Edvard Munch was never a part of the establishment of Norwegian painters of his own time, and beyond his youth he had very few close friends within his own professional group. He did, however, establish a multitude of mutually inspiring contacts with artists from other professions, especially within literature.
Munch himself had literary ambitions and left behind a large amount of notes and draft manuscripts but published next to nothing. He did, however, achieve a place for himself in theatrical history with his atmospheric sketches for Max Reinhardt's staging of Ibsens Ghosts at Reinhardt's Kammerspieletheater in Berlin in the autumn of 1906.
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Death
in the Sickroom, 1893
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The ageing Henrik Ibsen had recently re-emigrated to Norway after more than 20 years of "exile" in Germany, when the young, controversial "anarchist" Edvard Munch in 1892 inaugurated his own "exile" with his so-called "scandal exhibition" in Berlin, which instantly gained him notoriety in Germany. The exhibition which had first been shown in Kristiania (Oslo), was a summing up of all that Munch had worked on after he had embarked on his artistic career at the age of 18, and it comprised works reflecting the whole range of current art trends; from naturalism through impressionism to symbolism and synthetism. The same artistic development, from naturalism to symbolism, had also been reflected in Ibsen's works of the same period, from a fatalistic, "anarchistic" naturalism in Ghosts through a sort of purification-mysticism in Rosmersholm and to pure symbolism in The Lady from the Sea.
The ceremonious opening of the exhibition culminated in strong indignation when the public were confronted with Munch's pictures, and the management of the Art Society in Berlin, who had solemnly invited Munch to show his exhibition there, demanded its immediate closure. Ibsen's Ghosts had received a similar hostility when it was refused by all the permanent stages in Europe, and was referred to independent theatre companies. Munch may be said to have followed Ibsen's pattern when he subsequently sent his exhibition on a tour to smaller exhibition venues in several German cities, and after that also to Copenhagen. The public attended in large numbers. They happily paid expensive admission fees in order to shudder face to face with an accepted scandal. This proved good for business. According to contract, Munch received the maximum part of the admission fees, which would suggest that he was expecting sensation rather than actual sale.
As a part of this tour Munch reopened the Berlin exhibition a couple of months after it had closed down. A photograph from the gallery reveals that Munch has added a portrait of another important contemporary dramatist, August Strindberg, who at this time became Munch's close friend. The wealthy German translator of Ibsen's works, Julius Elias, acquired a Munch painting and asked Munch to give his respects to Ibsen back in Norway. Munch took the note to Ibsen's home in Arbiens gate in Kristiania and Ibsen in return honoured Munch by approaching him at the Grand Café and exchanging a few ordinary, polite phrases with him.
There is every reason to believe that Munch attended the very first premiere in Norway of Ghosts, performed by the Swede August Lindberg's private touring company at Møllergaten Theatre in Kristiania in October 1883, a performance characterised by "the quiet, muted speech, the altogether natural tone of conversation", and by a non-existing division between stage and audience. In any case Munch at the same time painted a portrait of the musician Hjalmar Borgström, "painted as a pale, green and thin Oswald". A photograph of Lindberg, who himself played Oswald, has been preserved, in which he sits hunched up in the same posture as in the portrait of Borgström "as Oswald". Munch thus painted the Oswald character in a friend's portrait long before he himself formulated the theatrical character in his art as his own alter ego. Similar to the painter Oswald, Munch too felt consumed by heredity, in Munch's case the disposition to lunacy (on his father's side) and to tuberculosis (on his mother's side). In connection with "The Sick Child", painted in memory of his dying sister, Munch writes, probably with a conscious reference to Oswald: "In the same chair in which I painted the sick person, I too have sat, and so have all my loved ones from my mother onwards, and longed for the sun." And, about the cycle of motifs from love, anxiety and death that was later called the Frieze of Life and which Munch painted mainly with reference to the literary environment in Berlin, Munch commented: "The Frieze of Life is really about heredity as a curse ... a sort of Oswald atmosphere."
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Stage
set design for Ghosts, 1906
Oswald, Mrs. Alving, Pastor Manders and Engstrand (Act II, last scene) |
About a year after the production of Ghosts at the Møllergaten Theatre, Munch wrote to a friend about the Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania that year: "No picture has left an impression equal to a few pages from an Ibsen drama." The parallel between his own art and Ibsen's work, however, was expressed in the advance reviews of the scandal exhibition in Berlin, which in the press was referred to as "the Munch Case", and where it was said that Munch's pictures represented "Ibsenian moods".
The painting "Inheritance", by Munch also called "The Syphilitic Child" and originally conceived at a hospital in Paris, shows a naked, small child with a syphilitic rash, lying on its mother's lap. In this work, Munch finally finds a motif that expresses his own Oswald fate, his anxiety that his own impaired, hyper-sensitive nerves were inherited from his grandfather, the archdeacon, whom Munch thought had died from syphilis, a result of a trip to Copenhagen.
The evening when Munch opened his first purely symbolistic exhibition at a venue on Unter den Linden in Berlin on 19 December 1893, with emphasis on the so-called Frieze of Life motifs, partly arranged in a series, coincided with the premiere at the nearby Lessing Theatre of August Strindberg's Playing with Fire, an erotic triangle drama. Both "performances" were aimed at the same audience. Munch's central painting, "Death in the Sickroom", characterised by a high perspective which gives the illusion that the scene is enacted on a sloping stage floor, was conspicuously mounted as an introduction to the above mentioned exhibition. It was immediately connected with modern theatre, above all with the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolistic dramaturgy. In both Munch's picture and in Maeterlinck's L'intruse, death is represented symbolically. It is the survivors' reaction to death that is portrayed, not the dying person. In the wake of the exhibition, Anna Mohr, the Danish wife of the German painter Walter Leistikow, asked Munch to illustrate her Danish translation of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas and Mélisande. The symbolism of hair is central in this play; with her long hair, the woman ties the man to herself. This is completely analogous to Munch's hair symbolism. An example is the painting "Love and Pain", later called "Vampire" (which was later pictured in the catalogue), in which the woman's long red hair envelopes the man. This may well have given Anna Mohr direct associations to Maeterlinck's hair symbolism in Pélleas and Mélisande, and she may therefore have found it natural to approach Munch about illustrating her translation.
A year later, in the late winter of 1894, Munch exhibited his works in Stockholm. The current sceptical attitude to Munch's powerful artistic expression and modern motifs was here partly drowned by several enthusiastic critics. A few days after the opening, the established French theatre manager Lugné-Poë premiered Ibsen's Rosmersholm as part of a Scandinavian tour, during which he also staged Maeterlinck's L'intruse and Pélleas and Mélisande. Munch was invited to a social event together with Prince Eugen, Lugné-Poë and the Ibsen translator Graf Prozor. However, we have reason to believe that a visit by the theatre troupe to Munch's exhibition was the reason for the wish to attach Munch to the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. The slowly lingering, elegant and confident style with which Lugné-Poë rendered Ibsen's works symbolistically had previously irritated Ibsen. The acting style and the décor - which were inspired by lingering performances by the symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck's plays acted against scenery and with costumes in the fashion of the important symbolist painter Maurice Denis' anaemic paintings - now required revitalisation. Munch's explosive paintings, both in form and feeling, must have given the theatre troupe food for thought. From now on, Munch was in any case wanted in Paris as a co-worker at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre to create an authentic Norwegian revitalisation of its productions of Ibsen's works. A first approach came from the above mentioned Graf Prozor with a request to illustrate his French translation of the play The Balcony by Munch's friend, the writer Gunnar Heiberg, one of the main works of the period, about how a woman changes her nature in her relationships with three different men. In the catalogue for the Stockholm exhibition Munch had had printed, as a caption to the motif "Sphinx. Woman in Three Stages", a quote directly from Heiberg's The Balcony: "All the others are one, you are a thousand." However, before Munch went to Paris in 1896, he organised a larger exhibition at Blomqvist in Kristiania; his first exhibition in Norway after the "scandal exhibition" of 1892. The established French writer Thadée Natanson, who had translated Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, and who in his literary journal La Revue Blanche supported Lugné-Poë's theatre, reported from Munch's exhibition at the same time as the journal covered the premiere of a new play by Gunnar Heiberg. The fact that Ibsen attended Munch's exhibition, and was shown around by an enthusiastic Munch who explained every motif to him in detail, was also properly reported in the journal. Munch later claimed that the painting "Sphinx. Woman in Three Stages" had inspired Ibsen to his final drama When We Dead Awaken. One may ask, however, whether Munch as well as Heiberg had been inspired to their representation of the changing stages of woman by the book Women in Ibsen's Dramas written by Friedrich Nietzsche's girlfriend Andreas Lou Salomé, translated into Norwegian by Hulda Garborg and with a foreword by Munch's friend Arne Garborg, in which he claimed that all Ibsen's female characters belonged together as in a cycle, and as a whole examined the nature of woman.
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Playbill
for Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, Peer Gynt, 1896
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In Paris Munch was commissioned to contribute to decorations and the playbill for the production of Peer Gynt at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris in 1896, and subsequently to the playbill for John Gabriel Borkman, which was performed the following year. Munch must also have contributed, in some capacity or other, to the Peer Gynt decorations, which coincidentally were painted by a relative of his, the popular painter Fritz Thaulow who had settled in Paris. In any case, the press created the impression that the two Norwegian artists collaborated. It cannot be ruled out that Munch also may have contributed to the stage paintings for John Gabriel Borkman, which were made by the Norwegian theatre painter Jens Wang. However, Munch's possible contributions beyond the playbills cannot be documented. Munch's interest in the theatre as such is, however, reflected in contemporary, loose plans for a production of I.P. Jacobsen's Nils Lyhne with music by Munch's friend, the British composer Frederick Delius and with decorations by Edvard Munch.