ROME.- Decades have passed since the last exhibition dedicated to Munch in Rome; although one of the world’s most beloved artists (the only one who, with his most well-known work “The Scream,” “generated” an emoticon), he is also one of the artists most difficult to see represented in shows, because almost all of his works are held at the Munch Museum in Oslo, which has agreed to extend an unprecedented special loan.

Thus Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome is hosting one hundred masterpieces by Edvard Munch, including the iconic The Death of Marat (1907), Starry Night (1922– 1924) The Girls on the Bridge (1927), Melancholy (1900–1901), Dance on the Bridge (1904), as well as one of the lithographic versions of The Scream (1895).

The exhibition, which paid a previous visit to Palazzo Reale in Milan where it attracted visitors in record numbers, recounts Munch’s entire artistic journey, from his very beginnings to his last works, traversing the themes dearest to him, linked to one another by his interpretation of the tormented essence of the human condition.

Curated by Patricia G. Berman, one of the world’s greatest Munch scholars, with the academic contributions of Costantino D’Orazio, the exhibition is being held in collaboration with the MUNCH Museum in Oslo.

EDVARD MUNCH (Norway, 1863 – 1944)

Among the leading 19th-century symbolists and a forerunner of Expressionism, an artist whose life was marked by great pain and early sorrows, Munch quickly established immediate empathy with his viewers, causing them to perceive and not just see the suffering and anguish he depicted.

His mother’s premature death when he was only 5 years of age, the loss of his sister and father, and his tortured relationship with his fiancée Tulla Larsen were the primordial emotional material upon which the artist began to form his poetics. Thanks to his extraordinary artistic talent, these poetics were then combined, in a highly original way with his passion for the energies unleashed by nature.

His expressionless faces, his dazed landscapes, his powerful use of colour, and his need to communicate unspeakable sorrows and the most human anguish, succeeded in transforming his works into universal messages, and Munch into one of the 19th century’s most iconic artists.

Shock, visions, and emotional violence were translated into powerful images – with a sometimes direct and sometimes suffocated emotionality – reiterated with the obsessive aim of reproducing as faithfully as possible the impression of scenes etched into memory.

Munch is one of the artists most able to interpret the feelings, passions, and anxieties of his soul, communicating them in a powerful and direct fashion.

Initially shaped by Norwegian naturalist Christian Krohg, who encouraged his painting career, in the 1880s he visited Paris where he absorbed the influences of Impressionism and Postimpressionism, which suggested to him a more intimate and dramatic use of colour, but above all a psychological approach.

In Berlin, he contributed to the formation of the Berlin Secession, and his first solo exhibition in Germany, which was deemed scandalous, was held in 1892: from that moment on, Munch was perceived as a subversive and accursed artist, alienated from society – an identity in part promoted by his literati friends. In the mid-1890s, he devoted his efforts to making prints and, thanks to his experimentation, became one of the most influential artists in this field.

His productivity and punishing exhibition schedule led him to commit himself voluntarily to clinics beginning in the late 1890s.

Painful romantic relationships, a traumatic accident, and alcoholism – a life lived “on the edge of a precipice” – led him to a psychological breakdown that he sought to recover from in a private clinic between 1908 and 1909.

After having lived much of his life abroad, the 45-year-old artist returned to Norway, establishing himself by the sea and painting landscapes. Here, he began to work on the giant murals in the University Aula of the University of Oslo. These canvasses, the largest of Expressionism in Europe, reflect his lively interest in invisible forces and the nature of the universe.

In 1914, he purchased a property in Ekely, Oslo, where, as a renowned international artist, he continued his experimental work until his death in 1944, just one month after his eightieth birthday.

THE EXHIBITION

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) had an exceptional work ethic that brought him to produce thousands of prints and paintings during his long life. Both a man of images and of words, he also composed endless notes, literary sketches, correspondence, and even a play. The desire to communicate his perceptions accompanies him throughout his life and is the beating heart of his practice as an artist. His works deal with images of birth, death, love, and existential questioning. He considered these themes to be universal. Many works portray psychological struggle: the instabilities of erotic love, the toll of physical and psychological illness, and the vacuum left by death. Others attempt to capture the invisible forces that Munch believed to animate and bind the universe.

This exhibition focuses on Munch’s inner fire, his commitment to crystalize and communicate his memories and sense perceptions. He explored the means to make his sensory and emotional experience visible by staging narrative scenes in flat areas of color and discordant perspectives. We can associate his works with a creative process that seeks to bring together what he observed, what he remembered, and how much he charged with emotion.

Munch’s early career coincided with radical changes in the study of perception, in which scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and artists debated the relationship between what the eye sees directly and how the contents of the mind affect sight. His lifelong interest in the unseen forces that shape experience conditioned the works that made him one of the most consequential artists of his time. In his exploration of unseen forces -- a precursor to 20th century Expressionism and even Futurism – he continues to speak to our own inner visions and contemporary concerns. In his works, Munch endeavoured to make the invisible, visible.

First section – Training the Eye

Munch believed that individual psychology, inner visions, and the conscious retrieval of memory shaped and supplanted direct perception: “I do not paint from nature – I take from it – or help myself from its bountiful platter. I do not paint what I see – but what I saw.” His early training in academic art quickly turned toward inventive techniques that expressed memory and emotion beyond what the eye can see. Briefly studying engineering and then academic drawing in 1880, he soon came under the influence of the politically radical painter and author Christian Krohg and a literary and artistic group – the Kristiania Bohéme -- that Munch later claimed to have “ripened” his ideas on the authority of inner experience over the material world.

Early trips to France underlay his forays into Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist, and Synthetist techniques. In the mid-1890s, he lived in Berlin where, in close association with writers, scientists, and social liberationists, he was part of a community that studied contemporary psychological theory and expressions of the unconscious. For example, the few years separating Munch’s portraits of his sister Laura between 1882 and 1900 testify to the artist’s journey from sight to insight.

Munch was remarkably attentive to sights, sounds, color, and even vibrations in the air. He was also acutely aware of the ways in which emotions filtered his experiences of the world, mirroring the research of Hermann von Helmholz and philosopher William James. In his writings, he repeatedly noted how his sight was affected his sensory experience, including sound or emotional states, resulting in such works as The Scream.

Second section – Hauntings

“Illness was a constant factor all through my childhood and youth. The tuberculosis bacteria turned my white handkerchief into its victorious blood-red banner. The members of my dear family died, one after another”.

Munch’s work on the motif The Sick Child in the mid-1880s initiated a lifelong outpouring of memories in painting and prose. He had experienced significant losses in his childhood: his mother died of tuberculosis just after Edvard turned five. His older sister Sophie, with whom he had a particular bond, succumbed to tuberculosis one month before Edvard turned 13. His father died while the artist was in France, and his brother Peter Andreas died, age 30, in the mid-1890s. The artist filtered his family’s grief into some of his most poignant motifs.

Sentimental representations of illness were popular in the Nordic countries. Munch’s images are, in contrast, laden with the agony of watching someone die and also of the imagined death struggle. His renderings of hallucinations, elongated shadows of bedside figures, and rivulets of paint that echo the dissipating bodies all suggest the world as experienced from the perspective of the patient.

Munch was explicit in his writings that memory was a critical device in his work. The act of recalling allowed him to dispense with unnecessary details and bring forth events from the past as iconic. These paintings, drawing, and prints are conscious exercises in haunting, most explicitly when Munch created scenography for Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts for a theatre in Berlin.

Third section – When Bodies Meet and Depart

In 1890, Munch wrote a poetic text that has since become understood as the “St. Cloud Manifesto” that guided his art:

“A strong naked arm – a tanned powerful neck – a young woman rests her head on the arching chest. She closes her eyes and listens with open and quivering lips to the words he whispers into her long, flowing hair. I would like to give it form as I now saw it, but in the blue haze. These two in that moment when they are not themselves, but only one of the thousands of sexual links tying one generation to another generation. People should understand the sanctity, the grandeur of it, and would take off their hats as if in church. I would make a number of such paintings. No longer would interiors, people who read and women who knit, be painted. There would be living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love..”

In an era of both public propriety and private promiscuity, Munch’s determination to make visible what he termed the grandeur of sexuality was pathbreaking and controversial. While some of his images are misogynist, and he often represented relations between men and women as a battle of the sexes, he also expressed empathy toward both men and women entrapped by seduction and undone by the dissolution of love.

In the mid-1890s, he began to organize his images of erotic desire, sexual awakening, and desolation in a series called “Love” that he developed over the next decades into “The Frieze of Life,” which he saw as symbolizing an essential human lifecycle.

Fourth section – Munch in Italy

An underappreciated aspect of Munch’s work is its debt to Italy. His first journey to Italy was in 1899 with his then lover Tulla Larsen. It began poorly: “He should have traveled to Paris,” Munch later wrote in the third person – “But he was too ill – perhaps Italy would help – So they traveled together to Florence – Sickness – Drink - Disaster – That was the trip to Florence.” After Larsen departed, however, Munch headed to Rome where his confrontation with the Italian tradition was profound. He wrote to

Tulla: “I am now between Florence and Milan. And it is truly with mixed feelings that …I leave one phase in Italy and a great new phase in the North.”

This new phase, in part inspired by the art of Raphael, included the elaboration of his “The Frieze of Life” into an architectural narrative display. His later monumental paintings likewise owed a debt to the Italian Renaissance: “I am thinking about the Sistine Chapel…I find the room to be the world’s most beautiful.” Munch returned to Italy in 1922 -- “more glorious than ever” -- including a day spent exploring Milan’s Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio.

Munch spent a month in Rome in 1927. On that visit, he made a pilgrimage to the Cimitero Acattolico to visit the grave of his uncle, Peter Andreas Munch, Norway’s most famous historian. P. A. Munch, who died in Rome in the year that Edvard was born, was such a distinguished scholar that he was among the first non-Catholics ever allowed to use the Vatican archives. Munch also again sought inspiration among Rome’s art treasures: “As I am working in large formats, it is important for me to view frescos by Michelangelo and Raphael,” he reported.

Fifth section – Invisible Universe

“The earth is a giant living atom,” a colleague remembered Munch as stating: “It has thoughts and a will, the clouds are its breath, the storms its heavy exhalations, the glowing lava its shimmering blood. Why shouldn’t the sun also have a will, in which it sends its wealth of light into space? Everything has life and a will and motion, rocks and crystals like the planets.”

For Munch, the earth was a conscious, breathing studio. Like many intellectuals of his day, Munch followed the ongoing debates about the relationships among science, technology, religion, and mysticism. He was attracted to the doctrine of Monism, a system of belief in which mind and matter, invisible forces and the material world, were understood to converge. One of the most influential theorists within this area was the German comparative anatomist Ernst Haeckel, Europe’s foremost proponent of Darwinism. Monism proposed a force that permeated the universe and animated evolutionary relations among living and inanimate matter.

Munch’s own cosmology was shaped by his idea that the physical environment and creature bodies act on one another, permitting invisible energies – solar radiation, electromagnetism, telepathy, cellular growth - interact with the visible world: “Today I heard a lecture on the radio about light waves and matter. The lecturer pointed out the latest conclusions, the drift of which was that light consisted of waves, and is therefore also matter. This – is - exactly what I wrote in my diary 20 or 30 years ago. I wrote that everything is in motion, and that the fire of life may be found even in a stone.”

Sixth section – Facing the Mirror (Self-Portrait)

Munch was as prolific a self-portraitist as were Rembrandt or Picasso. Self-portraiture offers a way for an artist to explore expression, posture, lighting, and other dimensions of the human subject using the most readily available and inexpensive of models. Self-portraits can also be arenas for the expression of artistic identity and self-invention, a dimension that Munch explored with exceptional theatricality.

Munch always cannily performed before his studio mirror. His mirror acted as a kind of staging device, reflecting his assumption of differing personae. His lithograph of 1895 offered the artist as a Symbolist specter, as though gazing out of a tombstone, his floating head framed by an inscription and a skeletal arm. In 1903, his naked body was embedded in the flames of Hell. He exhibited many of his self- images, interspersing them with his other motifs to communicate what he wished to disclose of his psychological state at any given moment. In turn, even if invented and fictional, his self-images provided a sense of personal authenticity to his other assembled works.

As Munch aged, he was merciless in recording the effects of time. The Night Wanderer (1923-24) pictures the artist peeking in from the side of the composition, an insomnia victim walking the floors of his home. In his late 70s, Munch staged himself planted unsteadily in Self-Portait. Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-1943), his hard working hands hanging inert by his sides. In this sense, his mirror was a kind of perceptual device, a partner in his acts of self-invention.

Seventh section – Munch’s legacy

Throughout his career, Munch was a great experimenter, able to intertwine numerous forms of expressions of creativity: from classical painting to cinema, from etching to photography, his exploration maintained an extraordinary consistency and a power of evocation that is still extremely contemporary.

The exhibition collects some of his masterpieces that allow his disturbing, restless but seductive imagery to be reread through precise compositional choices. These are landscapes that share his personal and innovative construction of space, resolved through the planning of an irregular perspective, often defined by an architectural element that projects our gaze decisively into the painting.

Perhaps this effect takes place with the balustrade in On the Veranda Stairs, with the road in House Wall in Moonlight, or with the fence in The Girls on the Bridge: such elements that invite us to enter into the scene and, with greater involvement, to take part in the emotion that pervades it. after having made a careful study of the great renaissance tradition during his travels in Italy, absorbed the explosive innovations of the post-impressionism of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, and interacting with the emerging generation of expressionists, munch was able to inaugurate a personal language in which to apply, with a controlled freedom, wholly new geometric rules in which colour, laid in broad and decisive washes, took on extraordinary power.

His exploration, in part yet to be explained to this very day, laid the foundation for the birth of the avant- gardes that, in the 20th century, would lead artists to seek increasingly radical solutions, often not appreciated by the public in the immediate term, but destined to define our imagery and become the best tools for recounting our deepest emotions.