Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (Art Institute of Chicago) [Hardcover]

The catalogue for an exhibition held until april 2009 at the Art Institute in Chicago, this book is an interesting study that tries to debunk the myth surrounding the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Far from being the reclusive and emotionally unstable artist that history has made out of him, he actually revealed a keen sense of the world that surrounded him, and especially of the art world. The authors of the book emphasize the fact that Munch, contrary to what he wanted the public to believe, was the subject of many influences, whether by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Ensor, Whistler, Klinger, and many more. Several chapters strive to explain the real Munch, in his relationship to the artists who were his contemporaries, in his attitude towards the market and in the way he succeeded in creating a myth around himself and his art.

The illustrations are numerous, almost all of them in color, however, very few are full-page and there are almost no close-ups. Therefore, only 4 stars instead of 5...

This is a sumptuous catalogue of an exhibit attempting to visually place Munch in the context of the art world of his times. As such it proves a great opportunity for the Art Institute of Chicago to show off some of their excellent print holdings. I wish the volume was a little more generous with the size of the reproductions, but I suppose that's the difference between a $50 artbook and a $75 one.

While the accompanying essay imparts some interesting information (I knew nothing of the Norwegian tradition of Blue Mood Paintings), it unfortunately takes the show's conceit and goes full throttle to DeconstructionLand. It's as though the author is hoping to make a name for himself, or at least get another merit badge, by debunking the myth of Munch as the isolated mad genius. As if that myth has held any currency in decades!

Isolated: Well, duh, Munch lived in Berlin and Paris and traveled Europe widely and wildly and fairly incessantly. That's no secret. He saw, say, some Gauguins, and there was surely a bit of influence. But in the essay the author takes the supporting evidence (the works of the other artists also hanging) and tries to tie them directly to specific Munch pieces. That gets pretty silly pretty fast, especially when repetitively such assertions are amended with the observation that Munch coulda woulda shoulda might've maybe seen X work at the Y gallery or the A work at the B museum. Nothing like such sloppy loose conjecture presented as proof to kill a hypothesis.

Mad: By insisting Munch's careful handling of his career and public image proves he was perfectly sane, the author stupidly steps back 100 years to the black-or-white age of mental health. Since then, we've learned there is much gray in between. Consider a man who witnessed the death of his mother, and sister, from TB. Who had another sister placed in a mental asylum. Who wound up thankful for a bit of electroshock himself. Who wrote voluminous letters to prospective buyers. Who mostly refused to have any gallery, or agent, contractually represent him. Who, when he wound up having to sell one of his "Frieze of Life" paintings, would just paint another version. Check out the photos (not in this volume) of his open-air winter studio, thinking the harsh elements were beneficial to the canvases. While clearly functional, it seems nonsense to argue that Munch wasn't quite a few bottles short of a case.

Genius: Is this even in dispute? Check out the surfaces of his paintings. The scrubbed down yet drippy pigment. The canvases covered in a way that had never been done before, and that indeed anticipated treatment many decades in the future.

Text, and the slight inferiority of reproductions aside, this is a volume well-worth the purchase. It contains a number of Munch's paintings I'd never seen before, despite the monographs on my shelves. And again, thanks to the Art Institute of Chicago for opening a door into their Prints collection. While I'm sure there's surely a fat expensive volume devoted to Munch's graphic works, this is a very nice introduction.

My purpose in this review is to evaluate this exhibition and its accompanying essay. A potential buyer of this book must distinguish between the product descriptive abstract and a review. While Clarke states she offers "surprising connections and influences", and seeks to "resusitate forgotten nuance in his work," I do not see this book as a good perspective on Munch's work.

The book reproduces well enough for $32.00 the 145 pieces from the show, 27 Munch prints from the Museum's collection, 60 other Munch paintings, drawings and prints from various sources, and 58 pieces by other artists, 22 of which are also from the Museum's collections. These are the pieces used to show "influences." This show closed on April 26, 2009, just 20 days before the grand opening of the new Renzo Piano wing at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jay Clarke has reverted to "influences" in a trope style of the Warburg Institute (Panofsky, Wolfflin) in an attempt to dethrone the assumed monographic identity of the artist. She does this using a line of thought like Thomas Crow writing on Gericault: "[The singularity of an artist] is itself a quality that must be put together from bits and pieces of already existing models. And the more one knows about the ambitious young artists who came immediately before him, the less idiosyncratic [the artist's] impulses seem." Nineteenth Century Art

The real problem is that the anxiety of influence belongs to Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry; Deconstruction and Criticism. I suppose she does this by disassociating the "anxiety" from the "influence" to make it look like generic thought, instead of what it is.

Bloom writes: ""Influence" is a metaphor, one that implicates a matrix of relationships- imagistic, temporal, spiritual, psychological- all of them ultimately defensive in nature. What matters most....is that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call "poetic misprision." What writers [artists] may experience as anxiety , and what theiir works are compelled to manifest, are the consequence of poetic misprision, rather than the cause of it. The strong misreading comes first; there must be a profound act of reading that is a kind of falling in love with a literary [artistic] work. That reading is likely to be idiosyncratic and it is almost certain to be ambivalent, though the ambivalence may be veiled."

Bloom finishes by saying that we would have less Keats without Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, no Tennyson without Keats, and no Wallace Stevens without Whitman, even though Stevens was "hostile to all suggestions that he owed anything to his precursor poets [artists].

Jay Clarke's show also borrows heavily from two previous French Musee D'Orsay Shows, in spirit and content: Rodolphe Rapetti and Arne Eggum's collaboration on Munch in Paris Munch: Et La France (French Edition), from which Clarke lifts two of Rapetti's visual comparisons, an act of museum curatorship/authorship, without specific acknowledgement, and Serge Lemoine's massive "lineage of influence" show in Venice which attempted to show that Modernism's father was Puvis de Chavannes, not Cezanne Toward Modern Art: From Puvis de Chavennes to Matisse and Picasso.

Munch came to France "influenced" by the Norwegians Jaeger and Krogh, and though he looked up to France as Rapetti (and Jens Thiis) point out, he bounced through France faster than a steel ball falling to the bottom of a Pachinko machine. No engagement, not much studio or studio crits. Clarke does expand our view of Germany in this discussion. But in general, offering various representations of people kissing, looking out windows, bathing and swimming, this is expoiting the credulity of the public while trying to reform it. There is no way to get from Munch the Realist to Munch the Symbolist by way of Monet, or many of the other works used as influence in this show.

This show comes on the heals of three other recent shows which have dealt with all of these issues: The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch: The Vivian and David Campbell Collection (Prelinger/Parke-Taylor/Schjeldahl), After the Scream: The Late Paintings of Edvard Munch (Prelinger), Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (McShine/Heller/Berman/Yarborough.)

Ever since the 60's, when I encountered the Munch Museet only three years after opening it doors, the writing of Arne Eggum, Ragna Stang, and Reinhold Heller, added to by Elizabeth Prelinger in the current generation, have served only to expand our view of the artist, the period, and the Norwegian nation.

In contrast to Clarke's assertions of reform, this is just another Munch show, maybe one too many. It is the way it is because the Director and the Curator made it that way. It attracts visitors to the museum, who might come back to see the new wing of the museum. Those visitors will see the "Scream" again, and see the good people of Oslo walking west on the north side of Karl Johan's Gate down from the Storting at sunset, with their anxious eyes, because the curators have put these paintings there once again...You can't have it both ways...

Clarke reminds me of Mary Louise Elliot Krumrine writing on Cezanne, Paul Cezanne: The Bathers, who might be Clarke's mentor, as Clarke gives her a nod using a gratuitous comment about Munch and misogyny similar to that which appears in Krumrine's model of Cezanne. This turns into an epithet overlaying scholarship.

Abilgail Solomon-Godeau, writing on Gauguin, offers a better model for the evolution of communicating "what the public needs to know." See her two essays, the infamous article "Going Native", Art in America LXXVII, 07/89, followed 20 years later by her essay in the catalog of the recent Rome Gauguin show at the Complesso del Vittoriano, Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth and Dream (Eisenman).