Edvard Munch - a life on paper

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'Almost all Munch’s most famous paintings make an appearance here, either in preliminary sketches or reprised versions in print'; Alexander Adams is impressed

Edvard Munch: Works on Paper edited by Magne Bruteig and Ute Kuhlemann Falck

Edvard Munch’s compelling work and dramatic life is written in full on 25,000 works on paper by him held at the Munch Museum, Oslo. For six months a selection of these sheets were displayed at the museum to mark the 150th anniversary of Munch’s birth. Fortunately for those who missed the exhibition, a catalogue is available. The English version is reviewed here.

Munch was a hoarder. Testimony and photographs record that his last home, in Ekely, outside Oslo, was strewn with uncounted sheets, books and paintings, covering horizontal surfaces, heaped on the floor and pinned to walls. When he died in 1944, all his art and possessions were left to the city of Oslo. As the authors note, one reason why much of this work has yet to be properly assessed by historians is because of the sheer profusion of the bequeathed items. The good news is that work is about to begin on the catalogue raisonné of Munch’s drawings.

Almost all Munch’s most famous paintings make an appearance here, either in preliminary sketches or reprised versions in print. Munch roughed out his concepts in sketchbooks, refining and elaborating until he was satisfied to translate the composition into oil paintings, prints or watercolours. Munch’s 150 sketchbooks did not leave his possession and like his other work were inherited by the city on his death.

In this catalogue, a series of chapters analyse Munch’s life and art through the prism of his work on paper, each focusing on a different aspect but broadly chronological in arrangement. At the conclusion of the book are short essays on paper making and the range of papers used by the artist, and on presentation and conservation issues specific to Munch’s oeuvre. The many large illustrations of exhibits are supplemented by archive photographs of exhibitions held in Munch’s lifetime. Oil paintings are reproduced for reference purposes.

Although the book is not intended as an introduction to Munch’s art as a whole, the span of pictorial motifs and biographical elements is actually wider in the drawings than it is in the oil paintings. For example, Munch scribbled caricatures of friends and drew his daily surroundings in a way that rarely if ever made it to oil paint. There are drawings of his lodgings, pets and family members. The meticulous drawing of a medicine bottle and a spoon remind us of how ill Munch was for much of his early life. Tuberculosis carried off his mother and sister at young ages and inspired some of Munch’s haunting images of suffering and grief. The Sick Girl (1896), showing Munch’s elder sister Sophie on her deathbed, trembles with febrile energy, in part achieved by loosely weaving together of delicate grainy crayon marks on the lithographic stone plate.

The catalogue covers the whole of Munch’s life: the early years of illness and genteel poverty in Christiania (now Oslo), his studies in Paris, then the wild years of decadence, fame and huge productivity in Berlin which culminated in hospitalization for depression and alcoholism in Copenhagen, in 1908–9. While in the asylum in Copenhagen, Munch sketched himself undergoing electroshock therapy, mordantly inscribing the drawing: ‘Professor Jacobson electrifies the famous painter Munch’. The treatment seemed to work and Munch returned to Norway to live through another three productive and secluded decades.

Munch was a brilliant and innovative printmaker, working in etching, drypoint, lithograph and – most powerfully – in woodcut. He used planks cut along the grain so that the texture of the wood comes through in the finished prints, giving them a primitive, earthy feel. Simple figures or portraits are surrounded (and, in part, also infused) by swirling and sweeping grain lines that suggest the power and influence of hidden natural forces.

Munch developed a technique of cutting out elements of a woodcut so that figures, sky, sea, forest and so forth could be inked in different colours and the jigsaw-like printing plate reassembled before being run through the press with paper. This permitted the production of boldly coloured prints without the need for the artist to hand-colour the sheets. (The book reproduces photographs of plates and test sheets to demonstrate the technique.) Munch was very aware of the commercial value and publicity potential of printmaking and frequently produced more than one printed version of successful image. No discussion of Munch is complete without an overview of his printmaking.

Not only will academics and fans of Munch find much new and exciting material Edvard Munch: Works on Paper, but art students would also benefit from reading this title. The richness and diversity of Munch’s graphic output is impressive, and receptive students are bound to find the techniques and imagery here rewarding. This title is highly recommended.

Edvard Munch: Works on Paper  edited by Magne Bruteig and Ute Kuhlemann Falck, is published by  Munch Museum/Mercatorfonds, distributed by Yale University Press, 2014. 311pp., 130 colour illus, £45.00 (hbk). ISBN 978 0 300 197 310