Two events from the last decade demonstrate how Edvard Munch (1863-1944) remains relevant in widely varying contexts today. One is the $119.9 million price paid in 2012 for a pastel version of “The Scream” (1895), which made it briefly the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. The other is a proposal to use a version of “The Scream” to label a nuclear waste storage site, warning future generations — or visitors from other planets — of the toxic dangers lurking within.
Munch’s era, like our own, was filled with financial speculation, vast disparities in wealth, human displacement because of industrialization, and natural disasters. (Some art historians have linked the blood-red sky in “The Scream” to the 1883 eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia, which, although it happened more than a decade before the painting was made, emitted volcanic dust that produced spectacular sunsets around the world for months.)
It is Munch’s uncanny representation of humans in distress or extreme states that resonates today, however, and that is evident in the 26 etchings, lithographs and woodcuts in “Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print, Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York,” at the Princeton University Art Museum.
And while it seems like a small show, Munch — as demonstrated by the potency of “The Scream” and a handful of other works — was a master of evoking sensibility and expression with a few deft figures and lines. Like other artists associated with Symbolism in the late 19th century, he was more interested in mining the interior world of memory, anxiety, fear and loneliness than in recording changes in the outside world as the Impressionists did. A wall label includes a famous aphorism from his writings: “I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.”
Printmaking fueled him in this quest. Raised in the working-class tenements of Oslo — the city was called Kristiania at the time — Munch was trained on a scholarship in Paris, where he encountered the work of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Gauguin’s lithographs and woodcuts in particular inspired him, including the coarsely carved woodblocks Gauguin used for his book “Noa Noa,” which were left for safekeeping with a neighbor in whose apartment Munch would have seen them.
Prints were also more affordable than paintings and reached a wider audience. Munch had become responsible for supporting his family after his father died in 1889 — his parents and his sister eventually died of tuberculosis — so this was crucial. In 1893 Munch moved to Berlin, and a year later he began working with a master printmaker.
Some of the earliest works here allude to the tragic events of his biography, including “The Sick Child” (1894), a drypoint, and “Death in the Sickroom” (1896), a lithograph that uses solid black forms for the figures and sinuous lines to capture the dark mood of the room in which his sister Sophie died.
Other works attempt to capture emotions like loneliness or desire. “Two People. The Lonely Ones,” with two figures, a man and a woman, seen from behind — a common pose in Romantic portraits — went through multiple versions over the decades, and several are on view here. The work also has biographical links: In 1898 Munch became involved with Tulla Larsen, the daughter of a wealthy wine merchant who wanted to marry, but Munch suffered from what today might be called commitment issues.
“I have been given a unique role to play on this earth,” he argued in a letter quoted in a wall text, “by a life filled with sickness, ill-starred circumstances and my profession as an artist. It is a life that contains nothing even resembling happiness.” The couple parted in 1902.
“The Kiss” was another subject popular with Art Nouveau artists, and there are multiple versions of that here, with male and female figures entwined into one curving, organic mass. “Anxiety” (1896), a lithograph with undulating red lines hovering over a group of blank-faced figures, recalls the unsettling atmosphere and alienating psychology of “The Scream.”
It was the woodcut, however, one of the oldest printmaking methods, that particularly intrigued Munch. Emulating Gauguin but expanding on his work, Munch used larger blocks and native woods like spruce, oak and birch. He also weathered his woodblocks to create a textural grain; sometimes he cut them up to create puzzle-like compositions. “Angst” (1896) and the fantastically eerie “Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair” (1896) use the grain of the wood to enhance the linear emphasis of the works.
The latter work also shows the Symbolist proclivity, at times flagrantly misogynist, for depicting women as femmes fatales. You can also see this in works like “Vampire II” from 1895 to 1902, in which a faceless, predatory woman hovers over her helpless man, and “Ashes II” and “The Woman,” both from 1899, and which might, in other circumstances, be seen as celebratory images of bold, strident women.
One of Munch’s most famous female subjects was the “Madonna.” A beautiful lithograph and woodcut version on view here, made between 1895 and 1902, shows a dark, sexualized Madonna, seen from below. In the corner of the work is what looks like a fetus: the vestiges of what would have been, in earlier centuries, the Christ child seated happily on the Madonna’s knee.
Taking a traditional Christian subject and updating it in the age of Nietzsche and Freud — as well as the era of the gramophone, the typewriter and film — Munch achieved in his moment something that was shocking, but uncannily apropos.
In 1892, a solo exhibition of his works at the conservative Berlin Artists Association was shut down because of outrage over its scandalous nature. A decade later, though, Munch was a celebrated artist, championed by fellow artists for his modern sensibility. Clearly, despite the century that has passed, that sensibility, with its acute focus on human fragility, angst and uncertainty, endures today.