In Our Time - Munch and The Scream

Episode Date: March 18, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests David Jackson, Dorothy Rowe and Alastair Wright discuss the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, focusing on his most famous painting, The Scream.First exhibited in 1893 in Berlin, The Scream was the culmination of Munch's magnum opus, a series of paintings called The Frieze of Life. This depicted the course of human existence through burgeoning love and sexual passion to suffering, despair and death, in Munch's highly original, proto-expressionist style. His titles, from Death in the Sickroom, through Madonna to The Vampire, suggest just how directly and unironically he sought to depict the anxieties of late-19th century Europe.But against all Munch's images, it is The Scream which stands out as the work which has seared itself into the Western imagination. It remains widely celebrated for capturing the torment of existence in what appeared to many in Munch's time to be a frightening, godless world.Munch himself endured a childhood beset by illness, madness and bereavement. At 13, he was told by his father that his tuberculosis was fatal. But he survived and went on to become a major figure first in the Norwegian, then the European, avant-garde. He became involved with two of the great playwrights of the period. He collaborated with his fellow countryman Henrik Ibsen and became a close friend of the tempestuous Swede August Strindberg. He admired the work of Post-Impressionist painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom influenced his art. Munch's own influence resonated through the 20th century, from German Expressionism to Andy Warhol and beyond. His work, particularly The Scream, remains powerful today.David Jackson is Professor of Russian and Scandinavian Art Histories at the University of Leeds; Dorothy Rowe is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol; Alastair Wright is University Lecturer in the History of Art at St John's College, University of Oxford.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1893 in Berlin, a Norwegian artist exhibited a disturbing image. Several figures are walking along a promenade. Above is a blood-red sky. Below, tiny boats float in a fjord. All this is depicted in long, thick, swirling lines of paint. At the front of the picture, one of the figures is staring out at us. He is a face like a skull, his hands are pressed to the sides of his head, and he appears to be screaming. Edward Monk made several versions of the scream, in paint and in prints. And in the century since, it's become astonishingly famous. Monk had endured a childhood

ravaged by madness, sickness and death to become a highly original artist, and the scream is the best known of a powerful series of images which capture the intense anxieties that troubled Europe at the birth of the modern era. Some argue that Monk remained forever burdened by the traumas of his early years. Others contend that his tortured artist persona was a canny fashion-conscious construction. Either way, his work is at a profound impact on painting and beyond. With me to discuss Edvard Monk and the Scream,

Adorothy Rowe, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol, Alastair, Wright, University of History of Art at St. John's College University of Oxford, and David Jackson, Professor of Russian and Scandinavian art histories at the University of Leeds. David Jackson, can you give us some idea of Edward Munk's early life? Yeah, I think it was an absolute nightmare. It was an anxiety of youth, which I think did mark his work, and I don't think this is anything to do with a later designer image.

He grew up in an atmosphere of stultifying fundamentalist religion from a father who kept his family fiercely in check. He was sick. all of his childhood. His mother died from tuberculosis when he was five. His sister, to whom he was exceedingly close, died when she was only 15, when he was a few years younger than her. He had mental illness in the family. He had a sister who had schizophrenia. And he said at one point that sickness, insanity and death were the things which marked his childhood and that they followed him through his life. He also, when he was only 13 years old, he himself,

contracted tuberculosis, and he was given up for dead. Basically, the family sat around his bed as 13-year-old at Christmas time in 1875, and his father basically told him to prepare for death, to prepare to meet his maker. And Munk later on, who was a prolific writer of his own biography, not for publication, but I think for his own catharsis, Munk left an exceedingly poignant account of how at 13 years old he sat there on his bed, coughing up blood, his whole chest moving and rolling inside, and gave himself up for dead,

and his father gave him up for dead as well. So I think those things mark him, and you see that reoccurring time and time again in his paintings, that he tries to exercise these things, the image of the sick room, the image of the mother. These come back year and year out. There was another scientist from him, though, that enabled him to get on quite quickly

when he decided to be a painter. He had relations who were painters, they were eminent in the society of the time. He was a good middle-class family which could push him forward and support him in the early years. We moved into Christiania, now Oslo, into Bohemian circles. Can you give us some idea of what sort of society he was moving into then? Yeah, I think there are two things there, both the society

and then the Bohemian circle which reacted against that society. The society was exceedingly conservative, Protestant, bourgeois, in all of the senses that that term conveys, that it was a very rigid and hierarchical society where freedoms were really limited. It was characterized by labor unrest. There was no welfare, no safety net. The use of child labor was endemic.

Nearly a third of the workforce were children. There was very little control on the hours they would work. So it was a deeply divided society in many ways, but a very complacent middle-class society as well. But one of the chief characteristics of that society, which the Christiania Bohemia then, reacted against, and you see this in the literature in the painting of the time, is that

they also had a state-controlled prostitution, that a series of state-controlled brothels were part and parcel of that society, and they were regulated by the police, the prostitutes had to have weekly inspections for an aerial disease, which was aimed not at protecting them, but at protecting their middle-class Christian clientele. And this was, again, part and parcel of the

Christian bourgeois society, which the bohemians reacted fiercely against. But there was this behemian society, one of whose members came out with the glorious phrase, I will not rest until I have corrupted my generation. Munk did take art classes and he had a cousin who was a famous artist in Norway at the time, and then he went to Paris, Alistairite in the 1880s, where he encountered many other artists, of course, and also the work of the impressionists. Can you tell us what impact Paris had on him?

Sure. As you say, he had a cousin in Norway, Fritz Taulo, who is a famous painter in Noy, but also in Paris. And the first time that Monk goes to Paris is in 1885 with the financial support of Taulo, and probably also some letters of introduction. So Monk has a good entree into the Paris art world. The more important visits for Monk begin in 1889. He arrives just in time to catch the tail end of the Universal Exhibition,

which was for the centenary of the French Revolution. And there he could see a vast array of French painting from the last century. So he very quickly gets up to speed with the public. past of French painting. He can also see in private galleries around Paris the work of the Impressionists. So, for example, Monet is showing his first paintings of the Givini Garden. What he seems to become particularly interested in, though, is the work of a younger generation of painters who are coming up in the wake of Impressionism and seeing themselves in some way as being opposed to impressionism. So, for example, he toys for a while with pointillism, which is the style of Georges

Sera. But he seems to have been even more drawn to the more expressive side of the post-impressionist generation. So he looks, for example, at Gagin. And Gagin, it's worth pointing out, was married to the sister of the sister of Fritz Towers, the cousin of Monk. So he has connections to Gagin, and it's clear that he learns something by looking at Gagin's work when he arrives in Paris. He learns about simplifying his paintings using more straightforward and solid blocks of powerful colour. And part of what he's beginning to be interested in, I think, in using that sort of technique, is to allow the painting to have a kind of direct expressivity.

He also seems to be looking quite closely at someone like Toulouse L'Trek. And what he picks up from Toulouse L'Trekich is an interest in an expressive line, almost a caricatural line that stamps character into the faces of the people that the image depicts. He also picks up, I think, from Toulouse the Tresk, a use of diluted paint that soaks into the canvas. And again, this lends a kind of expressive power. What about the impact of Van Gogh? He saw an exhibition of Van Gogh's works, didn't he?

Yeah, I think Van Gogh is very important for Monk. Van Gogh, as we know, shoots himself at the end of 1890, and that was a deep shock for the small world of the Parisian avant-garde. There's an posthumous retrospective in the spring of 1891, at which Van Gogh is presented as the kind of great, mourned, young, potential leader of the avant-garde. We know that Monk almost certainly went to see that exhibition, And I think he picks up from Van Gogh, first the idea that painting should not imitate the appearance of things,

that it should set itself a more profound or deeper goal, which is to get to things that you can't see with the naked eye. So to get to emotions, to try to be able to represent or to present in your painting deep psychological states. And the second thing, of course, that he gets from Van Gogh is the idea that what painting might do is to present to the public a tortured soul. I think what makes Monk unique in a way is that he picks up a set of formal tools, expressive tools from French painting or painting that's happening in Paris, but combines that with what people at the time at least were inclined to see as a northern European sensibility that's much more interested in melancholy, in states of distress, in angst and so forth. And that's not to say, of course, that the painters working in Paris didn't also talk in that way at times. Gogam was as melancholic as any of them. but it tends to mark their work a little bit less. And for Monk, the work becomes about expressing that sort of feeling.

Doherty Row, he then spent much time in Berlin, where he met the Swedish player at August Stringberg, and they became friends, unlikely on both counts in a way. But they became close friends and met at this pub called The Black Pig. Can you talk about that friendship and the influence that Berlin life had on him? The Monk arrived in Berlin in 1992 on the invitation of the Association of Burmerell. Berlin artists to exhibit with them. And that led to instant notoriety for Monk,

which I think we'll probably come back to shortly. Well, nice of you say, tell us now, and then we get a little teister. Okay. Well, he was invited by a young painter called Valta Leicesterkov to exhibit in Berlin in 1892 at the Fe Réinde Berliner, the Association of Berlin Artists. And really, Valta Leiccoff had heard about Monk's exhibition in Christiana and about some of the furoré that had been caused by that exhibition

and was interested in this and wanted something fresh to bring to the Association of Berlin Artists. So invited Monk for a solo show and really used Monk as a catalyst to cause discontent within the Association of Berlin Artists, which he did because...

The Berlin artist didn't realize what kind of paintings Monk was going to be exhibiting. And when they opened the exhibition, they thought that art had become sick and the kind of association of degeneration was associated with... So what was he showing that offended them? He wasn't showing historically-based narrative painting anymore. He had completely changed the rules of what it was

that the Association of Berlin artists were used to. He wasn't showing romantic landscapes. He wasn't showing historical or narrative scenes. He was focusing on lots of individual pictures in which themes of love and death and psychological emotion became the subject matter. In contemporary life? Without contemporary references, without any kind of external references,

kind of inner moods, well, what was being portrayed in his work. And that was completely antithetical to the traditional mode of painting within Germany at the time, in which was a big tussle within the German in Berlin's Artists' Association about what painting should be and what German painting particularly should be. And so Lysdikov, by inviting Munk, caused a split, and the association didn't want to be impolite to Munk by closing his exhibition down and they had to vote on this. They didn't comment on the painting.

They didn't feel they could comment on Munk's painting, but they wanted to close the exhibition down so they did it on the grounds that the painting wasn't appropriate for what they wanted to show. So they got rid of it in about a week. To Monk's absolute delight, as far as that right now. Yes, he absolutely loved it. He didn't realise that a painting could close as much fast,

he wrote back full of glee. Yeah, he wrote to his tant of Karen and said, I'm going to need frock coats and money because I shall be invited to all the parties in Berlin now. And he became an overnight success in Germany. And that really very much kind of sealed his fame in Germany. Germany and sealed his notoriety, particularly for a new generation. So that was the one aspect of his rival in Berlin.

The other was, as he said, he's entering the Black Tavern with Stringberg and Stavislov Pravidzky. And they kind of were a sort of set of expat communities who shared ideas. And one of the ideas that they shared was, well, there were two, in fact, I think that was significant for both Monk and Stringberg. One was a challenge to Lessing's Leocon. When Monk arrived in Berlin He had a letter of introduction to Julius Elias who worked at the university in Berlin and was just editing a new edition of Lessing's Leocon

which was an 18th century aesthetic treatise on the relations between painting and literature and the differences between art and literature Monk arrived just at the point when Elias was editing the leicon and so inevitably monk probably had a discussion with Elias about the treaties, about the aesthetic treaties and it's something that later critics of Monk's work in Germany picked up. And the issue that Monk addressed was for Lessing,

the difference between painting and poetry was that poetry could unfold a narrative and literature could unfold a narrative over a sequential period of time, whereas in painting and representation, the artist had one moment in which to capture both the past and the present and the future in one moment. And so what both Monk-Anstrandberg did

was in a sense take that idea of Lessing's and challenge it. And so what Monk then started to do was think about, series of works, and that became the freeze of life in which the scream is a part. 55 works, though, yeah. Yeah, and 55 works initially and then 22 in the first exhibition. And they were all supposed to be held together as a series as a total work of art. So that was a kind of counter to Lessing's sense that you could only have one image that had to capture everything.

And Stringberg's response was to develop this idea of one-act play, the theatre of intimacy, in which everything was focused on the internal rather than the external there were no intervals and no gaps. It seems to be ideas and David Jackson that they were discussing were as much to do with philosophers around the place as to do with painters. For instance, they were very interested in Nietzsche, although we don't think Monk met Nietzsche,

he did a portrait of him. We're turning to talk in this part of the program about the scream itself, but what part did Nietzsche play in his thinking at this time? Well, Nietzsche was something that he read voraciously throughout his life and that he paid a certain homage to it. He did also with Dostoevsky as well, actually. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were the two things which he, read most frequently.

And I think what he was picking up particularly from Nietzsche and what was being debated earlier in the Christianabohem was the notion that with the downfall of what you might call the Christian morality and the belief now that God was dead, what would you replace this with? And we're in some aspects of the M that was very negative and the answer was you were a sentient being and your duty was simply to follow your material needs

and your senses and feed those. Munk's reaction was much more positive and that was to set himself with the frees of life to examine those things which we have in common. Nietzsche was an influence on him in the sense that this gave him a framework within which to discuss and consider those aspects of the non-religious life, the internal life, which we all share, and which he would then find common ground in painting the frieze of life. The word godless has often been used in relation to the painting of the screen.

Let's talk about that in some detail now. We have a, we have a, I did it in the trail But there's no reason why we should repeat it We have a description from Mulk himself About how he arrived at I was inspired perhaps How arrived at doing this painting He says in one of his memoirs at this time

And I would quote this He says, I was walking along a path with two friends The sun was setting Suddenly the sky turned blood red I paused feeling exhausted And leaned on the fence There was blood and tongues of fire Above the blue black fjord and the city

my friends walked on and I stood there trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature It's interesting that he works from that sort of impulse rather than from a painting, well it is painted because he's seeing the blood red sky Yeah I mean one of the things he famously said in relation to the clash here between a representative form of art which in whatever size and whatever style takes as its subject matter the physical world, the perceived ocular world,

and something which then goes beyond that to the internalised world. I think it's interesting that one of the things Monk was very specific about was that you had to paint what you saw with your senses, and therefore if, as he claims, he saw the sky blood red and he experienced it blood red, that was how he should paint it. This is not about replicating nature. It's not about what you see through the eye. I personally think that the power of this world,

work and the significance of this work is that it's a sort of a blank page in a sense. You can liken it to a Room 101 where you can put into that work anything that you like and that Room 101 is not about a particular dread, it's about the dread you bring to it. So the resonation of that work, which still is alive today, is that without knowing the quote, and even with the quote, we're not quite sure, is the figure blocking out the scream? Most people think the figure is screaming. but I think what you bring to it is your own personal dread, your own personal neuroses,

and that work still has that resonance. Dorothy Roe, can I come back to a point, still to obvious on this painting? First, I'd like to talk about how I thought the landscape was, but how, because how were ideas? David Jackson just told us he read Nietzsche all his life, Stringberg, what ideas were, how did they feed in? The landscape, first of all,

and then what idea is he giving them? I am going to do a painting which shows the god-lestone, lessness of life. Was that around? Yeah, well, I think that the idea of the scream and the idea of the figure in the landscape is something that Monk draws on from the romantic tradition of the early 19th century in which artists like Caspar David Friedrich began to address the role of man's relationship to nature in relationship to the infinite. So in which man is centered in a direct relationship with nature rather than deferring

to the role of God within nature. And it's about the exploration of the individual's play. within the infinite landscape. And I think in the later 19th century when monk was painting, that becomes focused much more on the inner psychology of man's feelings in relationship to nature as well. And I think it also comes, this is where, again, Nietzsche's nihilism comes in,

because with Nietzsche's nihilism, which basically announces the end of kind of dogmatic Christian religion, but not the end of spirituality, Nietzsche gives a role to new artists, which is why he's taken up so well by Monk and the German expression. It's the replacement in a way. Yeah, it's through the artists that cultural and spiritual renewal can be found. And so a lot of these artists take this on board very seriously and then begin to address then what is the artist's role in relationship to this nature.

And I think what's interesting about the quotation that you've cited is that he talks about the infinite scream of nature. It's not his scream. It's the scream. It's the scream that we're looking at is the scream. He's blocking out the scream rather than uttering the screams. Yeah, it's about, it's not. about the individual screaming, actually. It's about how the scream of nature is being perceived and received by the individual in the painting, I think. Anastair, right, there was very much a movement in the late 19th century and earlier,

and often before that the city was degrading and alienating and unnatural, and the natural world was the true place and a refuge. How does that play into the scream? I think one of the things that monk does is essentially to obliterate that distinction. There's a painting he does in 1892, just a year before, called Evening on Carl Johann. That was the main boulevard that ran down the middle of Christiania. And it's a rather similar painting to the screen. We're faced by not a single figure, but by a small crowd of figures,

also looking slightly ghostly, slightly skeletal, who stare out at us. And the idea of the painting, I think, is precisely one of urban alienation, that you're alone in the crowd, that you don't know the crowd, that you feel anxious faced by this onrushing kind of, of claustrophobic press of figures. What's interesting is that when he's out there on the little path, looking out across the fjord, he expresses a very similar idea. It's also about anxiety.

So you're saying that the city and the fjord being, as it were, nature, there's not a distinction there, not a distinction that matters? I think for monk, that distinction becomes less important. It becomes all about his projection onto, in a way, whatever he sees. He sees a crowd, he feels anxious, he sees a blood-red sunset, out of which, of course, if you're a different sort of painter, you could make a beautiful painting, but he feels anxiety, he says,

claims that he trembles with anxiety and produces a very similar kind of painting. It's worth thinking perhaps about why the scream is the painting that has remained from that period. It's interesting that Monk had painted an identical work the year before, except that instead of this somewhat skeletal figure staring out at us, those are portrait, something like a self-portrait of monk,

a youngish man with dark hair, away into the side. And that's not the painting that we all know. It's the scream that we know. And I think it's because the screen really does something incredibly powerful. First, because the figure is looking at it, so it pins us, and we've locked into the logic of this terrifying painting. And the second, because the figure is de-individualized. So you don't feel that you're looking at a young man with whom you might not identify. You feel you're looking at a kind of blank canvas, into which you can project yourself. And so it's a work that really, if you wanted to make painting that conveyed as expressively as possible the feeling of anguish, whether because you thought

you could sell it or because you felt that way. This is a painting that does it absolutely brilliantly. Before we put it into his larger scheme of things, the way he painted it, it was painted on cardboard. Can we just talk about the artifact? He often painted on cheap material, and he, early in life he did that because he had to do that. That was about all he could afford. He famously, in many occasions, simply didn't have the cost of canvas or paint and would beg borrow short of steel from anybody he could. Later in life he carried on using relatively cheap materials because it suited his aesthetic.

But you see with the first version, the four versions of the screen in paint, and there are many more in the graphic media, you see in that first version, firstly that it's done on cardboard. He mixes media. One of the things he did is, if you like, an anti-art statement. Alistair talked about the use of very things. thin layers and allowing the process to show through. He mixed his media.

He was very happy that people would see that it wasn't finished work, that you would perceive the cardboard through the different layers of pastel and pencil. There is actually within the sky, within some of the waving, frenetic lines in the sky, there's a pencil inscription which says could only have been painted by a madman. There's some debate as to whether that was put on later or whether Munk put that on. I like to think Munk put it on because I like to think he had some concept

a ironic concept of the way he was being perceived. He was not a man without a sense of humour, actually. But one of the things which characterised this work and others, but he was very keen that you saw the process of making and part of the controversy he courted all of his life and was certainly there in that first Berlin debargue was that one of the chief things that was thrown at him was that the works were not finished.

And at this time, to call the work unfinished, was pretty much the worst you could say about something. And he was very keen. throughout his life that you would see the process. He hated, he never varnished. He thought that was to freeze, encapsulate, and kill a painting dead. He never varnished. He didn't like the use of frames.

And he also had famously something which he called the horse cure. And this was basically, he left his paintings to fend for themselves. People who visited monk would often find paintings in the yard, being rained on, being snowed upon. Famously, in one instance, that one of his dogs ran through a canvas and broke it, and when he was asked why he did this, he simply said it does them good to fend for themselves,

and that he had this view that paintings should have an organic life. One of the ironies about the scream, one might just say briefly, is that when it was stolen and when it came back, it was quickly jumped upon by a small army of conservators who wanted to get it back to its state, whereas Monk would have been happy to say its organic life went on, it had a bit of adventure, it came home, and whatever marks were left on it after that

would have been part of its natural development. And Dorothy, Roe, can we talk about the freeze of life a little more? This is a great number of paintings, conceived as a big work. Why did that appeal to Monco? I think when he first exhibited in Berlin with the 55 paintings in the Fehrin in the Association of Berlin Artists in 18902

before the screen had been painted, he stood back from that exhibition, apart from all notoriety that it achieved, and actually realised that what was, occurring amongst the paintings that he exhibited in that one was that there were certain themes coming out of them. And I think throughout his period in Germany and in Europe, before he went back to Norway in 1908,

he treated each exhibition as an organic experience. And each time he exhibited these group of works, they mutated, they changed and he added to them. And so when he exhibited the freeze of life in 1893, he'd begun the next stage of this organic series. Can you give us some idea of what some of the other paintings are about? Yeah, well, the first one, the opening one... Just a few ideas, go and we'll get all that much time.

Bounce along and give us three or four ideas. Okay. I think the exhibition opened with Death in the Sick Room of 1893, and I think that one's... it was a big opening exhibition and a big opening painting for the exhibition. And it's different then from the subsequent set of six that become studies on the series of Love in which the Scream is the last one of the six. So Death and Sick Room opened. it's a bit of a Stringbergian

kind of stage scene in many ways the death in a sick room. It's like a scene from a Stringberg play where the focus is not so much on the person dying and God but on the character's threat. Then you have the six of the paintings which are the Summer Night's Dream, the kiss,

love and pain which became known as the vampire, the face of the Madonna, jealousy and despair which then became known as the scream afterwards. And each one is like a stage in the process of the flowering of love, it's blossoming, its problems through jealousy,

and its passing and bitterness. And intensely personal, Anastor, we're talking about this particular artist. I mean, amazingly, amazingly autobiographical in one sense. Yeah, I would be inclined to treat with some caution the claim that these comes straight out of his life

and that we can read these as autobiographical documents. What seems to be clear, from the moment as Dot said, the moment he arrives in Germany and starts creating something of a furor. He's quite pleased about this. And I think he picks up fairly quickly that there is, this is going to sound too cynical, but that he realizes that there's a kind of market there

for the stereotype of the slightly imbalanced, mournful, brooding, Scandinavian artists. So you think his marketing is flawed personality? I think that might be. What Evans do you have for that? simply that the circles that he comes out of the Christiania Bohemia

they're doing that all the time the game becomes to write literature and to make art out of your own life so Hans Yeager who's the chap that you quoted earlier saying he wouldn't rest until he'd corrupted his entire generation or driven it to suicide he has a three-cornered affair with the wife to be of Christian

Crowe because another of the painters in Christiania who supports Gogh early on, and then publishes as a novel the love letters that he received from the woman. So there's a whole kind of industry of making, as I say, making literature or making art out of your personal experiences. And for those to sell, for those to fly in that circle,

the experiences have to be bad. You can't write novels about nice picnics that you had with your family when you were young. There has to be a kind of trauma there. And I think it's true, of course, that Monk has, there are great many depressing events in his childhood and that the circles he's running with are circles that are often teetering on the edge of insanity. So Stringberg becomes convinced, or at least claims in writing to have become convinced

that Shibishevsky and Monk were trying to kill him. So there's some truth to the idea that something like insanity is stalking this painter. But I think it's also, he's very, A lot of the stuff that we have are public statements. So the statement about the screen is published, it accompanies the painting, the various versions of the paintings. That doesn't invalidate the fact that it could be real, that it's public, doesn't undermine that?

It doesn't necessarily. But one just has the feeling that he cottons onto something. And I think he cottons onto Van Gogh after the death of Van Gogh, that he realizes that a space has been opened up by the death of Van Gogh for this sort of painting. Dorothy, can I take up what Alastair is saying because it's very interesting. How far do you think he did many prints of the screen?

He did many prints of his work, thousands of them. He worked at his work. He wanted to sell his work. He wanted his work to be seen. As most artists do, they wanted to be read, seen, heard or whatever it is. How far do you think that this was a sort of professional... I didn't see why we should call it calculating,

but how far do you think that operated in the way he worked? Yeah, I think there are two things going on with the multiplication of the same image. in Monk's career. And I think the first one is, you know, the market opportunity that arises. He's extremely happy with the success of his Berlin exhibitions and his notoriety in Germany, and the money it raises for him. So he's very happy with that, obviously, because he needs to make a living. But there's also a sense in which the freeze of life is this total work of art for him. It's what's known as a Guzamt Kunstwerk in Germany, which means total work of art.

And each painting within the frieze is a spiritual fragment of the greater whole. and he wanted to keep the freeze of life together and show it together and eventually donate it as a whole to a museum in Oslo when he died and that was conditions of the donation and so I think what he realised there was this tension between people who wanted to buy works from the freeze of life and yet his aesthetic sensibility to the freeze of life to keep it together so I think that he produced a number of different copies

of certain images from the freeze of life so that he could sell individual. works from it and yet keep the whole thing together. Alice Wright, several of the paintings in the freeze of life are depictions of women. And we've heard from Deb Jackson at the beginning of the program about his sister-ed-old and she was 15 and he was younger. We've heard about prostitution in Christiania, how it was hypocritically protected by the state to protect the middle classes who were putting forward a very stern public morality.

Can you tell us about the depictions? Is there any progression in them in his depictions of women? I think there is. It's true that he fairly quickly gets to a rather predictably fantasy eclo vision of women, that they're famthotal, that they're seductresses, that they bring men low and so forth. But there are some works from earlier in his career, for example, a painting called Morning from 1884, which shows, it's probably a servant girl sitting on the edge of a bed, it's the start of the workday, she's preparing, she's just got dressed, she's preparing to go out.

And her top is slightly unbuttoned, but it's not a painting that's about sexualizing, this woman. It feels more sympathetic, even empathetic with this figure. And we might put that alongside the sort of plays that Ibsen is writing, which are essentially openly feminist plays about the way in which society mistreats women. So I think early on there may be something like sympathy for women and perhaps a desire to feel himself into the experience of others, which has a certain ethical force to it, that very quickly evaporates. And by, the early 1890s, as I say, he's painting the most hackneyed, most reprehensible in a way, images of women as vampires, women who are, as I say, going to seduce you, tempt you,

and then destroy you. So it's very much about men at the mercy of women, and becomes, to the degree that this is autobiographical for monk himself, becomes, at least this would be one way of thinking about it, a kind of self-pitying art. when you say it's to some extent autobiographical, his relationship with women were not particularly satisfactory. One of them tried to shoot him, didn't die of him? He got a bit of his finger blown off by

a woman who had been stalking him around Europe. The great story that he tells, and again, how true this is, is something that's very hard to know, is about his first love affair with a woman called Millie Talau. So she is another of his cousin's wives. He's an adulterous affair with her in Christiania.

And the way he writes this story, story later is that he's attracted to her, she seduces him, and then very quickly betrays him, is having affairs with other men and so forth. So he talks about this love turning very quickly to ashes, and that it was at this point that he realized that the face that drew you, the face that you desired was really a medusor's head, that always lurking behind prettiness was this threat of death. And he himself was very influenced by Stringberg, who wrote a play for which was indicted for blasphemy in his native country, that marriage was a form of entrapment.

Yes, but for Stringberg, it's the man who's entrapped. That's right. So it's the opposite of Ibsen. And Bipson, yes. So I think part of monks developing, evolving, or devolving attitude towards women comes from the people he's hanging out with Stringberg. Shibishevsky gives the title vampire to a painting

that apparently when it was first, one of its first outings, it was simply called Woman Kissing the Back of a Man's Neck that the man folded over into the woman's lap and she's leaning over the top of him. So it has this fairly innocent title

It then is quickly called Love and Pain and then Shibyshefsky apparently suggests it could be called Vampire And of course this changes utterly the feeling But what do you think it is? I mean is it kissing the back of the neck Is it Love and Pain or is it a vampire? Dorothy, what do you're at Dorothy?

Everybody's calling you don't except me I'm going to Dorsey. It's fine, you can call me what you like. I think it's a bit of, I think it's, I think... Oh, no, you're not an obsessive bit of each, right? Well, I mean, Monk didn't call it vampire. That is a name.

You should know, shouldn't it? That's a name that was acquired, but he didn't dispute it either. And it seems that each time that somebody added something to his work, whether it was the inscription or not on the screen, or whether it's titles, he didn't deny or dispute or change. He just left it. And I think it's part of what David was saying earlier about the element of chance that Monk seemed to enjoy in the production of his work.

And I think that comes also for, from Strindberg, from an essay Strindberg wrote in 1894, which was called on the element of chance in art. And I think that was quite influential on Monk's thinking. And it was in many ways, very early sort of precursor of later surrealist intentions where they used chance and incorporated the idea of chance in their work. And I think that Monk and Stringberg were also, in a sense, exploring this idea as well in their attempts to create a new form of literature and painting.

David Jackson, there's a great maelstrom really when he has, after the Berlin exhibition, he becomes famous in certain small but influential, important circles, and he carries on with his freeze of life and so on, and he's still rejected by his own country to a certain extent, but then he has a very long life out of him.

He dies in 1944, 1994. Can you give us some impression about the way he worked through the greater part of his life? I mean, one of the interesting things about what happens, happens in that watershed is that it brings him a huge notoriety and he is infamous rather than famous and people are coming to see him in these exhibitions sometimes almost like a tourist attraction to see to see to what extent they will be shocked. But I think he in a sense he's not a very good marketer. I would take issue with that because I think he financially he was in want for most of his life and he has a turning point around about early 1900s when he does show the free of life as a totality. in the Berlin secession. That is then a big success, and people wake up to who he is.

Norway eventually wakes up, and he's been the subject of an enormous amount of personal vilification. I don't think we can underestimate that. The attacks on his work were also accompanied by very fierce and very personal attacks on him and his mental stability, the worst sort of tabloid journalism you can imagine. I'm just saying this promiscuous madman. Yeah, and Monke is very sensitive to that sometimes

because he thinks maybe they may be right. He believes there's insanity and he's. family, actually in fact there isn't, but he believes there is. And he in a sense makes a turning point here with the success. And from then on, he has a

complete breakdown in 1908. He goes into the clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobson in Copenhagen who rehabilitates him out from that. After that, he pursues, not altogether, but to some extent a much more even furrow. Some of his

work becomes more optimistic. The landscapes in particular. He does a very large fresco series for the Oslo University, their large auditorium, which is basically a huge sunrise over the Asgard Fjord, the same area, or the Oslo Fjord, the same area roughly around where we see the scream, and this is a huge sort of Zoroastrian thing filled with light

and filled with the sort of life-giving affirmative of the sunrise. He also does a rather, more superficial series of decorations for a canteen in the Freya Chocolate Factory in 1921, which he's happy to do, and he seems to be relishing that. That's not to say he doesn't come back to these. He comes back to things like the sick room very often again and again, and these things that clearly do have a resonance for him. Honest to what extent would you say that after that breakdown, that 1908 breakdown,

and the recovery from it, his painting changed, sorry about the word, but dramatically. He was a sort of, the impulse was a different impulse. The painting was of a different. How far would you say? Is that too simplistic? Maybe oversimplifies it a little bit, but I think there's a great deal of truth to that.

And it's certainly for me it feels that something of the power goes out of it, that there is, whether it's deeply heartfelt or whether it's marketing or whether it is actually a little bit of both. There is a real expressive power to the work that he's making in the 1890s. to eat. Finally, to each one of you, how influential a painter do you think monk has proved to be? Starting with you, Dorothea. I think he was a huge influence, particularly to the new generation of German artists coming out at the turn of the century, a young generation, who were also reading Nietzsche, who were looking for a new form of expression in their work, and who were

looking for new forms of expression that weren't overtly French. There was a contention within German art and the development of German modernism about trying to find a new German modernism that was specifically German or at least specifically Nordic and that didn't have to have an over-reliance on the French traditions. David Jackson? Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, Monk himself was one for denying any form of influence on his work and he was one for disdaining the notion that he was having an influence on others.

And when people used to pay court to him and say, well, you've been a huge influence on me, he would dismiss it. He didn't like to tie himself to any isms whatsoever, and he famously decried those. And I think that's palpably not true. You can see that through the German expressionist painters, particularly people like Emil Nolda, etc. But even if you come up into more contemporary periods,

it would be hard to imagine Francis Bacon without the premise of monk being there. Anastair, Alastair. I think all of that is true to end perhaps on a slightly cynical note which is not quite fair because I think Monke is a terrific painter but his influence also is felt on whole generations of art school students who feel

that what painting is is spilling your guts onto the canvas and talking about your own feelings and that has not necessarily been a salutary effect although he produced also some good output. Well thank you very much artist of right David Jackson and Dorothy Row next week in the first of a special two-part in our time for Easter,

we'll be talking about the development of cities from their beginnings in the Middle East up to just before the coming of the railways. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.