Edvard Munch: Alpha og (and) Omega

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“Sickness and insanity were the black angels that guarded my cradle”

Edvard Munch, personal manuscript.

Background

Edvard Munch is one of my painting idols.

Back in 2009 I wrote about his “Madonna“. In 2013 I wrote a piece on “Death and the Maiden“, a journey from Munch to Abramovich.

Today I continue the Munch stories with “Alpha and Omega”, which I saw a few days ago at the Munch Museum in Oslo. It was a revelation for me to see these pictures.

Alpha and Omega is a fable written by Edvard Munch.

In addition to the text, there is a series of lithographs depicting the story.

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in Front of the House Wall (1926), Munch Museet, Oslo
Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in Front of the House Wall (1926), Munch Museet, Oslo

It is possible that Munch first created the pictures and then he wrote the text.

As we read in Christie’s website, presenting one of the lithographs for sale, “lithograph, 1908-9, on stiff wove paper, signed in pencil, from the total edition of approximately 80 or 90 impressions”.

At first the title was “The First Human Beings”, but then Munch changes it to “Alpha and Omega”.

Before I present the fable itself, I would like to give some background relevant to Munch’s life at the time of writting and illustrating the fable.

In the period 1908 – 1909, Munch suffered a psychotic incident. He was 46 years old at the time.

Edvard Munch, Dr. Jacobsen, and Nurse Schacke
Edvard Munch, Dr. Jacobsen, and Nurse Schacke

In the fall of 1908, Munch collapsed in Copenhagen. Hearing hallucinatory voices and suffering paralysis on his left side, he was persuaded by his old roommate from the Saint-Cloud apartment, Emanuel Goldstein, to check himself into Dr. Jacobson’s clinic at Frederiksberg in Copenhagen for detoxification. It was during his stay there, 1908–09, that he created Alpha and Omega.

The sketch shown above, drafted by Munch himself, reads:

“Professor Jacobsen is electrifying the famous painter Munch, and is bringing a positive masculine force and a negative feminine force to his fragile brain.”

Munch made progress following his treatment, which included “tobacco-free cigars, alcohol-free drinks, and poison-free women.”

Edvard Munch: Moonrise
Edvard Munch: Moonrise

The fable

Let us now go back to Alpha and Omega.

Omega's Eyes
Omega’s Eyes

Alpha is the first man and Omega is the first woman.

They live on an island and fall in love.

ALPHA AND OMEGA were the first Humans
on the Island. Alpha lay in the Grass and slept
and dreamed, Omega approached him, looked at
him and became curious. Omega broke off a
Fern branch and tickled him, so he awoke.

Alpha loved Omega; they sat in the Evenings
leaning into one another and gazing at the golden
pillar of the Moon, which swayed and rocked in
the Ocean surrounding the Island.

The couple lives a paradiselike existence, surrounded by animals and plants.

Omega and the Pig
Omega and the Pig

Omega becomes bored and allows herself to be seduced first by the Serpent, and then in turn by the Bear, the Poet Hyena, the Tiger and the Donkey, in addition to the Pig and other animals.

After a time she leaves the island on the back of a Doe and travels across the ocean to “the light green Land, that lay beneath the Moon”. Stenersen, quoted by Steinberg and Weiss, notes that the tubelike reflection of the moon on the water resembles the artist’s characteristic drawing of male genitalia.  “Thus it appears that the image of the full moon (breast – penis) was to Munch a protection against castration anxiety.

Omega's Flight
Omega’s Flight

Alpha remains on the island together with Omega’s offspring – a whole new generation of children – “little Pigs, little Serpents, little Monkeys and little Predatory animals and other Human Bastards”.

One day Omega returns. Suddenly the landscape turns to blood and Alpha closes his ears to the “cries of nature”. He then drowns Omega. According to Steinberg and Weiss, the bloody landscape represents the shocking sight of Munch’s dying mother, which could not be avoided or shut out. Munch experienced his mother’s death at the age of five.

Omega's Death
Omega’s Death

He is in turn torn asunder by her small mixed offspring, who finally take over the island.

It is a story of an archetypal man and woman as they progress from love and passion, to jealousy and melancholy, to anxiety and death.

 

 

Death and the Maiden: from Munch to Abramovic

Edvard-Munch-Museum-Life-and-Death-1024x766

Some time ago I wrote about one of the most stunning and moving themes in the work of Edward Munch: The Madonna. Following my visit to the Munch Museum in Oslo, I wrote about Munch’s fable “Alpha og (and) Omega“. 

Some of the paintings and etchings of the “Madonna” series I used in a subsequent post on poetry: “Naked heart forever.”

Munch described “Madonna” in this way: “Now life and death join hands. The chain is joined that ties the thousands of past generations to the thousands of generations to come” (qtd. in Hughes 281). He painted a woman in warm hues, her torso bare and her head tilted back, with long reddish hair flowing around her body. Her eyes are closed, her lips slightly parted in silent rapture. Her face is pale and bony, and crowned with a deep orange halo. The corpse-like face above the voluptuous, sensuous body is a strange rendition of the Madonna as virgin-especially given that the work was originally presented with a painted frame of circling sperm. The lithograph versions have the sperm border, and a fetus with its arms crossed in the corpse position looking up unhappily at the Madonna from the lower left corner. Munch is playing with opposites here: fertility and virginity, lust and chastity, and in his words, life and death. (1b)

Edward Munch, Self portrait with bottle
Edward Munch, Self portrait with bottle of wine, 1906, Munch Museum, Oslo

The “naked heart forever” post ended with an etching by Munch that sets today’s topic: “Death and the Maiden”.

But what is the origin of this theme in the western world?

I quote from “Black Calavera

Rudolph Binion argues that artist Hans Baldburg painted Death and the Maiden during the early 1500′s, which also originates from the ‘Dance of Death’.

According to Binion, the Renaissance Reformation introduced the Death and the Maiden to the public sphere. These particular paintings featured death holding or touching a woman in a suggestive and sexual manner.

In comparison Enrico De Pascale  claims that “The origin of the theme lies in Greek Mythology, in the abduction of Persephone by Hades, king of the Underworld who epitomised the eternal conflict between Eros and Thantos, between love (life) and death”

Hans Baldburg Grien: Death and the Maiden, 1518 – 1520
Hans Baldburg Grien: Death and the Maiden, 1518 – 1520

“Death and the Maiden” is an even more explicit rendition of the same themes. The woman and the skeleton clasp each other in a purely erotic pose. She is, as in the “Madonna,” very sensuous and voluptuous, while the skeleton is cold, thin, harshly white. The figures-death and sex-are thrust together within a background that is black and chasmic. They are framed by red, upward-moving sperm cells on the left, and two fetuses on the right in the same style as the “Madonna” fetus, with their arms crossed over their chests in the corpse-position. The moment of conception parades around the figures, who are taunted by the hollow stares of the fetuses. The unborn present their judgment on the nature of sex, conception, life, their own ultimate demise.(1b)

Edward Munch, Death and the Maiden, Oil on Canvas, 1893, Oslo
Edward Munch, Death and the Maiden, Oil on Canvas, 1893, Oslo

The link between Eros and Thanatos is embodied in the images-he imbeds it there so that he might reach us through our own relationship to love. He presented his paintings as packets of emotional impressions rather than as a narrative, thereby allowing us to arrange and rearrange the impressions, to create our own oppositions and links. Throughout, though, he firmly establishes the destruction inherent in creation. A creation of the union between two people results in conception, which is quite clearly the beginning of death. The idea of love involves an opposition in trying to combine with the other person, in trying to break the original barriers of communication. It is an attempt to move together towards one space while still retaining one’s own identity. (1b)

This motif dates back to the Middle Ages, but has been repeated and developed throughout the history of art thereafter. A precursor of the strong focus on the erotic that we find in Munch’s engraving Death and the Maiden is Albrecht Dürer’s portrayal of death as a skeleton, part-seducer, part-rapist. Yet in Munch the roles are reversed; it is the woman who is the seducer, and the man who allows himself to be ensnared by her, loses his integrity and his creative powers – and dies, if not physically, then figuratively. Perhaps this mirrors the man’s scepticism vis-à-vis the sexually and socially emancipated woman – the femme fatale in various guises was a popular motif in literature as well as art at this time of change and upheaval – yet above all it reflects Munch’s own horror at the fact that an all-consuming relationship with a woman should stand in the way of his artistic vocation. The link between love and death was graphically real for Munch, as it was for many other artists of the age. Woman was a creature who, by virtue of her bodily cycle, was closely bound up with life and death, and who therefore brought man face to face with his own transience. (1a)

Death and the Maiden
Edward Munch, Death and the Maiden, 1894, Private Collection

Matthias Claudius, Der Todt and das Maedchen – Death and the Maiden

Das Maedchen – The Maiden

Vorüber! Ach, vorüber!

Geh, wilder Knochenmann!

Ich bin noch jung, geh Lieber!

Und rühre mich nicht an.

Over!

Oh, pass by!

Go, wild bone man!

I’m still young, go dear!

And do not touch me.

Edward Munch, Dance of Death, 1905
Edward Munch, Dance of Death, 1905

Der Todt – Death

Gib deine Hand, du schön und zart Gebild!

Bin Freund, und komme nicht, zu strafen.

Sei gutes Muts! ich bin nicht wild,

Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen!

Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender form!

I am a friend, and come not to punish.

Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,

Softly shall you sleep in my arms!

P J Lynch: Death and the Maiden
P J Lynch: Death and the Maiden, 2010

Musical Interlude: Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), D.531; Op. 7, No. 3, is a lied composed by Franz Schubert in February 1817. It was published by Cappi und Diabelli in Vienna in November 1821. The text is derived from a poem written by German poet Matthias Claudius. The song is set for voice and piano.

Júlia Várady soprano sings and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau plays the piano.

Egon Schiele’s painting “Death and the Maiden” puts us in mind of the circumstances of Schiele’s own life at this moment. He is on the eve of conscription. Perhaps then the mood of this painting is being tainted and informed by the thought that he is being spirited away into the arms of death. He has also just chosen between two women in his life, with great callousness. One he has married, the other, a model of long standing, he has abandoned.

The man’s stare is blank and wild, disinterested, otherwhere engaged – look at that distended pupil. With the long and bony fingers of his left hand he appears to be caressing, as if dispassionately evaluating, the dome of the woman’s skull. The impulse of the other hand appears to suggest that he may be repulsed by the way in which she is exaggeratedly enwrapping him with the long curve of her left arm.

That curiously long arm of hers is rendered all the thinner, longer and stranger-looking by the fact that the sleeve of his coat part-conceals it. Her fingers – are they loosening their grip even as they embrace him? – are turning and twisting about. We have noticed that he appears to be disengaged from this embrace – even though it is everything that is happening here. She too looks askance, into the middle distance. There is no pleasure in that look of hers.

Meanwhile, everything behind and beneath them, all that agitated landscape, seems to be engaged in a kind of heaving, in-and-out breathing, erotic dance of sorts, coaxing the two of them into a dance of death. In this case, the last dance with death perhaps. Or the last dance with the jilted or jilting lover. (3)

Death and the Maiden (1915-16) by Egon Schiele  Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna
Death and the Maiden (1915-16) by Egon Schiele
Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

Joseph Beuys, the man who can fairly be called Europe’s most influential postwar artist, was influenced by Munch.

A characteristic feature of Joseph Beuys is the identification with everything from mythological figures and historical personages to writers and artists. Edvard Munch is one of them. Beuys developed an interest in Munch towards the end of the 40s, when he was going through an existential crisis, partly attributable to splitting up with his childhood sweetheart.

In a long series of drawings from this period, Beuys explores woman, love and death, for example in Loving Couple (1948-49), Autumn of Life (1952) and Death and the Maiden (1957). We recognise Munch’s ambivalent attitude to woman in a number of these, where she is portrayed as a blend of the fascinating and fear-inspiring – as a dual symbol of eroticism and death. (1c)

Joseph Beuys, Death and the Maiden, 1957, Drawing on a manila envelope
Joseph Beuys, Death and the Maiden, 1957, Ink and Watercolor on a manila envelope

The drawing depicts the shadows of two skeletons in an intimate embrace upon the back of a manila envelope stamped ominously with the address of “Auschwitz.”

Andy Warhol Portrait of Joseph Beuys
Andy Warhol
Portrait of Joseph Beuys

In contrast to traditional iconography, Beuys changed the perspective in his watercolour of 1957, Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) by representing the maiden, too, as dead in her encounter with Death. Death, so it seems, is communicating with his equal. In this image Beuys refers to a life that is ruled by Death. Life appears here as a strangely unfamiliar paradox: Death speaks to us, and by way of the element of death in life, the human being ultimately achieves a new awareness of life. (2)

Ana Mendieta  About giving life, 1975  Photograph, 33.65x50.8cm  Documentation of performance,  Iowa 1975
Ana Mendieta
About giving life, 1975
Photograph, 33.65×50.8cm
Documentation of performance,
Iowa 1975

Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic place the motif in a contemporary feminist context. By substituting their own bodies for the maiden they take on the female role that was so alarming and novel in Munch’s time. In a ritualised episode, life and death become acquainted with one another and the woman confirms the cyclical power of her sex. These two artists also reiterate Munch’s analysis of himself and his relation to his surroundings. His role as outsider in the bourgeois society of the day becomes a parallel to the female artist’s situation in a society dominated by man. (1a)

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

Sylvia Plath

Self portrait with skeleton by Marina Abramovic 2003 Photograph: Marina Abramovic/Sean Kelly Gallery New York
Self portrait with skeleton by Marina Abramovic 2003 Photograph: Marina Abramovic/Sean Kelly Gallery New York

Death,

I need my little addiction to you.

I need that tiny voice who,

even as I rise from the sea,

all woman, all there,

says kill me, kill me.

Anne Sexton

clear

Sources

(1a) Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic: Death and the Maiden 

(1b) Anna K. Norris, Ruminations on Munch

(1c) Joseph Beuys: Woman as Symbol

(2) Michael Kröger: Death keeps me awake’ The Thresholds of Life and the Consciousness of Death in the Work of Joseph Beuys

(3) The Independent: Great Works: Death and the Maiden (1915-16) by Egon Schiele, Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

 

Edvard Munch: Madonna

 

Self portrait with bottle
Self portrait with bottle

Introduction

Edward Munch is one of my favourite painters. 

Today I start a sequence of posts dedicated to him. I have chosen the “Madonna” paintings as the theme and created a collage of quoatations, statements, press releases, to highlight the various aspects of the theme, the artist and most of all, the paintings and lithographs presented.

 
Beyeler Foundation Media Release: Edvard Munch – Signs of Modern Art

Munch’s concern with loneliness, love and death is of incomparable urgency. His art reflects the crisis,
transience and eclipse of the individual in the Age of Industrialization. His oeuvre was interrupted by
existential caesuras, yet at the same time developed with inexorable logic.

Munch’s handling of picture support and painting materials was highly unconventional. He transcended the
traditional borderlines between media such as printmaking, drawing, photography, collage and painting.
This helped him to represent growth and decay, creation and destruction through a range of devices extending
from the dissolution of figures and their merger with the background to strange intersections with the picture
edge and scratched paint surfaces, all the way down to exposure of many works to the ravages of rain and
snow. By means of what he called this “acid test,” Munch not only integrated the factor of chance in his art
but made natural decomposition a component of the creative process. In his late work, he raised process
and temporality, as an actual, physical disappearance of matter, to a universal expression of transitoriness
in his material-based modernity. In this way, as early as the turn of the century, Munch opened the door
to the development of art in the advancing twentieth century.

Madonna, Oslo, Oil on canvas
Madonna, Oslo, Oil on canvas

 

The Press

When “The Madonna” was shown in Norway in 1895, Munch received this typical review from the daily Aftenposten:

“He seems either to be someone who’s hallucinating about art or he is some kind of joker who thinks the public a fool and makes a lie of both art and life. Even though these caricatures are laughable, the worst is that such disgusting lies are being perpetrated — which makes one quite ill and tempted to call the police.”

 

 

Madonnam Oslo, Lithograph
Madonna, Oslo, Lithograph

 

Robert Nelson, The Age

The keynote for Munch’s output is given in a colour lithograph called Madonna of 1895. It shows a naked young woman in an erotic swoon. She is represented in a disembodied graphic manner, with hollow eyes, abundant hair and writhing body. Around her form, a border surges with spermatozoa; and in the bottom left-hand corner, a hapless foetus cringes in sorrowful isolation in the plane of the woman’s thrusting hips.

Writers have observed that this fierce confounding of lust and death belongs to Munch’s epoch, to the prevailing fear of female sexuality and especially to Munch’s personal insecurities, his anxiety in yielding to blighted seduction, his failure in libidinous bliss and his brooding in psychological defeat.

But the deeper significance of this terrific image is not so much in the keen pangs that it expresses on a personal level: it’s the philosophical trumping of spiritual conviction expressed through the title, Madonna.

The word Madonna unmistakably alludes to the Virgin Mary, who was conceived with divine intervention and who, in turn, gave birth to Christ without Joseph’s sperm. For Munch as for Nietzsche and Freud and many intellectuals in Oslo, this story of immaculate conception was considered wishful thinking on a hysterically social scale.

The philosophical name given to the wholesale discredit of religious spirituality during the industrial period is “materialism”. At the risk of blasphemy, Munch proposes that there is no transcendence, no hallowed spirit, no universal being or redemptive belief. There is only an agonising zeal for joy, which is ultimately consumed through inescapable death.

Materialism is a tough philosophy – the fatalistic fruit of science – which few people relish; and art, in particular, has always found greater profit in promoting the earnest and authoritative delusions that have proliferated from animism to Jung. But for Munch as an artist, the brave new recognition of material causes throughout nature and behaviour brought new problems, because all artists are spiritualists at heart and Munch, in particular, talked of nothing so much as the soul and the heart.


 

Madonna, Hamburg, Oil on canvas
Madonna, Hamburg, Oil on canvas

 

 

MOMA

Alluring and inviting, disturbing and threatening, Munch’s Madonna is above all mysterious. This erotic nude appears to float in a dreamlike space, with swirling strokes of deep black almost enveloping her. An odd-looking, small fetuslike figure or just-born infant hovers at the lower left with crossed skeletal arms and huge frightened eyes. Forms resembling sperm pervade the surrounding border of this print. Little about the Madonna seems to conform to her holy title, save for a narrow dark gold band atop her head. This haunting apparition reflects Munch’s alliance with Symbolist artists and writers.

Woman, in varying roles from mother-protector to sexual partner to devouring vampire and harbinger of death, serves as the chief protagonist in a series of paintings and corresponding prints about love, anxiety, and death that Munch grouped together under enigmatic headings. Madonna was first executed as a black-and-white lithograph in 1895. During the next seven years, Munch hand-colored several impressions. Finally, the image was revised in 1902, using additional lithographic stones for color and a woodblock for the textured blue sky. Self-trained in printmaking, Munch often used its mediums in experimental ways, such as the unusual composition of woodcut and lithography seen here.

Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 46Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 46

 

Madonna, Wurth Foundation, Lithograph
Madonna, Wurth Foundation, Lithograph

 

 

Epilogue

“My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm … . Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm’s edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss. For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Without anxiety and illness, I would have been like a ship without a rudder.”  (E.M.)