In the diaries, which he is to write later in his life
Edvard Munch often refers to himself in the third person
using the names "Brandt", "Nanssen"
or "Karlemann".
You can meet me after dinner.
Consumption is widespread in Kristiania nowadays
especially amongst the poor
and in crowded areas.
How long are your working hours?
From six to six with an hour's break for lunch.
- How much do you earn? - Fifteen crowns a week.
The year 1884.
Kristiania, capital city of Norway
with beerhalls, cafés, several Tivoli music halls
but with no opera, no ballet and no academy of art.
Bless us, O Lord
and these Thy gifts
which of Thy bounty
we are about to receive. Amen.
Of Kristiania's 135,000 inhabitants
the ruling strata is the middle-class, the borgerskap
conservative by politics, Protestant by religion.
The Karl Johan Gate
principle thoroughfare in a city whose Germanic buildings
reflect the origins of its main architects.
Here, in the summer, weather permitting
the Kristiania middle-class gather for the daily promenade.
I work in a factory too. I have to be up before five
to make breakfast for my husband and children.
The promenade upon the Karl Johan begins around two in the afternoon.
Music is played by a military band.
The social system supported by the Kristiania middle-class exists
with a national budget of 41.6 million Kroner
under a criminal code, which dates from the 1840s.
It has no sickness benefit, no old age insurance
state-legalised prostitution organised specifically for the middle-class
and still no reform against the labour of children in factories.
The promenade upon the Karl Johan lasts approximately for one hour.
Upon its conclusion the men retire home or to the beer-halls.
The women retire home.
Many of the poor children in this city
work in factories, craft shops and domestic service.
The working hours for these children in this year 1884
are as long as the maximum allowed under Norwegian law
for people on penal servitude and hard labour
and over 1/3rd of the industrial labour force in this capital city
is made up of boys and girls.
- Do the children work? - Yes, they're at the factory too.
Eleven hours a day.
- Help yourself. - I'm too tired.
The death of Laura Cathrine Bjølstad, mother of Edvard Munch
occurred in 1868, following a pulmonary haemorrhage.
Sophie has asked me
to write down my last will for her.
I've called my testament My Exhortations.
"My dear children. I am so afraid that in heaven
"I shall miss you who are so dear to my heart here on earth.
"But, trusting in the Lord, I shall beg for your souls
"as long as He grants me life."
In 1845, Edvard Munch's grandfather became insane
from a disease of the spinal cord.
Father walked to and fro across the floor.
Then he sat down beside Mother on the sofa.
They whispered to each other and leaned against each other.
Karlemann looked at them
and wondered why tears ran down their cheeks.
Mamma's full name
was Laura Cathrine Munch.
Mamma was very weak.
She died a year after I was born.
Isn't it nice to be
together on an evening like this?
"Death and the kingdom of death were cast in the fiery sea.
"This is another death. If not written in The Book of Life..."
The Munch family, following the medical practice of the father
have moved from one crowded house to another
in the poorer districts of Kristiania.
How long have you had it?
Three weeks.
- Is your throat sore? - Yes, a little.
Open wide and I'll have a look.
The first symptoms are fatigue and poor appetite,
an evening temperature and a hint of a cold.
When the disease develops, one's temperature rises
and the cold grows worse.
One begins to sweat at night.
Haemorrhage results in more than 50% of the cases.
Edvard Munch began painting in 1879.
During the past four to five years
he has created about one dozen canvases,
mostly views of the country near his home
and portraits of his family.
What happens to those who believe in God
if they give way to masturbation?
- The unfortunate wretches go mad. - This applies to everyone.
We all have a sexual instinct. Everyone masturbates to some degree.
- Women too? - Women too.
Peter Andreas Munch, studying to be a doctor
and Inger Munch, younger sister of Edvard.
What do you do out so late every night, Edvard?
You weren't home until the small hours last night.
So you've been spying on me?
I hear when you come home. I also know by the smell.
At this time in Kristiania
a small core of radical writers, artists and students
are gathering to protest the existing order.
Their spokesman, Hans Jæger, writer and anarchist
who urges his followers to overthrow bourgeois society with its moral code
and replace it with a decentralised structure
based entirely upon the human capacity for love and feeling.
All evil can be traced to Christianity.
Christianity suppresses man's vital desires.
What is a "respectable human being"?
One who is not out at night drinking with people like that.
Be quiet, so that I may speak with Edvard.
Have you told your parents you don't believe in God?
I don't want to say I don't.
Why not? Can't you follow your free will?
When Edvard Munch tells Jæger of his repeated quarrels with his father
Jæger tells him to take a pistol, go home
and shoot him dead.
Are you out drinking?
- Drinking? A glass of beer? - You smell of spirits, too.
That dreadful Jæger you mix with...
he's the Antichrist incarnate.
Jæger's group
referred to by the Kristiania middle-class as the Boheme
and by Georg Brandes as "that wild gypsy bunch"
discuss late into the nights nihilism, anarchy
the works of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx
the role of Art, the purpose of existence
and free love.
Nearly all the group are themselves from the middle-class.
Many, in protest, are women.
If there's no evil outside Christianity...
Of course there's evil but it comes from moral concepts.
Today's society would be happier if people
were allowed to develop their lusts and desires.
- I understand you. - Do you? You don't seem to.
You never do what I want. You follow your own course.
You don't understand me!
Much better than you think.
No, you don't.
We never seem to understand each other in this house!
In many of Munch's family studies
the faces are turned to the side.
Human contact with the eyes is avoided.
I'll never be done with you, since you never do what I want.
- I'm tired of this! - Now you be quiet!
The children missed school a lot because of illness
and I tried to study with them at home.
"Illness, insanity and death
"were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle
"and accompanied me all my life."
We can sit by the fire until the water gets hot
before you go to bed.
My sister Sophie
also died from tuberculosis.
She was 15 years of age.
"And I saw the dead stand before the throne
"and books were opened. The Book of Life was opened
"and the dead were judged in accordance with their deeds
"and the sea gave up its dead..."
My sister Laura was very talented.
She learned languages and mathematics effortlessly.
She got honours in Latin.
But she was born with a difficult and nervous disposition
so she could never
make use of her education.
It's so dreary at home! What did you do when you were young?
That doesn't concern you. At any rate I wasn't out and about.
Munch is to say later of his father:
"When anxiety did not possess him...
"he would joke and play with us like a child.
"When he punished us, he could be almost insane in his violence."
You get no inspiration from those people. And that woman...
It would've turned out better if I hadn't been scolded at home.
Edvard, I want to talk to you.
Your aunt said that a plate was broken.
Was it Peter Andreas?
- No, it was Laura. - No, it was Edvard.
The Bible says that you're punished! Onan was punished.
It also says that man
must replenish the earth.
One doesn't do that by masturbating!
That was nice and warm, wasn't it?
Now we'll wash our ears.
Two brothers and three sisters
watching each other grow into puberty
tended over by their aunt Karen
who, remaining unmarried, has devoted her life
to raising the children of her dead sister.
Half of the adults in this country are women.
They are also citizens but they are placed under guardianship
and are tyrannised by men and by society
emotionally, legally and economically.
I must make sure that there aren't too many bills at once.
In the workplaces where we're admitted, industries and schools,
we get one-third of the wages men get for the same work.
Using his reflection in a mirror
4 years ago Edvard Munch painted the first of his self-portraits.
"These self-trials from the difficult years."
What sort of work do they do?
They work at putting together matchboxes.
Their fingers are burned by the phosphorus.
Many of Norway's older painters have now returned from Europe.
Some have set up informal academies
such as Christian Krohg, age 32
whose own canvases, showing a direct concern for life
both in his own middle-class milieu and in the poorer class
have already pioneered "naturalism" in Norwegian art.
How much do they earn?
One crown a day.
How old are the children?
The oldest is 14. The youngest girl is 12.
The most important thing in art
is its own means, like colour.
It doesn't matter what you paint. You can paint horse dung.
- Then you paint for yourself? - The colour must be a joy to see.
Fritz Thaulow, leading Naturalist painter,
whose work reflects the opposing Norwegian school of art.
Such painters as Thaulow, Gerhard Munthe and Christian Skredsvig
Hans Heyerdahl, Erik Werenskiold and Harriet Backer
tend to express a feeling for the countryside and for people
but often from a less political and more personal viewpoint.
Who wants to look at horse dung?
The paint can be an aesthetic pleasure for you.
But the public need not regard it as an aesthetic pleasure.
He must concentrate on art!
People must undergo an experience looking at art.
But which people? The bourgeoisie.
They can afford
to buy works of art.
But what about those who queue for food?
For Edvard Munch the artistic problem lies deeper:
somehow to express the tension growing in himself and in his family.
"To Norway, giants' native land Let's drink this toast of honour"
In answer to the 10 commandments of Christianity
the Boheme, seen here singing a patriotic song
has published nine of its own.
Amongst these, the requirements
to never borrow less than 5 krone
to never wear celluloid cuffs
to never fail to make a scandal in the Kristiania theatre
to never regret
to sever all family bonds
and to take one's own life.
There has been a lot of illness
and death in our family.
Mamma died of tuberculosis when she was 30 years old
and Granny died of the same disease when she was 36.
I have a dream of founding a school for young women
who are morally confined.
Just look at the bourgeoisie
and all the middle-class girls that suffer from anaemia.
It's a good cause. I mean... founding a school for them
and teaching them to develop their feeling for love.
They can become capable of feeling.
The Christian names of the woman sitting to the right of Edvard Munch
are Andrea Fredrikke Emilie.
She is nicknamed "Millie".
Her age is 24.
For 3 years she has been married to a Kristiania city doctor
who is 9 years her senior in age.
She has no children.
All the virtuous little misses
will trip down the Karl Johan.
Jæger's vision is to set up a special school
for the "prim young misses" of middle-class Kristiania
educate them into proud women
who might walk freely down the Karl Johan
with all the world knowing that they love and have lovers.
They would write Boheme literature, open and frank
about their personal experiences.
Despite the somewhat bleaker reality of the Karl Johan,
Hans Jæger is also planning to write a highly personal account
of his own love life
with a frankness hitherto unknown in Norwegian literature.
He urges Edvard Munch to express himself in his work
with the same total frankness.
His father walked back and forth. He kept his hands clasped.
Hans Jæger is himself currently and publicly
having an affair with a married woman
Oda Lassen, age 24
a painter, whose husband is a wood and ice-merchant
8 years her senior.
I consider marriage
to be based on something which is completely impossible for me.
One is obliged to love another human being all one's life.
It seems utterly absurd. No one can order me
to love someone I have grown to hate.
What do you think of the Bohemians' conduct?
One might characterise their conduct as follows:
I consider it to be extremely unprepossessing
and a distinct danger for certain easily influenced souls.
I'm not talking about prostitutes but human beings who can love.
The only thing they seem capable of is so-called free love.
But rabbits are capable of that too.
"I love you, love you. Take me, kiss me, hold me and then
"embrace me, hug me so that I never breathe again.
"Your kiss is so fiery tonight.
"Fever takes you in command.
"Your tears run slowly down and burn into my hand."
Sigurd Bødtker, student and poet.
"Do you think that I've tired of you?
"Oh no! Smile happily as you did before.
"Stay with me tonight.
"Let my arm curl close about your waist."
How were sexual matters
dealt with in your home?
They weren't dealt with at all.
Everything was kept secret around me.
I understood nothing until it was too late.
Hans Jæger has told Munch that the human function of sex
is the most important single process known to man.
It is a source of pleasure, a wave of sweetness and warmth
through which man is elevated and made less lonely.
In her testament, Mamma asked us to be good
and to love Jesus.
I try to obey my lusts.
We have only one life and
we must develop our ability to feel and to love.
The final passage of Jæger's book details the burial of its hero:
"Then, they have all vanished and Jarman lies alone again
"there in the desolate cemetery and rots under his cover of flowers."
Sophie, shall we sing a Christmas carol?
"And suddenly something opened
"and we could see far, far into heaven
"and saw angels float, quietly smiling."
Four of Granny's eight children died before they were 16.
The Kristiania Bohemians say, "Thou shalt
take thine own life." What are your views on that?
I think it is wrong.
We don't have a right to throw away the lives God has given us.
They should be used for Him and our lives do have a meaning.
Tell us about his work.
Edvard Munch is a talented young painter.
But he's more interested
in painting light and shadow than social conditions.
In 1884 Edvard Munch paints this study of a servant girl
partly dressed, seated on the edge of a rumpled bed.
The sunlight dissolves the colours and contours.
There is a sense of softness
what Munch is to call later
his "nervous dissolving treatment of colour."
What sort of a person is he?
Very reticent, almost aristocratically so
which creates a distance to the other members of the group.
Amongst the colleagues of Edvard Munch
are Carl Nordberg
Andreas Singdahlsen
Halfdan Strain
and Thorvald Torgersen.
And Jørgen Sørensen
crippled since the age of seven
who is to die in his early 30's.
We must take part in
what is happening around us
and, what with poverty and need and children who have to work,
we must join forces with the people
not with the bourgeoisie.
Painters mustn't be led astray by new ideas...
My Lord!
...but sacrifice themselves for their painting.
Painting?
Yes, but his painting emerges from his own person.
He is the one who paints.
So art must express the subjective view
of the artist on reality.
In 1884, Edvard Munch begins work on a canvas of his younger sister
a portrait that illuminates her face and her hands.
The remainder of her body is shrouded in darkness.
There is no movement save for the tension
in the slight raising of the left hand.
Edvard, my brother,
almost died too from the same disease.
Lord God, I beg you...
The near-death of 13 year-old Edvard Munch
from a pulmonary haemorrhage
took place on Christmas Day, 1875.
Has all the suffering
in your family affected your faith?
I don't think it's for me to interfere in God's will.
He loves us and we must be grateful.
"Our Father who art in heaven
"Hallowed be Thy name Thy kingdom come
"Thy will be done on earth As it is in heaven."
"A strange man, dressed all in black
"stood at the foot of the bed and prayed.
"The air was heavy and black."
Munch's family is puritan.
Everyone who's seen his father knows that.
When he's with us
he has to go home for family evening prayer!
"Lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil
"For Thine is the kingdom The power and the glory
"For ever.
"Amen."
- Have you met his family? - I've not seen him pray either.
He sits there like a monk!
It was distressing for the older children
to see so much illness and death.
Are you sick?
"If anyone worships the beast's image
"and receives a mark on his forehead or hand
"he shall drink the wine of God's wrath
"poured unmixed into the cup of his anger
"and he shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels."
To be free on Sundays I have to work 17 to 18 hours the other days.
It's hard work.
Some of my friends, after working hours,
make so little that they often take to the streets.
The prostitutes of Kristiania
many of them from the district known as "Vika"
are legalised into a public institution
under the control of the police health authorities.
Look at prostitution in Kristiania today.
According to Christian morals there is no prostitution today.
It's typical that prostitution is controlled by the police.
But you're for making people live on prostitution.
No. In my society there is no room for prostitution.
There are 300 police officers in the city of Kristiania.
Amongst their principal duties, the control of venereal disease.
It's the bourgeoisie who gain from prostitution.
Yet bourgeois morals do not allow it to exist:
"Thou shalt not commit adultery."
What are your views on marriage?
In my opinion
marriage is an incalculably important and necessary institution
which undoubtedly forms the foundation
of our social and cultural structure.
Without marriage, rootless and chaotic conditions would arise
which in turn, I fear,
might easily lead to anarchy.
In brief, if we want to maintain peace and order,
it is essential to support and expand our institutions.
The way society is today, if one marries and has a wife,
she is just as prostituted as "the girls from Viken".
Once every week each prostitute must report to the police for inspection.
Sit there.
The year 1884.
An American inventor called Maxim develops the machine gun
and the United States receives Pearl Harbor
as a Pacific naval base.
Those who are prostituted are excluded from society
by the same people...
Lean back.
...who've put them in that situation.
That's the bourgeoisie's love of humanity.
A little wider. Raise your feet higher.
- Name and address. - Line Pedersen.
When I ask for your name, I want your surname first.
- Pedersen. - Name...
Pedersen.
Because of my illness, I'm grateful for the girls in Viken
but I don't use them any more than Mr Average uses his wife.
To me marriage is legal prostitution.
You can go now.
I assume the present assembly
is well aware of who it is
that uses prostitutes: the bourgeoisie and the police.
Once, when Grandfather came home from a business trip,
he found Granny behind a screen together with
three dead children.
When Edvard Munch first shows his completed painting, Inger in Black
the conservative press in Kristiania refer to...
"his almost frighteningly ugly portrait
"of a lady in black"
thus beginning a critical assault on his work
that is to last for at least 15 years.
In May 1885, Edvard Munch visits Paris.
For the first time in his life, he comes
face to face with full-size classical art.
He sees Velasquez and Rembrandt
and Manet.
Three weeks later, Munch returns to Norway
and shortly afterwards takes a boat with his family
down the Kristiania fjord to the little village of Bone.
Hello.
You live quite close to here? Then we're neighbours.
- Will you visit me one day? - I'd like to.
Some ladies are visiting today. Perhaps tomorrow?
In his diaries, Edvard Munch refers to this woman
as "Mrs Heiberg".
It is not her real name.
- Aren't you hungry? - Yes, I am hungry.
Beautiful landscape here.
It's so blue.
The year 1885.
General Gordon dies at Khartoum
Serbia invades Bulgaria
the British annex Bechuanaland
Karl Marx writes volume two of Das Kapital
and the future General Patton and D. H. Lawrence are born.
All the things he'd wanted to say! He felt awkward and afraid.
They walked on in silence. His cheeks burned.
Later in his life, Edvard Munch is to express a deep disillusionment
that all his father could do, as a doctor
for his dying mother and his dying sister and for himself
was to put his hands together and pray.
She spent time in bed
coughing into a handkerchief.
Did blood come this time too?
- I kissed you. Are you angry? - No.
Kissed your neck...
If you're angry, you can beat me.
I'm not angry.
Perhaps you'll let me kiss your mouth?
I'm in a fortunate position, married with no children.
One is free when one is married and has no children.
But what about your husband?
He's nice. He lets me do as I please.
- Is he as nice as that? - He's awfully nice.
I probably hurt him but I can't help it. I have to.
Stand still like that. Let me see you.
How picturesque you are in this light.
I'm so restless at night. I can't sleep.
I have such dreadful dreams.
I sleepwalk. I have such a longing to come to you.
I do so like the dark. I can't stand the light.
It should be like tonight. So mysterious.
I could do the most awful things in the dark. Anything.
Upon his return to Kristiania
Edvard Munch pays his first social call
on the home of Mrs Heiberg.
He looked at the worn steps.
He remembered all he had heard about her,
all the lovers who had passed here and quarrelled with her husband.
He looked well, he thought.
It was so heavy and dark and subdued.
He'd heard she usually lay on the couch all morning.
The light in here was favourable.
Have you seen how the hair grows out of his ears?
Now he felt shy.
He could find nothing to say.
When they were near he felt that she waited for him
to throw his arms about her.
We got these last spring. They were rather expensive.
But he thought it was... he felt cold.
It was the same shyness.
He longed to be out in the fresh air.
This is where my husband works. He's very orderly.
Daddy, what I'm spitting up is so dark.
Everything has its place.
I made that for him.
- Shall we go out? - No, I can't.
Perhaps this evening?
It's blood, Daddy.
I don't want to!
He stroked his head. Don't be afraid, my son.
I don't want to!
What? Don't you want to? Come here.
Are you crazy?
Don't be so frightened.
What a wretched idiot you are.
A cowardly wretch!
Why are you so set on becoming a great painter?
You're going to die anyway. Then you'll be gone.
Using his aunt and a young girl called Betsy as models
Edvard Munch begins work on a canvas measuring
119.5 cm by 118.5 cm.
The death of his sister Sophie.
How quiet it is in the forest.
Imagine living here, not alone but with someone else.
It's so mysterious here.
Shouldn't he sit a little closer?
But he remained where he was, staring at Mrs Heiberg.
At table Petra said,
"I saw you talk to Mrs Heiberg.
"Wasn't it Mrs Heiberg?"
"Yes," he said carelessly and reddened.
"She looks dull," his father said. "She behaves badly to her husband."
People talk so much.
What a ridiculous dream
it has been all these years.
A great painter... It's better than being a doctor.
But, compared to a king, it's nothing.
And a king is no more than a tiny microbe.
Munch now begins to add layer upon layer of texture
with brush, palette knife and even kitchen blade.
I've started work on a few canvases
and there is one of them I think
I can get something out of.
I think it is going to be
a good painting. I'm already very pleased with it.
I've been thinking of you.
In the colours especially, I can develop myself.
It's something new. As I said, I think it will be good.
Is something troubling you?
I do have a lot on my mind. I have worries too.
I have my work to think of.
The beautiful pale face with its soft full mouth,
half closed eyes and throat.
He had to own it again,
to look into those eyes, so often hard.
Sophie and Edvard...
I shall soon be leaving you
and I'm so afraid of what will happen to our family.
That's why I want to talk to you
and I hope you can promise me
to take care of Laura, Andreas and Inger
so that I can go to heaven with an easy mind.
- Will you promise me, Sophie? - Yes, Mamma.
- Will you promise me, Edvard? - Yes, Mamma.
I feel you in here very strongly.
- Have you had physical relationships? - Many.
Do you feel that you've fulfilled yourself as a human being?
I try. But there are many obstacles.
- Do you achieve satisfaction? - Now but not before.
When one is born one knows nothing.
One is surrounded by adults one looks up to,
adults full of words and prejudices.
Particularly in my family which is very bourgeois.
I was filled with lots of admonitions.
You mustn't do this. Do that.
Things that I wanted to do
were considered wrong and conflicts arose.
I've been thinking of you all night. I haven't slept.
A plate was broken today.
Was it you?
- No, it was Sophie. - Sophie, did you do it?
No. Edvard.
- Sophie, was it you? - No. Edvard.
In Jæger's book 'From The Kristiania Boheme'
he describes a scene with a 16 year-old girl
whom he has met on the street.
"I went down on my knees
"and stretched my hands with my gaze resting on her eyes.
"Her eyes retained their shy expression.
"Then at once they grew large and tender.
"And she drew me up to her, put her arms about me
"and rested her head against my shoulders.
"I leaned my head against hers and kissed her black hair."
Munch writes in his diary:
"They were lying beside each other.
"They didn't talk much.
"'Poor you', she said
"and stroked his wet hair slowly... slowly."
"She lay there with her head back and her beautiful throat exposed.
"I kissed it and wanted to carry her to the bed.
"But the touch of her soft limbs
"took all strength from my arms."
"She lay down on him.
"The moment again when everything ceased to exist.
"Again and again."
And that married woman - you shouldn't be seen with her.
Have you got something besides your work to think of?
I feel much calmer. I sleep at night too.
That's fine.
You know that I need you.
I'm so happy you came.
What wonderful lips you have.
Munch writes in his diaries of making appointments to meet
Mrs Heiberg on the Karl Johan
only to have her pass him by with her husband or a friend on her arm.
Exactly who began to break the appointments first is not known
but Munch writes of retaliating
by ignoring Mrs Heiberg when they next meet.
I waited for half an hour on the Karl Johan.
And when at last she came
she simply walked past.
She scarcely looked at me.
It's a good thing I don't like her any more.
At about this same period, Oda Lasson has told Hans Jæger
that she is becoming emotionally involved with Christian Krohg.
When I try to live according to what is right for me
and try to find my freedom and live according to my rules,
the only thing the bourgeoisie are interested in
is how many love affairs I have.
Only my friends look at and talk about what I do...
talk about my paintings.
She talked about how he had not greeted her on the street,
how she was just as good as other ladies.
Look at Mrs Pettersen who went with the lieutenant to Paris.
It made him shudder to hear of her affection.
At first, Munch adds
domestic details to the periphery of the painting
such as a chair, a glass, a bottle,
a flowerpot on a window and curtains.
Then, slowly, over the months
he begins to remove these details
concentrating more and more on the head of his sister.
Munch's affair with Mrs Heiberg is already deteriorating.
He takes the hand of his sister and paints it in broad and vague strokes
blurring out its ability for human contact.
Her hand was large and coarse. She placed her cheek against his.
He turned his head away
so their mouths didn't meet.
She was too repulsive.
I'm so glad you came.
I saw you out with another man.
Just a friend.
Just a friend?
I'd been waiting half an hour and you walked straight past!
I was with Lt. Lund.
He's just a friend.
Don't shout.
Everybody can hear.
Damn it, I have hundreds of things to think of. This can't go on!
I waited for more than half an hour!
- Who was it? - The banker.
The year 1886.
The French government presents the United States
with the Statue of Liberty
and equips its own army with the Lebel smokeless powder rifle.
Perhaps if I tell her that it's all my fault...
Perhaps then she'll like me...
If I tell her I could die for her...
This is nothing to laugh at!
Don't take it so much to heart.
There are plenty of women with her qualities.
I find it difficult to know what life I should lead.
Even if I try to live freely with men, they don't change.
They consider that a woman should behave
in such-and-such a way, which I can't do.
It's long past midnight
and you're out every evening.
Will you answer?
- Don't push me! - Are you drunk?
What do you do when you're out?
He's just a friend.
This can't go on!
I feel that if ever I am to find myself
I can't adapt myself to their standards.
Men I am with, who say that they are free,
have beliefs too, which obstruct my freedom.
In fact I don't even know what my freedom is.
I can't take any more of this. You know that!
We mustn't speak to each other like this. We mustn't.
You're a human being in a society oppressed
by standards and prejudices in every direction.
Painters can't take notice of political programmes.
You have to paint something as you see it.
You can't sit down and paint details.
If you come from a bedroom into the living room in the morning
and see everything as if in a bluish light,
even the darkest shadows,
that's how you should paint it. As you see it.
Colour means a great deal. Colour is the mainstay of painting.
Mood as well.
She let herself be drawn closer. Right up against him.
He held her gently about the waist. She reached up towards him.
He felt a warm mouth against his throat, a wet mouth against his
and his mouth slipped in towards hers.
"A feeling of sweet impotence poured over my shoulders
"and flowed through my limbs.
"I knelt and pressed her tight against me
"and kissed her uncovered throat like one possessed."
Haagen Ludwig Berg, an actor
and a Lieutenant in the part-time army.
Miss Drefsen, referred to by Munch as "Miss Rocker"
whom he recently met at a carnival.
Something I don't understand occurs again and again
and that is that a relationship starts strongly.
And I know what passion is.
I don't know what love is but I know what passion is.
The odd thing is that it begins with the feeling
that all is worthless
without this one person.
We should not have spoken of it.
And gradually, without you noticing what is happening,
this person becomes the one who holds you back.
Seeking now to de-emphasise all unimportant details
by blurring their images
struggling to eliminate Mrs Heiberg from his mind
striving somehow to impart the quiver and intensity of his feelings
onto the raw surface of his canvas
seeking to awaken a similar mood in the viewer
Munch works and reworks the head of his sister
detailing hair, eyes and mouth
only to scrape the oil from the canvas and begin again.
Using his knife, the back of his brush, the point of a pencil
Munch scratches and scores deep into the thick oil
as he struggles to remember and struggles to forget.
She looked into my eyes with her fair hair
and her pale, delicate skin.
We had a good time when last we met, didn't we?
- I like you. - You're sweet.
I've been thinking of you.
The whole time.
- I like you too. - How beautiful you are.
You're strange.
But you're a fine person. You're sweet.
What do you think of women
who have extra-marital relationships?
In my opinion a woman is and ought to be a defenseless
and beautiful little being, both in body and soul,
who needs the protection and security
of a man.
If you think this is funny, it's...
She smiled with her pale lips and white teeth.
We suit each other, don't we? You're so strange, Munch.
In December 1885 Hans Jæger's book, From The Kristiania Boheme
is confiscated within two hours of its publication.
Four months later Jæger is found guilty of blasphemy
and "violation of modesty and morality".
He is sentenced to 60 days in prison
and the permanent banning of his book.
Aimar Sørensen, Minister of Justice in the Liberal Government.
I received a copy of the book from the police in Kristiania
with certain parts underlined.
I telegraphed at once to ask all the police commissioners
to stop publication of the book.
In this part the lead character in the book
addresses himself to a very young girl,
so young that she could be his daughter.
She is sitting on his knee.
This will give you an idea of what it's about.
"Listen, I said to her while I patted her on the cheek.
"Let's have a sensible little chat.
"Do you know what this is? I had taken a condom from my pocket.
"No, she said. Well, I'll tell you..."
The following year Hans Jæger will be forced to flee from Norway
after the Liberal government imposes upon him
a second sentence of 150 days in prison
this time for sending 300 copies of his book
out of the country to Sweden
under a cover entitled "Christmas Tales by Hans Jæger".
"...and it doesn't pass through because...
"And I blew up the condom. Not even air passes through."
I could read more but I think that suffices.
Cell no. 1 of the Møllergaten district prison in Kristiania.
Does imprisonment influence your work?
No, it has no influence whatsoever.
That good people, who use literature for diversion,
scream and cross themselves means nothing. I knew they would.
It provokes the bourgeoisie who live their cosy, false life.
It provokes them to see free women.
Everything outside the fence they have raised around themselves
is so terrifying for them
except perhaps in their dreams, when they indulge in fantasies.
But, because I live openly and freely,
I think they become terrified.
The so-called free women we're always hearing about,
they can't be quite normal
but they can become normal if they discover their real capacity.
Half an hour before she came
and she just smiles as she passes by...
with another man.
Oh, damn!
Finally I finished, exhausted.
I had brought out a lot of the first impression,
the trembling mouth,
the transparent shine and the tired eyes
but the colours were not finished.
It was pale and Grey. The painting was heavy as lead.
At almost the last stage, Munch attacks the canvas again
scoring deep into the oil
and, in one gesture of broad sweeping strokes
eliminates the carefully executed window, curtains and flowerpot
on the right-hand side of the canvas.
The final distracting details
have gone.
Edvard Munch is aware that he has made a major breakthrough
in terms of his own art.
But he is not yet aware of the dimensions of this breakthrough.
At this time, in the mid 1880's
each of the major artists in the Western World
is still involved in the traditional presentation of the exterior reality.
Cézanne...
the early work of Gauguin and, even at this stage...
Vincent Van Gogh.
The difference between these works and Munch's canvas
is most clearly seen in
the contemporary presentation of young women:
Auguste Renoir...
Berthe Morisot...
the American Mary Cassatt...
the Norwegian Hans Heyerdahl.
But Edvard Munch's canvas, with its deeply scored surface,
which has transcended all exterior reality
to become the first expressionist painting of "feeling"
in the history of Western art, is strongly attacked
both by the Kristiania public and by its conservative press.
The public won't accept that sort of madness.
When one passes
people stand laughing at the painting.
Some people always set themselves up as guardians over others.
In literature they decide what is decent and indecent.
Says one colleague to Munch, "I think that your painting is shit."
Asks another, "What are all those strokes for?
"It looks like it's raining."
A human life is decent
but writing about human sexual life is indecent.
Another friend tells Munch that he will go mad
if he continues in this way.
As long as I can write,
I'll combat society and its rules to create a society
in which literature is free.
Who has the right to stop anyone writing about his emotional life?
No one!
The best way to judge Munch's picture is to see it at a distance.
Andreas Aubert, art historian and critic.
The colours and contours appear most clearly on cloudy days.
If one really wants to get a better impression
of this extremely strange painting,
one should look at it like this, between two fingers.
At some point in this period of his life
Edvard Munch writes in his diary of chasing a woman through the streets
whom he believes to be Mrs Heiberg.
I'm faltering. I think I am falling.
But he has been lured into throwing away his talent
in such a useless way
and encouraged to follow this path which leads nowhere.
I have no feeling in my legs. They won't carry me.
Everyone passing looks alien and strange.
I think they are all staring at me.
My whole body is shaking.
Sweat pours from me.
I have received an anonymous letter in my capacity as critic
in which the writer claims to see nothing but meaninglessness
and an attempt to be original in Munch's work.
All I can say to this person is that he get himself
a new pair of eyes.
Anyone who can't see that here we have a great
and genuine talent, has no right
to judge art at all.
I want life, that which is alive.
What do I care whether the chair is properly made?
What I wanted to bring out is what cannot be measured.
The tired movement in the eyes, in the eyelids.
The lips must seem to have whispered something.
It must have been painted by one almost mentally deranged
who sees hallucinations as if in a fever.
I lay down on a sofa in the corner. I lay half asleep.
I hated them for looking at me.
It is possible that Munch can speak in some way or other
to those with a sick emotional life.
But I think it's one of the most dreadful things I've ever seen.
One would have expected that a painter who presents his paintings
at a public exhibition, would respect people's taste
in a totally different way.
Hurt and confused by the attack on The Sick Child
and by the constant references to his work as "unfinished sketches"
Edvard Munch now checks the advance begun by his revolutionary painting
and steps back.
He paints a third self-portrait, this time with eyes veiled
a pose of defiance, looking down on the viewer.
A 2-year period of withdrawal has begun.
January 1888.
By this period, the group known as the Kristiania Boheme
has begun to disintegrate.
Personal tragedy, alcoholism, syphilis
scarring relationships, social isolation
have taken their toll.
The writer Karl Jensen-Hjell will die of stomach tuberculosis
within a month.
And six more of the young men at this table
many of them personal friends of Munch
will not reach the age of 40.
Bertrand Hansen will die of consumption.
Jørgen Sørensen will die an invalid
and the popular painter Kalle Løchen will kill himself at the age of 28.
Jæger himself, with the germs of cancer in his body
will die in 1910, a pauper and an outcast.
Outside the death room, a debtor will be waiting
to claim a bottle of whisky.
The summer of 1888.
Edvard Munch rents a cottage in Åsgårdstrand
near the village of Bone on the Kristiania fjord.
The affair of Oda Lasson with Hans Jæger has ended.
Oda Lasson is now married to Christian Krohg.
At the same time, with Krohg's knowledge,
Oda is developing the interest of Jappe Nilssen
age 18, student of French Literature, friend of Edvard Munch.
Inger Munch is now a close friend of Sigurd Bødtker.
Laura Munch, age 21, remains unmarried.
Why do you think I shouted so angrily
and said I couldn't see you again?
It was because you lied!
It's your inaccessibility that makes me so angry!
You said I shouldn't come so often.
Yes, but then I didn't know how much I liked you.
You've forgotten me now. You have someone else.
I love you.
If I'd only known that you went to somebody else to punish me.
It's the uncertainty that makes me so nervous, so furious.
You demand more and more love from me.
Don't you understand I can't give you more than I have?
The moment you show your feelings, it seems like
you want to take something stolen back.
Is it for your art you save yourself?
1888.
August Strindberg writes Miss Julie.
The pneumatic Tyre and cordite are invented.
Vincent Van Gogh paints Sunflowers
The Drawbridge At Arles
and The Sower.
An unemployment demonstration in Rome is suppressed by the military.
And Wilhelm II
becomes Emperor of Germany.
Whilst he continues to pursue Mrs Heiberg
at the same time, Munch is trying to escape from her.
He begins to cultivate his acquaintanceship
with Åse Carlson, age 19
herself a painter and engaged to be married to a Kristiania lawyer.
You need a woman and yet you don't want one.
I like you but we really can't meet like this.
You follow me everywhere. You plague me.
Munch writes in his diaries, repeatedly
of following Mrs Heiberg to her rendezvous with other men...
Jealousy is possessiveness.
Your jealousy is driving me to other love affairs.
...of endlessly waiting.
You can't own a woman.
It's impossible.
They kiss each other, just now, at this moment,
and she says she is fond of him.
Hidden behind the stairs, she whispers to the lieutenant
the same words as she previously whispered to him.
It is probable that at this time
Edvard Munch asks Åse Carlson to marry him.
Do you want to hold my hand? I'm so alone.
No, not here.
You know that I like you, but...
...more as a friend.
Friendship is...
Friendship is so little. Life is short.
In this winter of 1888
after heavy drinking with friends in the country near Slagen
Munch is pushed into frozen water
by an artist named Palle Dørnberger
and almost dies.
This is very serious. We should notify them.
On the left is Dørnberger's sister, Charlotte, age 20.
I don't know where they live.
I feel so young.
I try to see life optimistically.
We have different views on life.
You seem a little gloomy.
You seem weak, a little tired of life.
A feeling of tension and loneliness
now enters the canvases of Edvard Munch.
People appear still...
immobile...
often as though helpless in the face of nature.
I don't want to kiss you.
They looked at each other without speaking.
At that moment he had a feeling that life's greatest happiness
had slipped from his grasp.
There were tears in her eyes.
Munch now prepares himself again for the public and the critics
often in the introvert company of Sigbjørn Obstfelder, the poet
and Jorgen Sørensen, the crippled artist.
April 1889.
Edvard Munch again faces the public...
and to show exactly where he stands and what he stands for
exhibits everything he has ever created:
110 canvases and innumerable drawings.
Dominating the exhibition is a huge canvas.
Entitled Spring, it is a re-working of The Sick Child.
But gone now is the loose expressive brushstroke
of the earlier work.
Here, there is minute detail:
a strand of hair
a blood stained handkerchief
a carefully outlined bottle and vase
the detailed top of a cupboard
and even the pot of flowers.
Have you seen Miss C. since she married?
I expect things are difficult for you.
It must feel strange when you think of her.
Why has Munch's work changed so much since The Sick Child?
I can only guess something must have happened to him,
which made him lose faith in himself and his art,
poor criticism and other factors.
Society accepts that a man has a mistress
but, if a woman has a lover, it's quite different.
Later perhaps... Perhaps we can meet then.
Everything could be different.
We mustn't take it so casually.
If I marry, I must live for my husband.
A woman often marries because she needs to be supported.
She can't earn what she needs to live.
What was she thinking as she sleepwalked along?
A Madonna-like beauty.
That's the way it goes, year after year, a sort of trap.
Having now promised to live together in matrimony
and vouchsafed it before God and this congregation, I declare you...
Was she now thinking also of the pale man behind the column?
...and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
What God has joined together,
let no man put asunder.
The affair between Jappe Nilssen and Oda Krohg is now developing.
Åsgårdstrand, 1889.
She forced her way between me and my ideal,
my art!
Yet I can't stop loving her.
I can't put up with
any more of her lies!
Her love is poisonous!
She has feelings, too.
I don't give a damn!
Damn it, I said to her, you're lying on white sheets.
Your body will be deformed by disease and rot.
You're going to die ugly and stinking!
I'll laugh while I drink wine with beautiful women.
My joy will be even greater than the despair she brought.
I shall laugh, laugh, laugh!
We wish to thank the men, women and children
of Oslo and Åsgårdstrand who appear in this film.
We are very grateful for invaluable help from
Additional thanks
We wish to thank the staff at the Munch Museum in Oslo
without whose help this film could not have been made.
Directed and Edited by PETER WATKINS and written in collaboration
with the cast, many of whom express their own opinions.
Hurt and angered by the continuing viciousness
of the Kristiania critics
seeking to escape from the pain of his personal existence in Norway
Edvard Munch leaves for France, to study art.
He meets with Emmanuel Goldstein, a 27 year-old Danish poet
whose own work bears a disillusioned view on love.
Munch shares a room with Goldstein in St. Cloud
outside Paris, on the first floor above a cafe
overlooking the river Seine.
November 1889.
Dr Munch's death was a hard blow to the family.
We had just moved to Hauketo
and Dr Munch liked it very much out here.
The Sunday before he became ill
we took a walk home from the church
and the rest of us could not keep pace with him.
Now that he and his father can never be reconciled
Edvard Munch begins to re-assess the values and beliefs
that Hans Jæger has taught him.
There is a city in the city, the city of the dead.
There the graves lie side by side.
There you'll find hovels and palaces.
There quiet people live, the dead.
It's a popular city.
The bones make way for new.
What does it matter if one dies?
"Naught but sorrow and torment, misery and strife.
"There is not much more to be had from life.
"You pay a price too high for joys too brief.
"Our pleasures are bought by torment and grief.
"If to love's pleasure your body surrenders
"The source of all pains a new life is engendered."
1889.
The Eiffel Tower is built and the box camera comes into production.
Vincent Van Gogh paints Landscape with Olive Trees
and Wheat Field with Cypresses.
And Adolf Hitler is born.
In French literature, the "symbolists" hold
full sway in Paris.
Verlaine, Huysmans, the poet Mallarmé.
A rebellion against Naturalism
is now taking place in the French capital.
Amongst the painters
the older generation has already paved the way for the breakthrough.
Puvis de Chavannes...
Gustave Moreau...
and Odilon Radon
who emphasises the role played by the sub-conscious
in an artist's work.
When I light the lamp
I suddenly see my own enormous shadow
over the entire wall
up to the ceiling.
In the mirror above the fireplace I see myself
the face of my own ghost
and I live with the dead.
All it said was, "Dearest, come at 8 o'clock tomorrow."
I stared at each letter, each stain, for the marks of her fingers.
Did she love me or was she pretending?
Did she love me or the other or both at the same time?
"You are the vampire
"which sucks my sparkling blood,
"from the channels of my heart
"with icy draining looks.
"My body glows like desert sand burned and charred
"and the dry Sirocco of madness rages
"and my blood flows."
Munch now sees the work of Auguste Rodin in Paris.
We didn't even know each other and yet was it because
she took my first kiss that she took the fragrance of life from me?
Was it because she lied and deceived
that she suddenly
took the scales from my eyes?
Munch now begins to formulate the artistic philosophy
that he is to pursue all his life
to understand and express the purpose of man's existence
of woman's existence
the purpose for their pain, their love, their despair
links in an endless chain tying together thousands of generations.
There was to be no more painting interiors, people reading and knitting
but living people who breathe, feel, suffer and love.
She closes her eyes and listens
to the words he whispers into her long hair.
I'd depict it as I saw it now, but in the blue haze.
I remember something Munch once said a couple of years ago.
He had discovered that the Greeks regarded death as blue.
It says somewhere in The Iliad, "Blue death closes his eyes."
"Here in the Grey gloomy North," Munch said, "we see death as black.
"But in sunny Hellas they regard it as blue.
"Why shouldn't it be blue?"
Those at home, my aunt, my brother and sisters
think that death is just sleep,
that my father sees and hears.
On Monday he suffered a stroke and within a few days
he lost the power of speech and then consciousness.
Now and then we think he recognised us for he smiled and pressed our hands.
I can do nothing but let my sorrow run out
into the dawn and into the dusk.
Munch's painting Night in St. Cloud
a study of despondency in swirling blue and black silhouette
is a major breakthrough
in parallel to the similar breakthrough now occurring in Norwegian literature
a subjective and personal form of art.
The use of the first person in literature is introversive art
which breaks with naturalism in a psychological, mysterious way.
Things can be said in the first person which were unsaid before.
This form
is born of a desire to get right to the bottom
of the human being, or the mood one is faced with.
It becomes like a vision or hallucination
and it would be strange
if this form of intensity did not make people shudder and tremble
and listen to what the poet wants to say.
There is a rupture between the comprehensive view of realism
and the new personal form. Art for the sake of art
and for the satisfaction of the artist.
At last someone is willing to listen to the heart.
September 1890.
As proof of his work in Paris
Edvard Munch submits 10 paintings
to the official State Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania.
The painting which he calls Night in St. Cloud
is heavily attacked.
For the second time
Edvard Munch returns to self-exile in Europe.
This painting which is called Night
makes such demands on one's ability to guess
that few people go to the trouble of studying it more closely.
The atmosphere around the painting is so faintly designated
that it seems to disappear before one can grasp it.
The painter himself follows his own path in a misty
and shapeless world of dreams.
And the critic of Aftenposten refers to Munch's "sick mind" and states that:
"the borderline between madness and genius is unconscionably narrow."
Munch is primarily
a lyric poet in colour.
He feels colours, feels in colours but he does not see them.
He sees sorrow
and crying and brooding
and withering.
To the young poets and writers of Norway
now rejecting Naturalism
the work of Edvard Munch proves a revelation.
Wilhelm Krag:
"The river flows so slowly Flows and flows and flows.
"And daylight goes, goes.
"Night will soon be here.
"The light shines out of my room.
"Turns to regard me in silence and in anxiety.
"It knows he is coming."
Was it that she was so much more beautiful than others?
No, I don't even know if she was beautiful.
Her mouth was big. She could be ugly.
In my article in the Mercure de France
Albert Aurier, critic.
I refer to this work by Gauguin.
I explain that it is the duty of the new artist to choose between
the numerous elements which make up objectivity.
He is also entitled to distort, to emphasise,
to exaggerate line, form and colour
in accordance with his personal vision
and individual subjectivity.
Nice, 1891.
Two lovers, their faces dissolved together, featureless
lurk in the comer of a room.
Perspective has vanished.
Broken, slashing strokes of thin paint.
The breakthrough has begun.
She was affected, a liar and a whore!
The affair between Oda Krohg and Jappe Nilssen is now at crisis point.
Jappe wants his relationship to be clearly defined.
She, still married, feels differently.
Jappe is now taking drugs and has threatened to kill himself.
There seem to be rules demanding that women sacrifice themselves.
The best thing one can say about a woman
is that she is self-sacrificing.
I can't put up with it anymore.
I am so fond of her but why is she so angry with me?
It's so difficult at times.
I know that I lose control.
Seeking a way of peeling down to the essence of the inner reality
of stripping away needless detail and perspective
Munch now combines all the forms of media at his disposal
using pencil, pastel, oil and charcoal
not separately, but together.
He applies the oil thinly
to permit the canvas texture
to remain a visible component of the finished work
to emphasise its flat surface.
He allows the preliminary drawings in pencil and pastel
including the corrections made in them
to remain in the final work to show its spontaneity.
On this canvas, to be known variously as Melancholy
Evening or The Yellow Boat
Munch is attempting, for the first time in his work
to depict jealousy.
And not merely the event of jealousy
but its psychology and innermost quiver.
I wonder if something
is going on between her and Jæger. What shall I do then?
At any rate, I believe that the idea must be
to live according to
one's particular possibilities,
that one has a duty to develop
these possibilities,
that one has a duty to expand oneself,
to acquire more knowledge, a greater breadth.
I think that leads to greater freedom in the long run.
Look how she's on top of it all.
Cheerful and smiling, while the men all lie and perish.
Not everyone can have feelings for each other all their lives.
When a relationship no longer works, one should be able to break it off
before it changes to bitterness and gnawing hate.
This canvas marks a major development in the work of Edvard Munch.
It develops still further the flat application of colour areas
the lack of perspective
the tension between space and surface.
It is dismissed by the critics as a "sketch".
Edvard Munch is now seeking to take the practical artistic consequences
of what lies behind the theories of the symbolists.
He wants to realise them in all-powerful subjectivity
to pass on what he and he alone experiences from the motif
at the very moment that he grips it, or...
that he is gripped by it.
I walked along the road with two friends.
The sun went down.
I felt it like a melancholy sigh.
Suddenly the sky became blood red.
I stopped.
I leaned against the fence, tired to death.
I saw the flaming sky
like blood, like a sword over the fjord and the town.
My friends continued on. I stood there shaking in anguish.
I felt it like
a great endless scream through nature.
The German Kaiser visits London, hoping that Britain will agree to
the Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy.
There is civil war in Chile, widespread famine in Russia.
Munch now paints and exhibits a portrait of his sister Inger.
Another breakthrough.
Perspective has vanished. Space and surface are one.
But this canvas and his work known as Despair
with the artist's featureless and blank profile
its large disconnected strokes of heavy colour running over each other
are heavily attacked by the Norwegian press as
"an awe-inspiring gibberish of futuristic art."
For reasons which still remain unclear
Edvard Munch is now formally invited by the Berlin Art Association
the Verein Berliner Künstler
to arrange a one-man exhibition of his work
in their new exhibition hall, the Architektenhaus
a converted beer-parlour on the Wilhelmstraße.
On the 5th of November the exhibition opens
containing many of Munch's latest paintings
a total of fifty-five canvases.
The Berlin press is here in force
including Adolf Rosenberg, of Kunstchronik
and a representative from the conservative National Zeitung.
Here in the Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm II
"impressionism" is still a term of abuse.
The Kaiser himself, who once referred to Richard Wagner
as "a cheap little conductor,"
is dedicated to fighting what he calls
"the un-German type of art"
or "art of the gutter."
The entire exhibition is a mockery.
Every painting!
The man must be mad.
The colours are so unnatural.
Within a matter of days, the exhibition of these paintings
the like of which has never before been seen in Germany
has broken into a notorious scandal.
We haven't had a revolution!
Just think of people's reaction! To invite someone who...
Hermann Eschke, sculptor
professor at the Berlin Academy of Art, seen here in the foreground
has raised a petition amongst the conservative members of the Verein
to force through the immediate removal
of Munch's "anarchistic smears."
The conservative majority is led by Anton Von Werner
a painter of court and battle scenes for the Kaiser.
Von Werner, strongly attacked by the liberals
who refer to him as a "boots and uniform" painter
urges the removal of Munch's "Schmiererei."
This rubbish doesn't belong here.
In opposition to these conservatives
is the small caucus of liberal artists
amongst them Ludwig Knaus who argue
not so much for Munch's freedom of expression
as against the social incorrectness of the Berlin Academy
for throwing out an invited guest.
Amid reports of anarchist activities in Paris
and rising beer taxes in Bavaria
the German newspapers headline "the struggle taking place
within the Verein."
We must be united on objective grounds.
That's nonsense! No!
We'll withdraw from the Society
if the exhibition is closed down.
On the 11th of November, a conservative bloc carry
the vote to close the exhibition
and Munch is ordered to remove his "Schmiererei."
The Kunstchronik charges Edvard Munch
with "brutality, crudity and baseness of expression."
The National Zeitung accuses "this man E. Blunch"
of selling himself body and soul to the French Impressionists.
Edvard Munch has arrived in Imperial Germany.
One critic even states that Munch knows next to nothing
and should only exhibit
if he is in dire peril of dying of starvation.
I went to the Rotunda for a laugh.
Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt.
But, by God, I didn't laugh.
I found a great deal that was strange, even disgusting
but I also found tones that were delicate, almost too sensitive.
A dark room washed through with moonlight.
Lonely roads.
The secretive Norwegian summer night.
I felt as though I heard the breathing of melancholy people
struggling with their problems.
No sound came from their breasts.
They sat alone by the shore.
By God, I did not laugh.
Munch, choosing to be true to his vision
has painted the clouds over the Kristiania fjord
as he saw and felt them.
He argues that if he experienced clouds as blood
during an agitated mood
then that is how he should paint them.
Accompanied by his "anarchistic Schmiererei"
Edvard Munch moves into the room of a hotel
in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin.
Memories and images stored for over 20 years
are about to break forth.
All that is needed is one final catalyst.
On the corner of Neue Wilhelmstraße and Unter den Linden
is a tavern, serving over nine hundred kinds of liquor
and nicknamed "The Black Pig"
a meeting place for writers.
Amongst them, now living in Berlin, August Strindberg
who holds court in "The Black Pig", where, in the words of a historian
"he is virtually a tourist attraction for the intelligentsia."
Laura Marholm, journalist
who with her husband has given financial aid to Strindberg
a source of growing resentment to the poverty-stricken Swedish celebrity.
With Strindberg in this room
are as many Scandinavians as there are Germans.
Christian Krohg, who has accompanied his wife Oda to Berlin
where he watches her intense love affair
with the Norwegian author Gunnar Heiberg.
Sigbjørn Obstfelder and, next to him, Bengt Lidforss
Swedish botanical student
recently engaged to a 12 year-old girl.
Hermann Schlittgen, painter and engraver.
In this room, a centre of the literary storm
that is to sweep over Europe
are those who have already rejected Naturalism
who are now seeking an artistic or literary means
of presenting the interior macrocosm of the soul
peering into the darkest abyss of man.
Here, in the words of a historian
ideas change hands "faster than mistresses."
Here the writers feed upon the staccato genius in their midst
August Strindberg, in self-exile from Sweden
where he has been condemned as a blasphemer
where educationalists clamour for the suppression of his books
and where he is spat upon by parents in the streets.
Within this room, all is discussed:
art, black magic, spiritualism, the philosophy of Nietzsche
the erotic work of the Belgian etcher, Felicien Raps
such as Thievery and Prostitution Rule The World.
Richard Dehmel, currently writing a cycle of poems about sex
their purpose to raise sexual love to the level of religious mysticism
shortly to be prosecuted
because of his description of a nun masturbating.
Stanislaw Przybyszewski,
Polish-German author and medical student
involved with the occult, studies satanism
who rewrote the opening of the Gospel of St. John to read:
"In the beginning there was sex..."
And Edvard Munch
famous overnight as the centre of a storm
that has rocked the German art world to its very foundations.
Already he has received invitations to exhibit in Düsseldorf and Cologne
and he has been prevailed upon by the Berlin intellectuals
to make his home here in Germany.
Of all the men in this room
two will have the most marked effect upon the work of Edvard Munch.
Stanislaw Przybyszewski who is to later believe that
his passionate interpretation of Chopin
will have more meaning for German literature
than all his writing
and August Strindberg, divorced
separated from the children he adores
who presents the "Black Pig" with a triple credo:
woman the inferior
woman the whore
woman the man-weakening vampire.
There are paintings everywhere in Munch's hotel room,
on the sofa, on the cupboard and on all the chairs,
even on the stove and on the washbasin.
Amongst the group in "The Black Pig" is Laura Marholm's husband
the Swedish poet, Ola Hansson
who has had to leave his country following the reaction to his publication
of a collection of short stories
describing man's split emotional sex life.
Ola Hansson tells Munch that he suffers from a fear of life
constantly seeing "Death...
following him like his own shadow."
I have little faith in your struggle
for emancipation.
The equality which you strive for means that I cut off my penis
and you put it into yourself and then we're all equal.
Right now all women hate Buddhas,
hate and humiliate them,
well knowing that they will never become Buddhas.
Dagny Juel, age 26, daughter of a Norwegian country doctor
who has come to Berlin to study the piano
and who has been introduced to "The Black Pig"
by her family friend, Edvard Munch.
On the other hand, she feels a sort of instinctive sympathy
for beggars, braggarts, liars and dogs,
especially mangy ones.
Under the eyes of Przybyszewski who is in love with her
Dagny Juel now becomes the mistress of Edvard Munch.
Being married is the only way women have to survive.
You simply can't exist without a man.
If we leave you, you fall like ninepins.
You want the women
submitted to you.
I can manage with or without them.
- Are you sure? - Absolutely.
Why is there a woman beside you then?
At this time, Edvard Munch is beginning to suffer
from agoraphobia,
a fear of open spaces.
He walks close to walls and dreads to cross an open square.
I do as I please.
The year 1893.
There is a general strike in Belgium
serious riots suppressed by the police.
Hermann Göring is born.
And Peter Iljich Tchaikovsky dies.
Not the slightest artistic tradition
or affinity with accepted artistic ideals
can be found in Blunch or his colleagues.
Here, in the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II
Edvard Munch begins work on the subjective image of a naked woman
seen as from the viewpoint of her partner in sexual intercourse.
Around her head, the halo of a Madonna.
For his exterior model, Munch uses Dagny Juel.
Dagny Juel...
described by Strindberg as...
"tall, thin, haggard from liquor and late hours
"speaking with a drawling voice broken as if by swallowed tears
"with the figure of a Madonna and a laughter that drove men insane."
Strindberg has discussed with Munch
fear and distaste at the idea of his sperm
coming in contact with the sperm of another man
in the vagina of their common mistress.
He believes that this meeting of similar poles
sensual contact with another male
is so unbearable and horrible
that the normal man would often even prefer death.
"I run on. I am filled with increasing anguish.
"No one speaks to one another. No one smiles at one another.
"They rush off as though whipped."
So it is difficult to distinguish a human form
or even to determine the nature of an object at all.
But he was so frightened.
He felt the blood run through his chest.
1893.
An army bill increases the size of the German armed forces.
An anarchist bomb explodes in the Paris Chamber of Deputies.
When he breathed it felt as though his chest had come loose
and all his blood poured through his mouth.
Jesus Christ!
Strindberg has posed to Munch the question, "What is jealousy?"
and has answered
"Jealousy is not the fear of losing
"but the fear of dividing."
Przybyszewski feels differently.
He believes that no man should possess another human being
and has even offered the key of his apartment to Strindberg
so that he may avail himself of Przybyszewski's common-in-law wife.
Strindberg has declined.
Przybyszewski tells Munch
that he believes sex to be life's basic substance
and the inner essence of individuality
the ever-creating, the transforming and the destructive.
Sex created the brain, says Przybyszewski
but between them there will always be a constant fight
that will inevitably lead to death and destruction.
Three years from now, in 1896
Dagny Juel, accompanied by Stanislaw Przybyszewski
will travel to the Russian city of Tiflis to meet with a lover
who will shoot her through the head
and then himself commit suicide.
I feel better now.
May I look out the window?
Working simultaneously on themes of love
pain, despair and death
searching for the ever-elusive artistic solution
to the expression of his feelings
Edvard Munch turns now to tempera,
the use of egg-white to roughen the quality of the oil
to flatten and condense the image.
He begins a new canvas depicting the death of his sister
one of a series to deal with the grief and isolation of his family...
of himself.
God bless you, my child.
Munch depicts himself, his brothers and sisters
at the same age as if these events were happening in the present.
- Something to drink? - Yes, please.
Do you have a nice hotel room?
What do you think of the girls?
Perhaps you'd like a chubby girl?
In her will
Mother asked us
to be good
and to love Jesus.
We all had to promise her
that we would go on believing in Jesus.
I am so fond of the dark.
Munch paints his Madonna with what he calls "a corpse's smile"...
the moment of conception.
"Life shakes the hand of death."
Is it the whole night or only half an hour?
The night.
30 marks, please.
At some time in this period, Strindberg
who is now courting an Austrian woman living in Berlin
takes Dagny Juel as his mistress.
Referring to himself as "Andersson", he writes in his notes:
"Andersson liberates her from the anxiety of a disorderly way of living.
"The hollow cheeks are filled out with fiery blood.
"The creator admires his creation.
"The painter is ignored and accepts it without protest."
Good you have time.
It's much better.
Thank you.
"A kiss, a kiss is not a sin."
Munch begins work on a canvas
showing a woman bent over the neck of a weakened man.
He says of this painting that "in reality, all it is
"is a woman kissing a man on the nape of the neck."
He calls the painting Love and Pain.
But to Przybyszewski, the work depicts Woman
sucking the strength from a man.
He re-titles the painting The Vampire.
Munch lets the new title stay.
I need you.
The woman known as Mrs Heiberg
divorces her husband on the 4th April 1891
and remarries a month later.
Her ex-husband, the doctor, dies shortly afterwards.
Well, Strindberg?
What do you think of love and marriage?
Have you known love in marriage?
- I can't see my children. - Do you miss your children?
- Yes, very much. - Is that love?
All women are bloody whores.
February 1893.
Edvard Munch is in Copenhagen.
The first exposure of his work in Denmark.
It is his 15th exhibition.
Munch uses the occasion to study
the effect of his paintings placed next to one another
in the order of their developing theme
for now he is planning
and working on
a whole cycle of paintings that will link together
a Frieze of Life, as Munch calls it
to unfold the very meaning
of nature and existence.
It's so calm.
May I kiss you?
Munch returns to Berlin.
The Danish critics echo the Norwegians and the Germans:
"Some of the pictures are shockingly bad."
"There is little hope that the artist's talent will develop."
Do you sleep better now?
"The disease is almost certainly incurable."
The last Sunday Pappa and I went up Liabrubakken to church
I remember that I said, "You're very like Edvard today."
"Am I?" he replied happily and straightened himself up.
Look what I bought from Helgelandsmoen, Edvard.
Is it wine? It doesn't look very good.
When he comes home at night, he often starts to paint
and if you visit him in the morning, you may trip over a palette
and a new painting in some crazy position.
By the early Spring Strindberg writes of Dagny Juel:
"When the spark has leaped and the currents are neutralised
"he discovers that she is ugly.
"When he remembers how she has offered herself
"he is overwhelmed by revulsion for her body."
Did you know how I suffered? Did you understand why I was hard?
I wasn't myself. She was in me, in my blood.
Inger promised for all of us
that we'd be true to God.
Strindberg first offers Dagny Juel to the student Lidforss
who is known to be in love with her.
But Lidforss tells Strindberg that he cannot accept.
He is suffering from syphilis.
Strindberg then turns to his next alternative
Doctor Ludwig Schleich, a habitué of the Black Pig.
Schleich accepts.
A man can't live
more than three or four years with the same woman.
One must make new discoveries.
By loving one, can't we love many at the same time?
You want to be men,
not human beings.
One should strive to be a human being.
Both men and women derive strength
from being united in front of everyone.
Women have become more and more manly.
They strive for humanity but in that they see only manliness.
Has anyone tried to love a woman who walks like a man,
talks like a man, moves like a man?
It's like loving a man who acts like a woman.
Disgusting!
Przybyszewski says of this painting:
"A man broken in spirit
"on his neck the face of a biting vampire."
"There is something terribly silent, passionless about this picture.
"The man spins around and around, powerless.
"He cannot rid himself of that vampire nor of the pain
"and the woman will always sit there, will bite eternally."
In his canvas Death in the Sickroom
contrasted to the detailed, staring face of his younger sister Inger
Munch depicts himself
turned away, in profile, his face a blank mask.
He was very happy that Edvard had received the scholarship.
But he was sorry he had forgotten to send Edvard's Bible.
I've written to Edvard to say he must buy one.
At this period
as he paints Mrs Heiberg standing outside her summer cottage
her shadow looming large
the psychic and sexual tension of Edvard Munch is at an unbearable peak.
Constantly his nerves are at breaking point
as he struggles to find the artistic solution
to expressing his feelings.
He is isolated from his family, separated for ever from his father.
His work is rejected in his own country.
He watches his mistress, Dagny Juel, pass from one hand to another.
His bronchial condition is worsening. He is drinking heavily.
It's far too dangerous to share a woman with another man.
If a man mounts a woman who has just been with another man,
the preceding man's sperm will enter the organ of the man now mounting her.
He believes that he is going insane, that he is about to die.
The affair between Dagny Juel and Ludwig Schleich
lasts, again, for only two weeks.
Strindberg then agrees to help Schleich pass Dagny on to another man
and now offers her to Stanislaw Przybyszewski.
Strindberg himself is in good spirits at this time.
He is about to leave Berlin for his marriage.
He declares himself to be in love
and glad to be rid of the "wretched woman DJ."
You're disfiguring yourself! You'll die. Ugly and stinking.
And I, I shall drink wine with exultant women.
I shall laugh
even more!
At this time in Berlin, a party is held in "The Black Pig."
Accompanied by the sound of the sea Oda Krohg and an ex-lover of Strindberg
dance in the centre of the room with crab-tails placed in their hair.
With Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Edvard Munch briefly visits Kristiania.
At the same time, in Berlin
Dagny Juel is marrying Stanislaw Przybyszewski.
This can't go on. I can't put up with any more.
Emotions. I can't have emotions.
I wait and then she comes and simply walks past with a smile.
"I look. I look at the white sky.
"I look at the Grey-blue clouds. I look at the bloody sun.
"So this is the world. This is the home of the planets.
"A drop of rain.
"I look at the high buildings.
"I look at the thousand windows, at the distant church spire.
"So this is the world. So this is the home of mankind.
"The Grey-blue clouds gather. The sun disappears.
"I look at well-dressed gentlemen. I look at smiling ladies.
"I look at leaning horses and the Grey-blue clouds grow heavy.
"I look. I look.
"I must have come to the wrong globe. Everything is so strange."
In late 1893, using pastel on a base of cardboard
Edvard Munch creates The Shriek.
December 1893. A gallery on the Unter den Linden in Berlin.
Edvard Munch's 24th exhibition.
Amongst the works exhibited are 5 of his Life Frieze
listed in the catalogue under the title
Studies for a Series on Love.
I placed the paintings together and it was as though
each was connected to the others.
Then came a tone, a musical tone, linking the pictures together.
So, if a relationship between two people is to be sound
and I think it can be so
even if not for ever,
it must be based on mutual regard,
on tolerance.
In the wards of Oscar Kokoschka, the Austrian Expressionist painter
"It was given to Edvard Munch's deeply probing mind
"to diagnose 'panic dread'
"in what was apparently social progress."
One member of the public writes in his catalogue
that the exhibition is "the world's greatest swindle.
"Junk! Take it all to the insane asylum!"
And Munch himself has written
in pencil in the red sky of The Shriek
"Could only have been painted by a madman."
1894.
A canvas entitled Anxiety.
The faces of Edvard Munch
Stanislaw Przybyszewski and Dagny Juel.
Here, as in "The Shriek"
the individual is in the grip of something far beyond his control.
I have a friend who got married.
After two months he was a mess!
As if his wife
had drawn his teeth.
And his wife, then?
She was a dreadful bitch!
That's what she was!
Wasn't she disappointed?
She took everything from him. She treated him like a dog.
She said come and he came. She said go
and he wanted to go.
We had to pull him out of her embrace
from between her breasts.
His eyes were quite ashen. They were empty!
She was a dreadful bitch!
Munch has now completed another three canvases:
a woman pressed into the embrace of Death
the gaunt face of Przybyszewski above his skeleton arm
and Dagny Juel, poised...
inviting.
You talk about your friend.
How do you think his wife felt after an unsuccessful relationship?
Has she emerged from it proudly, undamaged? Is she not marked?
She is thriving.
Przybyszewski has himself published a short novel in which
the hero gives his wife to an artist
and luxuriates in the feelings of hate and jealousy
that he has aroused in himself.
English doctors have proved that, if two children lie together,
the weaker will absorb strength from the stronger.
Which of them loses by it? In bed, I mean.
The stronger.
And the male is
the one who is stronger?
Yes.
August Strindberg describes Munch's canvas The Kiss as
"the fusion of two beings
"the smaller of which, shaped like a carp
"seems on the point of devouring the larger
"as is the habit of vermin
"microbes, vampires and women."
Who did he get those ideas from?
Why does he see things like that?
I don't understand.
If you love a woman and she loves you
it's a reciprocal relationship.
The tension which passes from one to the other
also goes in the opposite direction.
I can't understand him.
But the future...
Must there be a struggle between the sexes?
Must it be man against woman, woman against man?
Since our souls were saved together for Jesus' sake,
God be with you, Sophie,
little pale Edvard, Andreas
and Inger
and you, my kind, dear, unforgettable self-sacrificing husband.
I have also written something to Edvard, my eldest son.
"Do not covet that which is on earth,
"but rather that which is in heaven.
"Keep watch and pray.
"Your mother."
Munch creates yet another version of Melancholy.
"Blank against the twisting, sinuous shore of Åsgårdstrand.
"two rocks, like the black eyes of a snake
"stare at him."
I can't go on.
A predominant characteristic of Munch's work in this period
is the lack of contact between the human beings in his paintings.
People remain isolated
even though in direct physical contact.
The sensory organs disappear
faces become blank
hands are clubs or curved hooks
as the features of human contact are eliminated.
For Edvard Munch himself
human contact is becoming a matter of fear
fear of his own ego dissolving into the psyche
and into the body of another.
Colours, brushwork and lines express so much.
They're fantastic. No artist can compete with him.
To be honest, I don't like these paintings at all.
I'm no art expert but they don't say anything to me.
I don't like his art at all.
So unnatural, the colours are not natural: blue trees...
I don't like it.
His figures are no more than suggested.
Munch makes a powerful impression on me.
He reflects a great deal of humanity in his paintings
and shows brutal reality,
as life is.
I'm a compatriot of Munch and I've heard it said of him
that he's an awful, dreadful man. But I like it.
He says something about human beings
and he speaks to me.
I know a little about the situation. I feel that he speaks the truth.
This is how I really believe it is.
Working in hotel bedrooms, on park and railway station benches
in bars and restaurants
using the small piece of copper which he carries in his pocket
Edvard Munch begins his first engraving
the theme which he captured the prior year on his canvas
Death And The Maiden.
A naked woman, stretched on tip-toe
presses her full body into the embrace of Death.
Towards the end of the 19th century
a new interest has developed in the medium of the graphic.
In Germany, Munch
here in the company of a professor of graphic art at Berlin University
studies the latest trends in copper engraving.
In particular, the widely published etchings
of the German Max Klinger.
Here his cycle of eight developing studies entitled "Eine Liebe" -
A Love.
The technical brilliance of Klinger's work
its painstakingly studied detail, its use of black and white masses
its fashionable though superficially treated themes
of eroticism and despair, intrigue Munch
and reinforces his desire to treat a similar cycle
on afar deeper and more expressive level.
I met a young woman
on the street one evening.
Her eyes attracted me.
They were large childish eyes.
I looked at her. She turned and we walked together.
"Do you want to come up?" I said.
In my room she seemed a little shabbily dressed.
Her face was a little harrowed but her eyes
were beautiful.
"Why did you come with me?" I said.
"That's why I walk the streets."
Munch writes in his diary: "Ill, ill and lonely.
"He wanted to put his tired head
"on a soft lady's breast
"smell her perfume, hear her heartbeat.
"Feel her soft curved breasts to his cheek.
"And, when he looked up, meet her look above him
"and then he would close his eyes and feel her warm deep look
"and her soft, lustful smile.
"And then she would stroke his hair softly downwards...
"downwards..."
In Munch's diaries appear these words:
"I greeted.
"The girlfriend laughed a little.
"The pale one smiled a bit, too.
"May I introduce myself? Painter.
"I take the liberty... I want to paint you.
"I bought half a bottle of port and went to the studio with them."
"Then you'll come tomorrow?"
Yes.
She hid the flowers.
Neither her sister or father had noticed.
They would have laughed.
He thought of her all day.
She looked tired.
But she was kind.
Was it true?
"They stopped.
"Brandt looked at the large house sombre-looking between the trees.
"The maids had gone to bed.
"Then it was as if he was supposed to say something
"but was unable to find the words.
"'I have to go,' she said slowly.
"He put out his hand and took hers without shaking it.
"'Goodbye then,' he said and left."
"She was a swan.
"I lived down in the water among slime and horrible animals
"remembered a time when I lived up there.
"I forced myself up, reached for the swan.
"Couldn't reach it.
"I saw my face, terribly pale.
"I heard a shriek and I knew it was I who had cried.
"The swan was far away."
During the two years of 1893 and 1894, sometimes alone
sometimes with the help of Adolf Paul, biographer of Strindberg
Edvard Munch lists, labels, checks, crates and dispatches
upwards of 50 or 60 canvases
to each of nearly a dozen major exhibitions:
Dresden, Breslau, Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt.
He travels hundreds of miles by train.
Sorrow... Sunset...
Countless hotel bedrooms
often working on three or four canvases simultaneously
and always under attack.
In July 1894, at the age of 31
having painted for 14 years, created some 80 canvases
organised 30 exhibitions
Edvard Munch receives his first serious recognition as an artist
500 miles from his own homeland.
The publication in Berlin of four essays
by the influential art-critic Julius Meier-Graefe
Stanislaw Przybyszewski
and two other German critics.
The first evaluation of Edvard Munch's art
and its importance for the contemporary age.
Constantly seeking other forms of graphic art
Munch moves to etching and aquatint
the use of acid to bite the image
and a base of cooked resin powder to give added texture.
His theme, a man comforting a crying woman.
What would I not give if only I could once
put my arms about him and tell him how fond of him I am.
Shyness always came between us.
At this time, Strindberg is in Paris
already separated from his wife, living in the utmost poverty
engaged in chemical experiments trying to make gold from copper
about to begin the writing of his short story Inferno
an autobiographical study of psychological collapse.
He had a stroke on Monday evening and died three days later.
The book written by Meier-Graefe,
Przybyszewski and the two other critics
becomes a milestone
in understanding Edvard Munch's work.
A paraphrase of a line by Goethe
provides the best formula
for the impression which it radiates:
"Here and now
"a new phase begins in the history of art
"and you can say that you witnessed it."
1894.
President Carnot of France assassinated.
Alfred Dreyfus arrested.
In Sicily, food riots, martial law
suppression of the Italian socialist parties.
Japan declares war on China.
"How dark it grew at once.
"How vast and black the sky grew.
"Endless, listening, the stillness of death.
"Close, close and far, far away.
"How dark it grew. Stay with me tonight.
"My soul is frightened and anxious.
"The dark holds
"such strange shadows
"and the stillness such strange tones.
"My friends leave and I sit alone, deep into the night.
"What grows bright over the mountains?
"What glows over the sea? What glints in the dark?
"What burns in the wind?
"Not clouds against the red sky.
"Not the reflected light of a dead day.
"It is fire which licks and blood which runs
"A fiery sword and a fire-red river.
"It is the anguish of doomsday and the torments of death.
"A scripture which blazes through the halls of night.
"With the mysterious anguish of life.
"Deep in the night I sat alone.
"I felt how a pain-filled scream
"passed over the Godforsaken world."
October 1894.
The first exposure of Munch's work in Sweden, the land of Strindberg.
With one exception, the critics are merciless
even discovering points of similarity
in the erotomaniac drawings of the mentally deranged.
Edvard Munch returns to Berlin.
The Swedish Academy officially repudiates Munch's work, stating
that the Academy allies itself with "the verdict of rejection
"of which Edvard Munch has become the object on the continent."
All the others, some with faces red from tears and others white,
rang in Christmas, while outside the bells tolled.
In the other room stood the Christmas tree,
so gay and so sad.
Jesus, help me.
Will I go to heaven if I die?
I think so, my boy, if you have faith.
Much of the tension in Edvard Munch during these years
is his search for a "knot" to tie together
the disparate themes of his Life Frieze
to explain and clarify and unite them.
Now, a theme emerges.
The triple aspect of Munch's feelings for Woman:
the Temptress, the Devourer
for whom he has both a revulsion and a deep longing
the Virgin, the Innocent
for whom he has respect
the Giver of Life, the Mother, the Sacrifice
for whom he has compassion.
The complexity
of Munch's suffering, of his art
is that each of these three images, for him...
are one and the same woman.
April 19, 1895.
Munch's younger brother Peter Andreas marries Johanne Kinck
age 22, daughter of a headmaster
with, it is said, the mental age of a girl of 12.
Munch writes: "He should not have gone through with it.
"From father's side of the family we inherited poor nerves.
"Then there was mother's lung weakness..."
The year 1895.
H. G. Wells writes The Time Machine.
Sigmund Freud founds psychoanalysis.
Italian troops advance into Ethiopia.
And Edvard Munch creates a new lithograph
Self-portrait with Skeleton Arm.
"Then I thanked her shortly and accompanied her to the gate.
- "'Won't you come inside?' - 'No, thanks, it's getting late. '
"She looked a little bit disappointed, I thought.
"I went home quickly, rather satisfied with myself.
"I felt I had got a small revenge."
"A lady dressed in black.
"He quickly walked up the street after her.
"He started to run, ran like mad, pushing people away.
"He stopped, short of breath. He was ashamed, running like that.
"Fool. It wasn't her after all."
"At times the blood ran down the sheets.
"His father was on his knees in front of the bed praying.
"His hands stretched upward. His voice husky from crying.
"'Lord, I beg you. I demand from you.
"'Don't let him die today. He is not prepared.
"'I beg you, have mercy on us. Let him live.
"'He will always serve you. He has promised me that. '"
Can't you stay? It's so lovely here.
- No, I can't. - Don't you want to?
No.
How strange you are. Not like others.
He slept little that night. His lips burned.
He pressed his hand against them. He was back amongst the trees.
He felt again
how she gave way,
how everything disappeared
and the tickling softness against his mouth.
How often have you sat at home
and waited for your wife, listened for every step?
She said she was going to meet a woman friend...
a woman friend she seldom met.
October 1895.
The Blomqvist gallery in Kristiania.
Munch exhibits 40 works. Amongst them, The Life Frieze.
The exhibition is heavily attacked.
The newspaper Morgenbladet states: "so much nonsense and ugliness...
"dreadful... low and repulsive... grimacing and confused...
"crude and shrieking hideousness."
The newspaper Aftenposten
attacks The Life Frieze as being
"a number of sensual fantasies, the hallucinations of a sick mind."
A boycott of the building is called for and the police are summoned.
This is amongst
the worst I've seen. I don't understand any of it.
The colours are so ugly.
Besides, it's highly immoral.
One almost has to sneak in by the backdoor.
How can a young man who looks so nice create things like this?
One can't take one's family along and enjoy the art.
I don't advocate censorship but why should this be exhibited?
Children might see them.
Edvard Munch returns to Berlin.
Abroad people will wonder what sort of morals we have.
It's not just ugly.
He paints such unpleasant things
that one doesn't speak of, at least my husband and me.
I regard this as something which must come to an end.
In late November, Peter Andreas Munch
now married for six months, writes to his family
"I can't stand life anymore..."
and 3 weeks later is dead.
Many of Munch's contemporaries now rally to his support
realising that his art is probing into
a new and revolutionary understanding of the human psyche.
Munch seeks peculiarity, mystery in everything he sees.
He sees the world in wave-lines, trees, shorelines,
female hair, trembling bodies.
Like no other Norwegian painter,
Munch aims at making our innermost tremble.
Working on the theme of the staring, isolated faces
in his oil on canvas Anxiety
Munch now turns to the final of the graphic arts that he is to conquer:
woodcut.
Already he has seen the use made by Paul Gauguin
of the grain and texture in wood
the stark and simple outlines of the blocks
cut in Tahiti.
The Japanese use
of differently coloured contours of wood.
The instant impact in the use
of primary white and black
by the Frenchman Paul Valloton.
In this field Munch perhaps surpasses all his other work.
He invents a method of cutting out individual pieces of wood
shaped to various contours in the picture
inking the pieces in their different colours
and then fitting them back together again
like a jigsaw, ready for printing.
He uses the grain in the wood
and takes again the familiar themes of the Frieze of Life
reducing them to an essential force and simplicity
for which he has been searching for 10 years.
Seeking for more effective ways of spreading
his philosophy of life and death
constantly fighting against what he sees as
the suppression of his own personality
Edvard Munch turns more and more
to graphic art with its multiple prints.
Within one year his graphic output has tripled
as he turns from dry-point to etching to wood-cut
to lithography in black and white and colour.
In a letter written by the nurse of Peter Andreas Munch
were these words:
"He asked me to read a little to him on the Friday afternoon.
"He wanted Christ's speech from the summit.
"With each attack of suffocation I had to give him a shot of naphtha.
"In the last attack three shots.
"On the Saturday night, we put him in his bridegroom clothes."
Your paper has mentioned Munch's paintings as
"confused and inarticulate, dreadful
or nauseating distortions."
Yes.
Isn't that rather strong language?
Yes, it is. What we feel for Munch's painting is expressed
in a footnote I added personally to our review:
"It is true the public is annoyed by these disgusting works.
"How regrettable then that such exhibitions draw full houses.
"An empty gallery would best control these extravagances."
I agree with Aftonposten. This is not art, it is dirt.
For the next 14 years, Edvard Munch is to lead a life
of increasing pain and isolation.
His illness, aggravated by smoking and alcohol, is to grow worse.
He is torn by the themes of jealousy and suffering
by the thought of his own death
and his descent into a literal Hell.
The conservative press is to continue its attacks on his work
and other than for periods spent at Åsgårdstrand
where he once met with Mrs Heiberg
he is to spend most of 14 years
travelling endlessly from one country to another.
He is to paint a major theme, The Dance of Life
in which the couples do not see each other.
Look at these streets.
Human creatures set upon one another.
Buses run with countless human souls.
They look indifferently on the happy man, alone outside.
Though most of his work is to deal with the problems of human communication
Munch is to try again with two more relationships
one of which will result in physical and psychic injury
And following a nervous breakdown, he will finally place himself
into a psychiatric clinic in Copenhagen in 1908.
At the same time, Munch is to be notified
that he has been made a Knight
of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav.
Did you notice me much before?
Yes, I often looked at you.
I thought you looked like Christ.
Sit here.
We wish to thank the men, women and children of Oslo and Åsgårdstrand
who appear in this film.
Director of Photography
Lighting Supervisors Sound Supervisors
Production Designer Properties Supervisor
Costume Design Make-Up
Production Manager
We are very grateful for invaluable help from
Additional thanks
We wish to thank the staff at the Munch Museum in Oslo
without whose help this film could not have been made.
Directed and Edited by PETER WATKINS and written in collaboration
with the cast, many of whom express their own opinions.
Edvard Munch's aunt, Karen Bjølstad
will never marry.
His sister Inger will never marry.
Laura Munch will withdraw deeper into her isolation
and will spend a brief period in a clinic.
Oda Lasson is to break with with Gunnar Heiberg
and to become the lover of a Norwegian doctor
while remaining married to Christian Krohg.
Åse Carlsen will remain married
until her death at the age of 40.
Dagny Juel, accompanied by Stanislaw Przybyszewski
will go to Tiflis to meet with a Russian lover
who will shoot her through the head.
The woman known as "Mrs Heiberg" will divorce for the second time in 1911.
She and Edvard Munch will never meet again.
"I felt as if there were invisible threads between us.
"I felt as if invisible threads from her hair
"still twisted themselves around me.
"And when she completely disappeared there, over the ocean
"then I felt still how it hurt, where my heart bled
"because the threads could not be broken."