Edvard Munch as landscapist: luminous meditations on nature — review

Edvard Munch transfigured mental distress into indelible icons, so we must be grateful for the anguish and loneliness that drove him to create such soul-stirring images. A woman with blood-red hair sinks her teeth into a man’s prone neck in “Vampire”. An erotic “Madonna” beckons with ecstasy and pain. In “The Kiss”, a man and woman’s faces blur into one flesh as they devour each other. And then there’s “The Scream”, the painting that embodies torment so graphically that it birthed an emoji.

But forget, for a while, about the artist who popularised, as he put it, “the black angels of sickness, insanity and death”. The magnificent Trembling Earth at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, gives us another Munch, a bard of sublime Norwegian forests, luminous midsummer nights and early winter gloamings. Munch the landscapist coexists with the connoisseur of affliction. In his vision, spruces, gardens and fjords are projections of the soul, and human figures fuse to the earth just as they merge with each other. Bodies are stormy and hills fleshy. The coastline cries. 

Nature served Munch as a subtle, indirect way to express his ever-roiling feelings. The landscapes are not his most famous works, but the best are better than the poster-ready celebrities. Large, opulent and (at the Clark) generously spaced, they allow viewers to meditate on nature as window and mirror: we go outside ourselves in order to dig deeper within.

Curators Jay Clarke, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen and Jill Lloyd have wisely avoided a chronological show. That decision spares us the grim arc of Munch’s decline, which was early and steep. Instead, they’ve organised the exhibition by theme, dipping into his later work judiciously, plucking sparks of brilliance out of dark psychic currents.

The result is a choral show that has room to expand and breathe, so that paintings sing to each other down a wall or across a room. Gradually, we discern that in Munch’s cosmology, there is no great difference between psyche and terrain, life and death, emotion and stone. In the woodcut “Melancholy II”, a woman’s long black hair obscures her face and merges with the darkly flowing shoreline, constructing a highway for feeling to pass between the mortal and the eternal.

A motley army of boulders tumbles across a stretch of “Beach” (1904), one of Munch’s lesser-known masterpieces. Each distinctive rock resembles a body part — a head, a liver, a limb — and all of them quiver with life, rolling as if propelled by some magnetic force. Munch wrote: “In the pale nights, the forms of nature have fantastical shapes. Stones lie like trolls down by the beach. They move.”

He was drawn to a few slices of German and Norwegian coastline, and returned again and again to the fjordside village of Åsgårdstrand, south of Oslo. Already in the late 19th century, the town was evolving into a summertime tourist destination. It’s a placid place now, just as it was then, with houses lined up along the shore across from a pleasant marina. A cobbled street leads gently uphill. 

But Munch transformed it into a wuthering set for his psychodrama, and the Clark lays out exactly how he accomplished that wizardry. In “The Girls on the Bridge”, an evolving series of woodcuts and paintings, three girls — or, in some iterations, three women — lean over the railing of what he called a bridge but is actually a pier. From version to version, you watch the perspective get more assertive, the street rise more urgently, the wide-shouldered linden tree grow bulkier and more ominous. 

Munch was fascinated by that tree, which shaded a large villa called Kiøsterudgården. (The house still stands; the tree is gone.) It appears often, as a beacon, a skull or a mountain, changing roles but constant in its regal presence. In his summertime paintings, it appears as a mass of green, solid and sheltering as the villa itself. But in a wintry scene in 1905, its leafless branches arc up and out so that they resemble blood vessels or alveoli. The tree looks explicitly anatomical, a two-lobed amalgam of brain, lungs and heart. More than animate, it is quasi-human. 

Trees made ready metaphors for Munch. Sometimes they exist in harmony with people, as in “Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice)”, where a woman stands stiffly amid an honour guard of evergreens, the reflection of moon on water echoing her columnar pose. Body, trunk and play of light all share the same solidity and stillness, a hushed readiness to come alive. 

At other times, nature expresses what people can’t. In “Young Woman Under the Apple Tree” (1904), the ostensible protagonist fixes the viewer in a deadpan stare, but she’s upstaged by the greenery at her shoulders. The fruit tree goes berserk, flinging branches in all directions, melting, splashing into the sky. Munch’s mind was undergoing a similar process, as he tipped into mental illness. The following year, he started making the rounds of spas to treat his emotional instability and alcoholism. 

For a while, living on the edge of chaos allowed him to thrive artistically. He kept both the menace inside his brain and his eerie, agitated flora under control. Anxiety and illness gave his work its dramatic power. That semi-stability gave way by 1908, though, and he was hospitalised with a full-blown nervous breakdown. After that, his focus dissipated into incoherent, brushy compositions that lacked his old core of ardour. 

Fortunately, the Clark’s curators have found a few later works that summon a powerful response. In “Apple Tree by the Studio” (1920), yet another apple tree appears from several vantage points at once. We see its low-hanging fruit from above, as if we were birds eyeing it for sustenance. But we are also enveloped by protective, even nurturing, foliage. Beyond its safe perimeter, terrible things can happen: right beside it, a ghostly figure dissolves into a swirl of blue and yellow strokes, and all that’s left is a featureless head hovering above the grass. 

Munch revered Van Gogh and, in 1893, he produced his own “Starry Night”, a nocturne of dread that’s unfortunately missing from the show. That big familiar linden presides over the Nordic coastline like a purple skull against the greenish sky.

Three decades later, he returned to the subject with slightly less foreboding. Stars outshine the sky’s pale glow, and a friendly yellow light from distant windows alleviates the gloom. Munch even smuggles an incongruously Mediterranean-looking pair of cypresses into the Nordic landscape, perhaps in homage to Van Gogh’s obsession with that particular tree. Even in Munch’s troubled age, and long past his period of reliable productivity, a few late spasms of optimism and dread contend in glorious tension.

To October 15, clarkart.edu