Munch's Art example essay topic

1.0- "Edvard Munch created what may be called a 'spiritual climate'. Two, even three generations of artists have produced works under his influence and spiritual inspiration. He was the initiator of the style of art termed Expressionism, defined as 'expressiveness'". (J.P. Hodin) No painter previously achieved such a revolutionary distinct break from the visible world as Edvard Munch. Drawing from personal traumatic experiences, Munch portrayed incredibly powerful works that depicted psychological rigours of the everyday man; something that Edvard had a distinct experience of. (Hate Can tz) There never existed a painter with a greater desire for a lyrical emotional life: but his unhappy intellect never lets him forget the worm concealed in every bud, the grimacing skull beneath every face, the beast lurking behind every passion, nature's arbitrary whims in every painful sensation: and with dazed amazement, beckoned on by mocking insanity with outstretched arms, he walks through the inferno of this life as someone atavistically burdened with talent. (Reinhold Heller) 2.0- It is within the purpose of this essay to compare and contrast three publications relating to Munch's influence on Expressionism and therefore Modernism.

Moreover, analyzing how Edvard's technique and psychological situation throughout his life defined his works. The first of these publications 3.0- J. P Hodin's 'Edvard Munch' describes a tortured man who depicted the "condition of modern man, in a time which was not yet conscious of its own predicament". (J. P Hodin) It was this predicament that Munch proclaimed to be the content and meaning of his art. Munch saw art and its future as an "epoch that exhausts itself in experimenting with form without the appearance of any meaning". (J. P Hodin) Adverse to the doctrine of 'art for art's sake'; a doctrine that was substantiated to save art from "relegation to a role of utility within a mechanized society". (J. P Hodin) To this extent the doctrine could have been justified. But when the formula is taken to the outer-most limits in which the work of art is deprived of any form of meaning, then a reaction was inevitable".

Behind Expressionist art stand men who regard it as a sin against the spirit to produce anything by coldly rational means". (J. P Hodin) The Expressionist artist gravitates towards thinking and inspiration of an archetypal nature. That is, Munch "expresses a collective unconscious whose content and functions are of an 'archaic' nature". (J. P Hodin) This 'archaic' nature refers to the psychologically primitive mentality, that truly creative, primordial spiritual force that gave form to men's conception of life and of the world. Expressionism and therefore Munch's work was one born out of sombre and passion. An art "in which spiritual experience asserts itself against the tyranny of mathematical thought and technical progress, [a time of ravaged rubble and stagnant land], in fact against the dehumanization and mechanization of culture". (J. P Holdin) 'Expressionism' is a universal style born in times of extreme spiritual tension.

"Munch's art cannot be divorced from his world of ideas, and in this fact lies his importance for us today". (J. P Holdin) To depict these ideas Munch characterised certain techniques that allowed the proper portrayal of his 'spiritual climate'. When referring to reference 1. -The Lovers, 1896, it becomes evident that by means of exaggeration and distortions of line and colour; "a deliberate abandonment of the naturalism implicit in Impressionism in favour of a simplification which should carry far greater emotional impact". (J. P Hodin) Munch wrote: Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments... I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their apparent emptiness... By painting colours and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. (J. P Hodin) One of Munch's picture stands somewhat alone in alliance with Expressionism, and disturbing in it's emotional and psychological portrayal, The Scream of 1893.

Munch wrote of it: One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord - the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood-red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked". (J. P Holdin) The composition of shows an exaggerated perspective, the pier penetrates deep into the landscape, all the while being dominated by the wavy lines of the sea, sky and land.

In the foreground, a screaming figure embraces it's head in both hand in a state of terror, the mouth open wide, and body convulsed and emancipated. In the background two elongated figures on the pier walk forward in a slow and threatening manner. The face of the disturbed figure is depicted by yellow, the colour of bone, or a skull. The colour spectrum introduced in this works is omnipotent with the emotion and observer feels while viewing the painting. "The colours symbolism the psychic situation: strong reds and yellows in the sky, blues, yellows and greens in the landscape, the railing reflecting the sky.

The colours and the dynamics of the curved lines express in the features of the landscape the anxiety which is an inner state of mind". (J. P Holdin) Therefore, on summarization of J. P Holdin's 'Edvard Munch's', it's evident that his inspiration and aspiration of work are price dented by emotional disturbances and degrees of clarity. Upon knowing this, it become blatantly obvious why Munch set out to create this new form of art know as 'Expressionism'. For Munch, impressionism doesn't allow any development or expression of the human psyche, and therefore to Munch, loses it's purpose as art. "No more interiors should be painted, no people reading and women knitting. They should be living people who breathe, feel, suffer and love". (Munch, J. P Holdin) In contrast however, Reinhold Heller's Munch: The Scream, opposes the previous writings to somewhat a degree in the appraisal of Munch's paintings as trailblazing.

Initially, seemingly supporting previous works, Heller talks of art's lack of emotions and humanity; and how Munch influences the digression away from this. However, Heller then goes back on this idealism and admits that Munch's inspirations are not entirely new and inspiration lies deep in Romantic roots. Christian iconographic themes which had nourished Western European art for over 1,500 years had become as historical as had the faith, incapable of satisfying Munch's desire for contemporary content and expression. As the modern spiritual content, Munch then proclaimed that he would paint 'de '- that which is specifically human - with its sufferings and emotions, rather than paint external nature.

Putting his new, anti-naturalist aesthetic into words in 1891, he wrote: This way! This is the path to painting's tomorrow, to art's promised land! In these painting the painter depicts his deepest emotions, his soul, his sorrow and joys. They display his heart's blood...

He depicts the human being, not the object... These paintings are designed to move people intensely, first a few, then more and more, and finally everyone... And it is, after all, precisely this, and this alone, that gives art a deeper meaning. It is necessary to depict man, life, and not lifeless nature... It is true that a chair can be just as interesting as a man, but the chair must be seen by a man. In one way or another, he must have had an emotional reaction to it and the painter must cause the viewer to react in the same way.

He must not paint the chair, but rather that which a human being has felt about it. (Reinhold Heller) However, it is at this point that Heller digresses to a different path. Blatantly outline Munch's seemingly 'pioneering foresight' as being slightly pretentious and self-indulgent. "That subjective experience, the personal emotions of the artist, should determine the content and form of the painting was hardly a goal unknown in earlier art". (Heller) Heller then goes into detail how Socrates already sought to persuade artists to depict the states of the soul rather than just external forms. (Heller) Even more emphatic however was Ludwig Tieck, a creature born out of German Romanticism.

And extract from Franz Sternbald's Travels in 1798: You cannot believe how much I wish to paint something which expresses totally the state of my soul and which would arose the same emotions in others... Every viewer would have to wish himself into the painting and forget his actions and plans, his education and political ideologies for a short time, and perhaps he would then feel the same way as I do now as I write and think about this. Similar aphorisms are echoed in the writings of painter Caspar David Friedrich: The painter should depict not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees inside himself... Close your physical eyes so that you see your picture first with your spiritual eye. Then bring forth what you saw inside you so that it works on others from the exterior to their spirit. (Heller) This is a Romantic viewpoint, that the spiritual state of the painter seeks and outlet of expression through which to communicate itself to others.

(Heller) German Romantics, discovered this within themselves, in introspection, in their own emotions, and visually interpreted it through landscape, creating mood painting demanding a sympathetic reaction within the viewer. "If Munich can claim direct descent from Romanticism, it is through a revival of Romanticism". (Heller) This can be seen in Munch's Evening, index. 3.

The content and format of Evening, with tis vaguely melancholy mood, was essentially a resurrection of Romantic formulae; the limitations of Naturalism were overcome by a reversion to pre naturalist.