Munch’s Window Into Our Souls
The Vampire - Musée d’Orsay, December 2022
Soul painting was his life’s work. Writing the meaning of human existence through his canvas, each brushstroke an excerpt on his experiences and philosophies. The objective for Edvard Munch was to capture the essence of life, and the exhibit Munch: A Poem of Life, Love and Death at the Musée d’Orsay seeks to curate just that. Coined by Munch as the Frieze of Life, we could call these three elements of Life, Love and Death the trinity of a human’s existence, and the defining points of the life granted us.
“Qu’est-ce que le temps? Une seconde entre deux battements de cœur”
“What is time? A mere second between the heartbeats”
Literary Sketch, 1907
Munch’s work is reminiscent of Proust’s À la Recherché du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time, and evokes Socrates’s The Examined Life, both manuals on introspection and meditations on making the most of the time that is allotted to us. Plagued by his sister’s death in 1877, a young Munch entered a period of profound self-examination, and his art became his form of self expression. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Munch plunged into exploring the depths of emotions of the soul, and this exploration became his life’s work. Analyzing the work of the two brought me to confronting the question of humanity, and the common elements that bind us all. The elements that every beating heart can identify with at varying intervals in their lives: Life. Love. Despair. Existential Dread. Death. Renaissance. As I reflect on these, I find myself coming to the conclusion that the summit to a personal renaissance is reached through understanding how these elements weave through our existence and influence our thought patterns and behaviors.
Exploration of the human psyche led Munch to his most famous paintings created, such as The Scream, and The Vampire (previously named Love and Pain). At this point, Munch’s artwork veered from the Impressionism he had picked up during his time in France, influenced by the styles of Van Gogh and Gauguin, to a more realistic painting style. Munch wanted to submerge into a deeper layer, one beyond aesthetics and daily happenings and further into the spirit of the living. He wrote in a personal notebook at the time, in 1889: “one shall no longer paint interiors, people reading and women kitting. They will be people who are alive, who breathe and feel, suffer and love. I would create a number of such pictures. People would understand the sanctity and power of it and would take off their hats as in a church.”
People who breathe and feel. Who suffer and love. A form of worship. His art therefore became a confessional, a prayer, a search for a higher truth while empathizing with the trials of the living. The essence of The Scream, for example, was to depict the universal anxiety of modern man. Something that evidently does not escape time or social progress, as it continues to plague man today - whether it be the stress of a corporate career, looming desire for artistic recognition, travails of the heart, or simple FOMO in the age of projecting social connection at all times.
L’amour perdu- lost chances, hopes for redemption and the constant wonder of what life would have been if we had taken one path versus another. Musings on what could be, but more importantly, what is. Munch helps us get here, to a place of examination of one’s own psyche and thereby one’s own existence.
The Scream, Musée d’Orsay, December 2022 ©Miriam Ahmed
