Munch's first graphic works

Munch made his first intaglio prints and lithographs late in the autumn of 1894 and continued to test the various techniques available fully during the winter of that year and the spring of 1895. It is probable that his decision to start working with graphics was fuelled by a desire to spread his art and a need to increase his income, and many of his first graphic works reproduce motifs used in his earlier paintings. During that first year he created graphic versions of many of his most famous motifs, such as the intaglio prints The Day After, Moonlight in St. Cloud, The Lonely Ones, The Voice and The Woman, and the lithographs Puberty, The Scream, Madonna and Vampire. The following year saw Jealousy, Anxiety, Death in the Sickroom, By the Death Bed and The Sick Child, and his first woodcuts, among which Moonlight, Melancholy and The Voice stand out.

The earliest intaglio prints were carried out using drypoint on copper, where lines are incised directly into the copper plate with a drypoint needle. The metal is forced up beside the line in what is known as a burr, a characteristic feature of drypoint prints. The ink is not only held in the line but also in the burr, so that the prints gain a slightly fuzzy line, which merges into a dense and soft black surface. This typical burr wears down very quickly during printing and the quality of the prints is noticeably reduced after very few runs through the press. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, it was discovered that the copper plate could be steel-faced by placing it in an electrolytic bath so that the entire plate became covered by a hard, steel film. This made it possible to print large editions and led to an increase in the use of drypoint as a technique. Munch also made use of this technique, and all the copper plates for his early drypoints have been steel-faced.

Soon afterwards, he also began to use different forms of etching and often combined several techniques. He practically never used traditional aquatint, instead obtaining similar effects using other processes. Open-bite is used in very many of his etchings, often in combination with stopping out. Corrections and additions were often made in drypoint, but etching in acid could also be repeated several times to attain greater variation in surface treatment.

The majority of his earliest intaglio prints can be found in a number of states. After the first drawing of the motif he took one or more proofs, continued to work on the plate and then took new proofs until he was satisfied and printed an edition. He worked in the same way with some of the lithographs and woodcuts. Changes might often be added at a later stage and each such change to the plate gives us a new state of the print. Placing a series of such state prints side by side enables us to reconstruct practically the entire production process. When we look at colour prints from several plates, the picture becomes more complicated, as the technique allows the plates to be combined in various ways, making it harder to talk about states in the normal sense of the word.

As a graphic artist Munch must have been mainIy self-taught and what he needed in terms of technical skill he probably learned from the printers. Naturally, he would have been aware of the graphic work of leading French and German artists and several of them have justifiably been suggested as sources for the development of both motifs and style in Munch's art. These include, for example, artists such as Max Klinger, Félicien Rops, Odilon Redon, Alfred Besnard, Eugene Carrière, Paul Gauguin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as old masters such as Rembrandt, Goya and Daumier. They were all part of the general cultural climate in which Munch lived and he naturally took advantage of what he could of this material.

Bearing in mind Munch's drawing skills and steady hand, it is hardly surprising that he was highly successful in using graphic techniques as a means of artistic expression. When he took up graphic work in 1894, he was far from a novice as an artist. One of Munch's most famous motifs of all, also among his graphic work, is The Sick Child. The drypoint from 1894 is a fairly accurate but mirror image version of the painting completed almost ten years earlier, carried out using drypoint and roulette in a full six states. In the first, the design still appears to be somewhat grey and tentative. In the first examples we know of this state he has drawn in a landscape in pencil under the picture itself. In later states this landscape has also been incised into the plate, only to be removed once more in the final state of the print. However, there are also a number of other changes which make it interesting to see how Munch worked through this motif, layer by layer, almost as intensely as he worked on the first version in oils.The figures are worked out with thicker and thicker lines and appear in increasingly greater contrast to the white bedclothes and the pale face of the sick child herself, which is almost indistinguishable from the white pillow.

It is assumed that Munch also created his first lithograph, Puberty, in Berlin in the late autumn of 1894, and we know that the portraits of Harry Graf Kessler were created in April - May 1895. In an unpublished diary, Graf Kessler describes an episode in Munch's room when he was working on the lithograph.The hotel manageress came in and confiscated the easel on which the stone was placed, presumably to cover an unpaid bill, and Munch, apparently unmoved, then attempted to continue work with the stone leaning against a chair. Graf Kessler continues that in order to make things easier for Munch he wanted to ask Joseph Sattler to teach him to create transfer lithographs, so that he could draw on paper instead of on stone.

This gives an interesting insight into Munch's method of working in these first lithographs. How and where he did learn of the opportunities offered by transfer lithography, however, remains unclear. While he did not create pure transfer lithographs until the following year in Paris, some of the lithographs from 1895 also show signs that the rough outline of the drawing itself may have been transferred. In The Scream, for example, the motif is printed the same way round as in the painting, which in itself indicates that the image on stone was preceded by a drawing. If we look at the print in more detail, we can also see that under the strong tusche lines lies a thinner outline in crayon, in which the motif ends several centimetres above the final design. In all likelihood Munch first drew the motif on paper with lithographic crayon, transferred this to stone, and then continued with tusche directly on the stone. A similar procedure may have been used for Madonna, which is also not a mirror image of the painting. In this work, besides lithographic crayon and tusche, Munch also makes great use of a pointed scraping tool to scratch fine lines into the stone.

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