaction of
Matisse and Picasso in a number of
paintings, which offers a useful model
that can be applied, with modification,
to thinking about the Van Gogh–Munch
relationship.
4. Munch’s relationship to
contemporary French art at this time is
explored further in this volume by Maite
van Dijk (pp. 00–00). See also the
extensive inventories of perceived
influences on Munch in Svenæus 1968;
Chicago 2009.
5. Although seeking precise
influences on Munch from varied
sources, Svenæus 1968, pp. 33–37,
observes that Munch’s appropriation of
other artists’ techniques and motifs
should not be considered ‘influence’ as
commonly understood, but rather ‘that
[Munch] discovered his own capabilities
…’ through them.
6. Munch 1928/29, p. 1. Munch
published his pithy aphorism in the selfpublished pamphlet Livsfrisens
tilblivelse, where he dated it to 1890, and
in his introduction to the catalogue of
his 1929 exhibition at Blomquist Gallery,
Oslo, where the date was identified as
1889–90. Concerning the dating of these
texts, see Jacobsen 2011.
7. Bloom 1997, passim, but especially
pp. 14 and 30–32.
8. Although evidence suggests Munch
could not have seen Caillebotte’s
painting in 1890–91, recent studies (for
example Chicago 2009, p. 44) continue
to consider Munch as directly
dependent on it. See also Heller 1973, pp.
62–64; Heller 1984, pp. 72–73; Rapetti
1991, pp. 102–03.
9. From paintings such as Garden of
the Asylum, Munch could also have
recalled the directional and descriptive
extended brushstrokes through which
Van Gogh similarly transformed
Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist
technical precedents.
10. Van Gogh letter 822.
11. Munch manuscript, c. 1890–92, MM
N 29, pp. 1–3, English translation
modified by the author.
12.Ibid.
13. Munch manuscript, 1928, MM N 57,
English translation modified by the
author. Munch identified the text as
12
originally written at Warnemünde in
1907–08.
14. Van Gogh letter 676.
15.Ibid.
16. On ugliness in art, see the
anthology of historic texts by Eco 2007,
and Pop and Widrich 2014. Significantly
ugliness is defined in terms of content
and subject matter in both publications,
not in terms of style or technique, which
are the concerns of Van Gogh and
Munch.
17. Van Gogh letter 677.
18.Ibid.
19. The inventory of Munch texts at
eMunch.no identifies some sixteen
variations of the text written by Munch
concerning The Scream’s origins. Eight
of these prose poems and other texts
relating to The Scream are also collected
in Heller 1973, pp. 103–09.
20. Munch sketchbook MM T 2785, pp.
77–80, English translation modified by
the author.
21. Munch 1928/29, p. 29.
22. The material makeup of The Scream
is considered in detail in TopalovaCasadiego 2008. For further discussions
of Munch’s unorthodox painting
techniques, see the literature cited in
Bjerke 2008, p. 48, note 8, and the
detailed analysis in Topalova-Casadiego
2009.
23.On The Scream as an ‘ugly’
painting, see Heller 1973, pp. 85–89;
Svenæus 1968, pp. 58–62.
24. In addition to Van Gogh, numerous
other precursors and influences for
Munch’s painting have been suggested,
as summarised insightfully in Bjerke
2008, pp. 25–30.
25. Van Gogh letter 822.
26. While Van Gogh’s writings about
his art were addressed to his brother,
sister and friends as personal
communications, the purpose of
Munch’s writings is less clear. Although
he published a few, most remained
hidden in notebooks and sketchbooks
until after his death.
27. For discussions of The Scream’s
development from first sketches to final
painting, see particularly Heller 1973, pp.
59–86; Eggum 2000, pp. 221–35; Bjerke
2008, pp. 16–23.
28. In December 1891, the Norwegian
Realist artist Erik Werenskiold
complained about Munch’s
experimental technique: ‘In most of his
stuff, Munch is half-finished, hardly even
that, smears together oil paints, pastels
and does that while leaving large
segments of canvas bare no matter what
the mood of the painting is; this naked
canvas then is supposed to fit in with
daylight, sunshine, evening moods,
moonlight or whatever.’ Letter to
Andreas Aubert, dated December 1891,
as cited by Langaard 1960, p. 138.
29. Van Gogh letter 822.
30. Concerning this aspect of Van
Gogh’s working attitudes and his
associations with the term ‘Parisian’ in
this context, see Shiff 2012, pp. 134–35.
See also Chapter 5, ‘Impressionism and
Symbolism as Modes of Artistic
Expression’, in Shiff 1984, pp. 39–52, for
an insightful consideration of the issues
of expression and subjectivity in later
nineteenth-century French art and
theory.
31. Edvard Munch in conversation with
Ludvig Ravensberg, in Ludvig
Ravensberg, Dagbok, 5 January 1910,
MM manuscript LR 536.
32. On Van Gogh’s popularity in
Germany after 1901 and Expressionism’s
indebtedness to him, see New York
2007; Feilchenfeldt 1988.
33.Concerning Bathing Men’s
development and transformation, see
Woll 2009, vol. II, p. 756.
34. To the triptych two further paintings
were later added to form a pentaptych.
35. For fuller consideration of Munch’s
relationship to vitalism and
Freikörperkultur, see especially Oslo
2006.
36. This tradition and other precursors
to Munch’s nocturnal scenes are
succinctly summarised by Lippincott
1988, pp. 12–14. See also Amsterdam,
Edinburgh and Helsinki 2012.
37. Van Gogh letter 691.
38. On Van Gogh’s nocturnal scenes,
see especially New York and
Amsterdam 2008.
39. Woll 2009, vol. I, pp. 302–03.
40. Eggum 1998, pp. 79–80.
41. Munch literary sketch MM T 2901.
42. The changes in Munch’s
terminology are summarised by Guleng
2013, p. 128.
43. Munch sketchbook MM T 2547, c.
1930–35, fol. 24v. As cited and translated
by Heller 1984, pp. 128–29.
44. The fluidity of the painting’s title is
outlined in Woll 2009, vol. I, p. 352. On
Munch’s Madonna motif, see especially
Gerner 1993; Oslo 2008a.
45. The destroyed frame was described
by Thiis 1933, p. 218, as ‘a sort of triptych
form, or Symbolist frame’. It was
retained by Munch in versions of his
1895 lithograph, Madonna (fig. 100).
46. Munch 1928/29, p. 7. Munch here
dated his ‘Saint-Cloud Manifesto’ to
1889–90.
47. Van Gogh letter 739.
48. Van Gogh letter 743.
49. Munch sketchbook MM T 2785, pp.
124–25.
23.On The Scream as an ‘ugly’
painting, see Heller 1973, pp. 85–89;
Svenæus 1968, pp. 58–62.
24. In addition to Van Gogh, numerous
other precursors and influences for
Munch’s painting have been suggested,
as summarised insightfully in Bjerke
2008, pp. 25–30.
25. Van Gogh letter 822.
26. While Van Gogh’s writings about
his art were addressed to his brother,
sister and friends as personal
communications, the purpose of
Munch’s writings is less clear. Although
he published a few, most remained
hidden in notebooks and sketchbooks
until after his death.
27. For discussions of The Scream’s
development from first sketches to final
painting, see particularly Heller 1973, pp.
59–86; Eggum 2000, pp. 221–35; Bjerke
2008, pp. 16–23.
28. In December 1891, the Norwegian
Realist artist Erik Werenskiold
complained about Munch’s
experimental technique: ‘In most of his
stuff, Munch is half-finished, hardly even
that, smears together oil paints, pastels
and does that while leaving large
segments of canvas bare no matter what
the mood of the painting is; this naked
canvas then is supposed to fit in with
daylight, sunshine, evening moods,
moonlight or whatever.’ Letter to
Andreas Aubert, dated December 1891,
as cited by Langaard 1960, p. 138.
29. Van Gogh letter 822.
30. Concerning this aspect of Van
Gogh’s working attitudes and his
associations with the term ‘Parisian’ in
this context, see Shiff 2012, pp. 134–35.
See also Chapter 5, ‘Impressionism and
Symbolism as Modes of Artistic
Expression’, in Shiff 1984, pp. 39–52, for
an insightful consideration of the issues
of expression and subjectivity in later
nineteenth-century French art and
theory.
31. Edvard Munch in conversation with
Ludvig Ravensberg, in Ludvig
Ravensberg, Dagbok, 5 January 1910,
MM manuscript LR 536.
32. On Van Gogh’s popularity in
Germany after 1901 and Expressionism’s
indebtedness to him, see New York
2007; Feilchenfeldt 1988.
33.Concerning Bathing Men’s
development and transformation, see
Woll 2009, vol. II, p. 756.
34. To the triptych two further paintings
were later added to form a pentaptych.
35. For fuller consideration of Munch’s
relationship to vitalism and
Freikörperkultur, see especially Oslo
2006.
36. This tradition and other precursors
to Munch’s nocturnal scenes are
succinctly summarised by Lippincott
1988, pp. 12–14. See also Amsterdam,
Edinburgh and Helsinki 2012.
37. Van Gogh letter 691.
38. On Van Gogh’s nocturnal scenes,
see especially New York and
Amsterdam 2008.
39. Woll 2009, vol. I, pp. 302–03.
40. Eggum 1998, pp. 79–80.
41. Munch literary sketch MM T 2901.
42. The changes in Munch’s
terminology are summarised by Guleng
2013, p. 128.
43. Munch sketchbook MM T 2547, c.
1930–35, fol. 24v. As cited and translated
by Heller 1984, pp. 128–29.
44. The fluidity of the painting’s title is
outlined in Woll 2009, vol. I, p. 352. On
Munch’s Madonna motif, see especially
Gerner 1993; Oslo 2008a.
Mercatorfonds