Munch by Patrick Bade

Author:Patrick Bade [Ingles, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781606155
Publisher: Parkstone International

38. Sketch of the Model Posing, 1893.

Pastel on cardboard, 76.5 x 53 cm.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

39. Encounter in Space, 1899.

Coloured lithograph, 18 x 25 cm. Private Collection.

Although he was very attractive to women, Munch’s relationships with them were never satisfactory. Let us remember, first, that the death of his mother when he was at so tender an age was a kind of rejection – if he loved a woman he felt she would go away from him, leaving him despairing and longing; secondly, that he was a product of his time, experiencing the distrust of women that was triggered by the growth of female emancipation, the fear of powerful women that frequently turned to hatred. His affairs with Milly Thaulow and later with Tulla Larsen probably bear some responsibility for this. Many of his generation exhibited this fear and distrust: Strindberg, in particular, who wrote that women’s nature was ‘crooked and warped and inclined to evil’ (his misogyny fuelled by his tortured feelings for Dagny); the dramatist Frank Wedekind (creator of the anti-heroine Lulu); that ambivalent celebrant of loucheness, the poet Charles Baudelaire; and the Belgian painter Félicien Rops with his savage depictions of the feminine principle. But at the same time Munch was able to recognise that women were perfectly capable of love and self-sacrifice. His ambiguous attitude is summed up in another version of womankind’s threefold nature, The Three Stages of Woman (1894): the virgin, the whore and the crone are here present, though in more subtle guise than these archetypes. The three stages reappear, with the whore transmogrified into the mother, in The Dance of Life (1900). Returning to Norway in 1895, he experienced the by now customary unfavourable reaction to his latest exhibition – he was even labelled as bearing the curse of hereditary insanity, a viewpoint with which he might have concurred.

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