The Art Museum Gets Its Munch

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

I've always regretted that the Philadelphia Museum of Art's holdings of Symbolist Art come nowhere near the richness and quality of its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings. A significant step toward redressing this situation has been taken, and we now have a splendid Edvard Munch painting in our Art Museum’s permanent collection. The trapezoid-shaped painting is called Mermaidand was painted in Paris in 1896.

The time and place are not without some significance. The Norwegian-born Munch had left Berlin in 1892 to set up shop in Paris, a city that was somewhat more hospitable to artists of "advanced" tendencies. His fellow Scandinavian, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, was there, and was lionized as a leading light in the new drama of ideas rather than contrived situations. The Symbolist movement was at its high-water mark and battling Naturalism for artistic supremacy. Both Strindberg and Munch had started as more-or-less naturalistic artists. But just as Strindberg found that he had to delve into the worlds of dream, magic and ritual to find real dramatic truth, so Munch found that careful copying of the then-reigning Impressionist style did not allow him to come to grips with his deepest emotions. Also like Strindberg, Munch had a deeply ambivalent attitude toward women. This ambivalence is what Mermaid is all about.

A lazy first glance tells you that the painting is a tasteful bit of fin-de-siécle eroticism in which we see an attractive nude woman rising out of a moonlit sea. But the woman has a strange, almost furtive expression on her face, and if we allow our eyes to glide past "the naughty bits" and along her leg we note that her lithe body ends in the tail of a fish. Oh my! This certainly isn't Ariel. Munch's mermaid is both woo-bait and your worst nightmare. I don't think he would have wanted it any other way.

Mermaid is presented by the Art Museum as the centerpiece of a mini-Munch exhibition highlighting a group of loosely related works. There is a preparatory watercolor and examples of three other paintings with a mermaid theme. But none expresses the solidity, the monumental quality of the central work.

Perhaps because Mermaid was a commission work for a wealthy patron of the arts, Munch felt the need to modify his normal style. The usual Munch oil paintings of the period-- including the works in this show--look quite unreal. They are like fever-dreams magically transported onto canvases. Everything blurs and swirls, as in The Scream, and this characteristic represents the Art Nouveau quality of Munch's work.

But there is something more to Munch. Art Nouveau tends to be emotionally neutral. It's all about crafting a unique design, not expressing strong emotions. And as I already noted, Munch was a roiling cauldron of emotions desperate to discharge themselves. Munch's famous verbal description of The Scream which was published in the Symbolist journal La Revue Blanche to accompany a sketch of the painter, reveals much about his emotional condition at the time:

"Stopping, I leaned on the balustrade, almost dead from fatigue. Above the black-blue fjord hung clouds, red like blood and like tongues of flame. My friends continued on, and, alone, trembling with anguish, I became conscious of nature's grand, infinite scream."

Precisely because of this emotive aspect to his work, Munch (along with Van Gogh) became a tutelary deity to young German painters like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller and Max Pechstein.. They too wanted to express their dreams, fears and desires to the fullest. While most art movements are named by their enemies and their names begin as slurs, the Expressionists named themselves, and quite fittingly.

Probably the work that best sums up the way in which Munch linked the Art Nouveau/Symbolist Movements of the end of the 19th Century with the Expressionist Movement at the dawn of the 20th is the color lithograph Madonna created in the period 1895-96. The image suggests a dark-haired prostitute baring her body for our inspection. Her long black hair falls like a swirling shroud around her pale flesh. The body seems transparent and flame-like; the bands of color surrounding her head at the top of image suggest that everything we see is a mirage. The fact that the subject has her eyes closed— thus eliminating any possibility of contact between us— reinforces this notion.

The image of the Madonna is bordered by what may at first seem an abstract design, but upon closer inspection proves to be a stream of sperm cells circling the image. As a "topper," at the lower left corner a wizened fetus glances upward reproachfully. That Munch chose to call this image Madonna was in itself a provocation. The image of the whore itself would have been enough to cause a Symbolist outrage. The sperm cells and fetus are what make it an Expressionist outrage.