Munch's Scream Through Nature

‘Trembling Earth,” the exhibition of Edvard Munch’s work at the Sterling and Francine Clark Museum, in Williamstown, Mass., features over 75 works by the artist. The Norwegian artist (1863-1944) is best known for his iconic image “The Scream.” A human figure, in a landscape, is shown uttering a cry of existential anguish. The image has entered the popular imagination, a haunting character expressing an emotion that everyone recognizes: torment derived from the fact of being alive.

Western European art is full of torment — agonized saints, hell-bound sinners, dying gladiators — but these are part of narratives in which the anguish comes from elsewhere. Munch eliminated that narrative and depicted an anguish that comes from within — an idea that became part of the twentieth century investigation of consciousness.

A print of “The Scream” is included in the exhibition. On it he inscribed a phrase: “I felt the great scream through nature.” This connection, between human and nature, was central to Munch’s cosmology. He believed that all living beings were connected, and in fact that everything in nature was connected: living organisms, light, heat, water and air. The exhibition focuses on this notion of interconnectivity and presents many of Munch’s responses to the natural world.

The show focuses on landscapes, and is divided into sections: “In the Forest,” “Cultivated Landscape,” “Storm and Snow,” “On the Shore,” “Cycles of Nature,” and “Chosen Places.” Munch chronicled the rise of tourism and industrialization, the strength and beauty of traditional agriculture, the power of weather, his own favorite places.

But the show could also be divided into “public” and “private” sections. Munch did grand and ambitious works for public spaces, including a series of symbolic compositions commissioned for a university. These are grand in scale and lofty in conception. “The Sun,” is a huge semi-abstraction depicting the great star rising over seaside cliffs and emanating a grid of diagonal rays. The scale of the work, the centrality and dominating image of the sun, its majesty and potency, all contribute to Munch’s powerful vision of the sun as the center of life. The handsome “Fertility,” (1899-1900) shows a young couple beneath a tree in the midst of a field. The palette is rich and verdant, the figures solid and elegant, the faces generalized. This is a celebration of the harvest, placing humans in the center of a natural cycle. “Digging Men with Horse and Cart” (1920) features a powerful, willing animal who bears the brunt of farm work. Stalwart horses, heroic laborers, fruiting trees and immense logs stand as powerful metaphors for the richness the landscape. Munch’s colors are vivid and brilliant, reminiscent of the German Expressionists, with whom he worked for a period, as well as the bright palettes of the Fauves and Matisse. “Starry Night,” (1922-24,) depicts a dark but brilliantly illuminated sky. The title, the vivid brushstrokes and the scintillating constellations all suggest van Gogh’s earlier work, but the Dutch artist’s sky arches over a parched summer field; Munch’s night vibrates with exhilarating cold. Winter has this landscape in its fist. The whole scene — the snowy fields, the motionless trees, the tiny distant house and the turbulent cerulean sky all sing a thrilling paean to the frightening and ravishing beauty of Munch’s natural world.

The personal works strike a different note. Modest in scale, intimate in tone, they depict a specific moment in an unexplained narrative. They offer mystery and ambiguity: like half-remembered dreams, they present something intuitively known, but just out of reach. The wood-block, “The Scream,” and other intimate works provide a sense of immediacy, of personal experience, both compelling and unexplained.

“The Storm,” depicts a woman in a nocturnal landscape. She is dressed in white and her arms are raised in desperation. A group of women behind her reiterate her gesture. Behind them is a brightly-lit manor house, the tree before it bowing in a fierce wind. The skies are dark and troubling, the narrative unclear.

The eponymous storm is present in every aspect of the composition: the tree, the desperate woman, the Greek chorus, the darkened sky. The somber palette, the loose, rushing brushstrokes, the soft, blurred outlines, the sense of peril and urgency create a scene at once universal and individual. As a metaphor the painting suggests human vulnerability before nature, but on a personal level it shows the private torment of a single woman, alone and terrified on a wild shore. Full of mystery and ambiguity, in these personal works, Munch won’t give us answers.

This beautiful and intelligent exhibition offers a new perspective on Munch’s work, offering a sense of the artist investigating the life around him as he addressed that most essential and powerful relationship between the human and the natural world.

Roxana Robinson is the author of "Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life."

Self portrait by Edvard Munch  Courtesy of Munch Museum

Self portrait by Edvard Munch  Courtesy of Munch Museum