Experimental lithographs and woodcuts 1898-1899

When he left Paris early in the summer of 1897, Munch travelled home to Norway where he spent most of the subsequent years. He probably brought with him a small printing press which he could use himself to print lithographs and woodcuts, and in the next few years he created a number of lithographs and woodcuts of an extremely experimental nature. The unfinished and almost tactile handiwork of these prints gives them a quality all of their own, which the artist himself cannot have been blind to. Besides this he also printed some lithographs at Petersen & Waitz in Kristiania.

During 1898 he completed four very special lithographs: Woman with Urn, Burlesque Couple, Desperate Woman and Desire, which all have in common the fact that they use stones prepared and printed by Munch himself. These lithographs exist in a number of states - in fact each impression is unique. Coincidence appears to have played a major role in the execution, calling to mind August Strindberg's ideas on coincidence as a creative factor. Several of Munch's woodcuts at this time also bear the unmistakable signs of having been printed by the artist himself, and on these we find the same fondness for rough brownish paper, torn or cut in an almost random manner which emphasises the character of packaging paper.

At this time Munch also developed another technique for taking imprints from woodblocks, what in modern art literature is referred to as frottage and is considered to have originated with the Surrealists. Instead of inking the woodblock and printing it in a press, he laid a sheet of paper over the block and rubbed it with a piece of coloured crayon. Unlike ordinary printing, such rubbings do not appear as a mirror image, that is to say they render the woodblock the same way round as it was carved. The first time Munch used such a technique was probably in 1897, when he created the poster for an exhibition in Kristiania. Then he first made a frottage from the woodblock of Man's Head in Woman´s Hair, which was then transferred to a stone or plate and printed lithographically. Later he also created several pure frottages, sometimes reinforced by drawing or further work. In addition, we can see that in some later transfer lithographs he also used woodblocks as a base for the drawings, so that the grain of the wood produced an effect in the finished lithographs.

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