The Pathological Experiments of Edvard Munch
Sometime in 1893, Edvard Munch revisited a self-portrait that he had begun before traveling to Berlin in the fall of the previous year (fig. 73).1 Around an essentially naturalist depiction of his own impassive countenance, Munch added a red background overlaid with wide black arabesques and, hovering above his head, a menacing and grotesque female face. On his own painted visage, he enacted a startling and seemingly irrational violence, scraping away large areas of paint on the cheeks and forehead to expose and gouge into the wood panel beneath. Munch never exhibited the portrait in his lifetime, but it nevertheless acted as a declaration, to himself and probably to a small group of supporters, that he had finally sloughed off naturalism in favor of symbolism and a new artistic identity.
| 73 | Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait, 1893. Tempera on unprimed wooden panel, 70 × 44.3 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
This extraordinary self-portrait capped nearly four years of striving in fits and starts toward symbolist form. In 1889, having achieved notoriety at home in Norway and garnered state support for his virtuosic naturalism, Munch had set off for points south, where he had quickly assimilated the latest French modes: impressionism, pointillism, and eventually the synthetist flat planes of the school of Pont-Aven.2 By 1891, the Norwegian painter and critic Christian Krohg was already identifying Munch’s work with “Symbolism, the latest tendency in French art,” and by 1893 Munch’s transition from naturalism to symbolism appeared more or less complete.3
Rather than a frightful mask or a depiction of Medusa,4 the grotesque face at the top of the self-portrait is more convincingly read as an exaggerated masqueron, a decorative element typically found on gilt frames common to the late nineteenth-century neo-baroque interiors of Charles Garnier.5 Convalescing on the French Riviera throughout much of 1891 and 1892, Munch spent considerable time in one of Garnier’s most sumptuous architectural creations, the casino at Monte Carlo, where he observed and possibly experienced what was known in the nineteenth century as gambling mania. Depicting himself in evening attire under a masqueron and against a stylized red damask wall covering—situating himself, in other words, at the casino—Munch used this self-portrait to identify Monte Carlo as a key locus in his search for symbolist form. The seemingly irrational violence visited upon his face implied that the irrational had played a role. And indeed it had, for at a crucial juncture, Munch had attempted to paint the irrational madness of gambling using mad, irrational form.
Munch’s work has often been seen as a signifier of the artist’s madness, as in and of itself insane, or as having the potential to provoke insanity in others. As early as 1890, a Norwegian art critic claimed that Munch’s proclivity for cool blue tones was symptomatic of the artist’s neurasthenia.6 Five years later, a Norwegian medical student argued publicly, probably with Munch in the audience, that his compatriot’s art stemmed from mental illness and was therefore, like the artist himself, abnormal.7 Much more recently, in 2005, nearly a year after the theft of two paintings from the Munch Museum in Oslo, a consultant for a risk-management firm advocated unprecedented security measures because, she said, Munch’s works “talk to you with such an intensity of expression that you have to worry about unstable people being provoked to vandalism.”8 Most art historians, however, no longer assume transparency between Munch’s work and his biography. Reinhold Heller and Patricia Berman, for example, read the artist’s putative madness as at once mythic and strategic, as instantiating a privileged position of truth telling and as helping to promote a romanticized vision of the mad genius.9 This now orthodox view of Munch’s madness as tactical, however, does not fully address how madness might have been useful for Munch’s artistic practice—how, in the artist’s words, his “invalid’s mentality had a very favorable effect” not just on his career but also “on [his] work.”10 This chapter argues that Munch’s madness comprised a nexus of strategies designed not only to construct a persona or justify a new style but, more fundamentally, to make art in the first place and to make it legible and of consequence to Munch’s first audiences of the 1890s.
Munch in all likelihood completed his self-portrait under a masqueron toward the beginning of an exceptionally productive two years in Berlin, during which, as a member of the At the Black Piglet (Zum schwarzen Ferkel) group, he painted what would become his most recognized works. A community of intellectuals enthralled by Nietzschean philosophy, monism, French experimental psychology, and psychiatry lauded Munch for having attained symbolist form above all with The Scream, the painting that, in words inscribed amid the red paint streaks of the sky, “could only have been painted by a madman” (fig. 6). Having achieved symbolist form in Berlin, Munch’s methodological dependence on madness persisted when he returned to Paris in 1896. In Women in Hospital, a painting representing the institutionalized insane, Munch turned pathological form to political ends, using his symbolist practice to paint something akin to propaganda for an emerging psychiatric avant-garde with very close ties to symbolism.
Munch’s symbolist art of the 1890s constitutes the most sustained example of an artist working to unify form and content in order to communicate what he and his supporters promoted as universal truths, and doing so by deploying a method determined by the epistemological assumptions of nature’s experiments. As Munch explored the other within the self, and how the self could become other through madness constructed as mental illness, he developed a visual pathological vocabulary by imagining what psychological alterity might look like. Munch’s pathological method was certainly a useful tool for his artistic experimentation, but it was one thoroughly rooted in nineteenth-century experimentalism. This chapter explores Munch’s primary relationship with madness—madness as method—and analyzes how this method developed within the larger intellectual, artistic, and social contexts in which Munch actively participated. From his Monte Carlo paintings, to The Scream, to images of institutionalized mental illness, Munch strove for truthful and universal portrayals of human beings by situating himself as a scientific observer of “experiments prepared by nature.”
Pathological Symbolism and the Lure of the Roulette Table
When G.-Albert Aurier published one of the earliest critical appraisals of Vincent van Gogh in the Mercure de France in January 1890, identifying the Dutch artist’s supposed mental pathologies with his sincerity, his individuality, and indeed with his symbolist painting, Munch was living on the outskirts of Paris and familiarizing himself with the writings of French symbolism.11 At the time, he was sketching and painting typically naturalist motifs, including street scenes, café interiors, and cabarets. But he was also already exploring how to invest these observed scenes with heightened psychological content. Especially attracted, as he wrote, to the “intense green of a billiard table,” Munch fixed on the motif of the pool hall and worked to imbue it with different moods.12 One sketch (fig. 74) conveys a lively social atmosphere similar to Jean Béraud’s popular belle époque paintings of billiard halls (fig. 75), but other sketches displace human presence from the center of the room to present a less animated scene. One shows a forlorn broom propped up against an unused table (fig. 76), and in another, a man strikes a pose associated with melancholy (fig. 77). Together, these sketches recall the mood of Van Gogh’s 1888 painting of a bar with a billiard table, The Night Café, which Van Gogh called one of his “ugliest” works (fig. 38).13 In The Night Café, Van Gogh used form and color to represent psychopathology, “terrible human passions,” in his words, “the power of the dark corners of an assommoir . . . where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes.”14 The emptiness at the center of the composition, the exaggerated perspective, the clashing colors, and the harsh artificial lighting, completely at odds with the warm glow of Béraud’s convivial scenes, all combine, as Van Gogh intended, to recall, and even perhaps to induce, extreme psychological responses.
| 74 | Edvard Munch, Billiard Players, ca. 1890. Ink on paper. Munch Museum, Oslo, T129, p. 43. |
| 75 | Jean Béraud, The Billiard Players, before 1919. Oil on board, 35 × 44 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Sold by Christie’s New York, 27 October 2004. |
| 76 | Edvard Munch, Billiard Hall, ca. 1890. Pencil on paper, 11.7 × 19.5 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, T127, p. 13. |
| 77 | Edvard Munch, Man in a Billiard Hall, ca. 1889. Pencil on paper, 23.1 × 30.8 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, T126, p. 3. |
Munch’s notes on the billiard motif concentrated on how the expansive green baize of the billiard table offered a unique opportunity to experience the physiological phenomenon of the retinal afterimage, and how this instance of abnormal perception could be exploited to capture both the “impression of a moment” and a “mood.”15 Unwittingly, Munch’s notes echoed the recommendations of Paul Gauguin, as related by Paul Sérusier to Maurice Denis and other Nabi artists: paint what you see, even if you see colors you believe to be unnatural.16 But this Talisman symbolism was to be enriched by a pathological approach to symbolism in keeping with Aurier’s reading of Van Gogh. In the early 1890s, Munch was already trawling for his own psychologically rich motif, one in line with Van Gogh’s Night Café as a place where one could ruin oneself or go mad. The reds and greens of the billiard table soon gave way to the reds, greens, and blacks of the roulette tables of Monte Carlo.17
Early in 1891, Munch began traveling regularly to Monte Carlo, not only for entertainment but in order to observe, in the words of his frequent traveling companion, the “many painterly situations from the gaming room.”18 As was becoming typical of Munch’s working method, he approached the motif not only through visual means but also via written ones, elaborating upon and then attempting to distill an experience to its essentials. Munch’s many texts on Monte Carlo vacillate between different narrative modes, from journalistic to confessional, from dispassionate observation to interior monologue. The author, narrator, and subject are often at odds; in one instance, an affected stream of consciousness reveals the speaker as delusional. Nonetheless, the notes help trace a shift in Munch’s concerns from a preoccupation with class and social alienation in the casino to an interest in the subjective experiences of gambling mania, a shift accompanied by a transition from more naturalist to more symbolist form.19
Nineteenth-century critics of gambling considered the mixing of classes and genders to be among the chief moral hazards of the gaming hall. “All types and variety of types meet at Monte Carlo,” wrote one such critic, “the millionaire Russian noble throwing down his notes beside the smug bourgeois who carefully ventures his little economies; the immaculate county squires elbowing the not too-stainless prima donna . . . aristocrats and adventurers; countesses and cocottes. . . . Where king Roulette holds sway social and moral distinctions cease to exist.”20 In two ink sketches and the first two of his three roulette paintings, Munch concerned himself with the potentially dangerous consequences of this social leveling. Béraud had done something similar in the painting Monte Carlo (Rien ne va plus!), a popular success at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars of 1890, where Aurier noted—and condemned—its extreme photographic naturalism.21 Béraud’s dynamic composition, disseminated by a double-page engraving in the illustrated weekly the Graphic (fig. 78), highlighted the grand interior of the casino and the bustling crowd swelling and contracting around the roulette table. The work is populated by the types noted by the commentator above, many of whom seem to be experiencing various deleterious effects of gambling; mouths gape, heads rest wearily in hands, a fur-draped cocotte stares directly out of the scene, and a man in shadows on the far right cradles his head in a gesture of despair.
| 78 | Jean Béraud, The Gambling Rooms at Monte Carlo—“Rien ne va plus.” Engraving after Monte Carlo (Rien ne va plus!), 1890, oil on canvas, 103 × 131 cm. Private collection. |
Munch’s two ink drawings distill class divisions into schematic signifiers such as evening wear, pomaded hair, indistinguishable clothing, and swollen hands. Despite their close physical proximity, the figures gaze in different directions, a sign of their disconnection (figs. 79 and 80). The first of Munch’s roulette paintings likewise offers up an image of social alienation. It removes the glittering surroundings of Béraud’s painting and uses a muted naturalist palette of dark grays, brown-grays, green, and ruddy oranges to portray a crowd of faceless and expressionless drones (fig. 81). Arms reach simultaneously out on the left of the canvas to place bets, lined up in parallel as if they were levers on a machine. In looking at the composition, it is worth recalling that Walter Benjamin figured the gambler as the mirror image of the industrial laborer, in his mechanized actions and eternally delayed wish fulfillment.22
| 79 | Edvard Munch, At the Roulette Table, ca. 1891. Pen and ink on paper, 9.9 × 16.8 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, T128, p. 32. |
| 80 | Edvard Munch, Along a Road (The Lonely Ones) and At the Roulette Table, ca. 1891. Pen and ink on paper, 17 × 27 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, T129, p. 36. |
| 81 | Edvard Munch, Roulette I, 1891–92. Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
Munch’s second roulette painting pushes the crowd into the background in order to distribute class and gender difference across the three foreground figures (fig. 82). On the left, a ruddy-haired man in thinly and sketchily painted gray clothing sits in stark class difference to the elegantly attired man standing on the right, who sports a thickly painted white cravat and waistcoat. Munch portrays him quite literally as more materially substantial than the man on the left, who is now the only figure reaching across the table to place a bet. The enigmatic woman seen from behind with the gravity-defying hat retains her ambiguous position at the center of the composition. Blocking our view of the table, it is not clear whether she is gambling or merely observing. These first two roulette paintings seem to reflect Munch’s initial impressions of the gaming rooms—the crowds, the class and gender mixing, the social alienation, and the slightly sordid atmosphere—but their formal strategies, still closely tied to naturalism, largely fail to represent the gambling mania that had begun to fuel Munch’s imagination on his repeated journeys to Monte Carlo.
| 82 | Edvard Munch, Gamblers in Monte Carlo, 1892. Oil on canvas, 72 × 92 cm. Private collection. |
Gambling Mania and Pathological Form
In his reworked notes, Munch heightened the psychological drama of his experiences in Monte Carlo by describing in detail the symptoms of madness displayed by those caught up in playing roulette, including his own apparently intensifying obsession with gambling. He wrote of his sleeplessness, dizziness, inability to work, altered sensory perceptions, tendency to fix his gaze, and overwhelming compulsion to return again and again to the gaming halls in the hope that his luck would turn. Aping Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had written the novella The Gambler in order to settle his own roulette debts,23 Munch identified the uncontrollable urge to gamble as both a physiological and a psychological illness that threatened the integrity of the self. “Is it contagious,” Munch wrote; “are there bacteria in the rooms of Monte Carlo”? Gambling, he observed, produced obsessive hallucinations—“always I see before me the emerald green table”—and provoked thoughts of suicide: “how tempting it is despite everything—to just forget everything—everything that tortured me—everything that gnawed away at me recently—if I lose everything what will I do?” At one point, he wrote of himself as temporarily “cured,” content simply to walk in the gardens of the casino, ruminating on his art and saying a friendly hello to the guards. But in contemporary parlance, Munch, or rather the text’s narrator, was on the verge of a relapse.
I went back into the room to meet my friend. He was standing at the table—overheated and nervous. I’m mad—completely mad—I can’t stop myself—then he throws down money on the table and loses and loses. I borrowed some francs from him—I placed my bet—and I won again. Now I felt that destiny was my friend—the money was pushed towards me—my pile got bigger and bigger. My trouser pockets—waistcoat pockets—every possible pocket was bursting with gold and silver. Is it my imagination or reality?—everyone seems to be talking about rouge and noir—about Monte Carlo. . . . In the railway carriage—in the train corridor I hear the words constantly repeated—rouge—noir—gagner—perdre—roulette. I dream about it at night—if I hear a conversation in the corridor it is about Monte Carlo—rouge—noir. My cheeks are burning—I have an eye infection. Nevertheless—it is an intoxication—it’s good to forget—all your worries. I awake in the morning in a pool of sweat—and before a sliver of light at the window heralds the break of day, I hear talk of money in Monte Carlo.24
The air in Monte Carlo, in the words of one commentator, was “thick with systems,” especially in 1891 and 1892, when Charles “Monte Carlo” Wells broke the bank a record number of eighteen times during an extraordinary run of luck.25 Numerous books and pamphlets detailed supposedly scientific methods of predicting where the ball would drop, and the casino encouraged belief in such methods by publishing the numbers in a daily bulletin.26 Munch described a means of breaking the bank, but he clearly signaled the method as delusional, just another symptom of gambling madness:
It is so obvious—why had no one thought of it before me? Simply wait—just be patient—when one of the colors comes up a number of times, then bet on the other color. If you lose—just wait for the next turn. . . . I will become rich—it is so obvious—I shall be able to devote myself to my work—pure art. . . . Yes, I will wait. I waited until the next suite came up—bet—and lost. This was strange. I decided not to play for a while—just to take notes and study the game. . . . Black came up 6 times in a row. In all probability, the red had to come up now. I put 20 on red. A lot of people had put down large sums of money on the same color . . . Noir.27
Munch’s “method” was, of course, ridiculous. Indeed, this is precisely what is so “obvious,” that the gambler’s desire for control, his belief in the possibilities of a method, and his apparent certainty that he could beat the system were all invoked as symptomatic of the gambling mania to which Munch represented himself as fully in thrall.
Munch exhibited the first two naturalist roulette paintings in his scandalous Verein Berliner Künstler exhibition in late 1892, and it is likely that only after this critical moment in his career did he attempt to give visual form to these psychologically more intense notes. At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo, probably completed sometime in 1893, more fully dispenses with naturalist form, deploying the roulette motif to paint madness and in the process coming much closer to the visual idiom that Munch would practice at the height of his symbolist phase (fig. 83).28 The first-person subject of Munch’s roulette writings imagined his gambling method not only as a means of supporting his family but as a way to devote himself to his art, not unlike Dostoevsky, who viewed gambling as at once pathological and artistically productive, even transcendent.29 The method that Munch described was nothing more than a patient attentiveness to the binary of red and black and a carefully timed bet on a probable reversal of that binary pairing. Linking this strategy with “pure art,” Munch allegorized a properly symbolist method of painting as a reversal of the naturalist modes with which he was fully conversant and, perhaps more important, with which he was known to be fully conversant. Munch thereby positioned himself to invert “normal” formal idioms and to stake a claim on their reversal. In approaching Munch’s symbolist practice, it is useful for the art historian to imagine naturalism’s other.
| 83 | Edvard Munch, At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo, 1893. Oil on canvas, 74.6 × 116 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo shifts the woman at the center of the first two compositions to the lower right corner of the picture and tips the table up to provide a more unobstructed view of its surface, which is now placed on a dramatic plunging diagonal. The playing board and the bright red roulette wheel, echoed by the oval form of the woman’s hat, have become the main actors in the scene, the wheel presumably inhabited by the “mystical creature” that Munch imagined lived inside.30 The keyed-up color rhythms of green and red, alternating with black and white, enliven the muted naturalist palette of the earlier canvases and parallel the way in which Munch’s notes used a staccato voice to present his observations from the gambling rooms. Saturated red punctuates the scene, circling the table like blood splatters from the wheel, describing the flowing ribbon of the woman’s hat in the foreground, a hat and scarf in the left background, and bright neckties or boutonnieres in the upper right corner. Not only does this make the entire composition seem to spin; it also suggests that the red paint strokes of the wheel, its “bacteria,” are being transmitted with the violence of a centrifuge, beginning to infect the players who will eventually contribute to the blood-soaked reputation of the casino. Significantly, Munch depicted no discernable coins on the table. Patches of color might resolve themselves into coins in the viewer’s mind, but they might also, like the wealth to be gained in Monte Carlo, be only figments of the viewer’s imagination.
Tipping the roulette table toward the picture plane enabled Munch to enact more fully a complex play of deformed hands that he had first explored in one of his ink drawings (fig. 80).31 Instruments of easy money or ruin, hands concentrate the action of gambling. They place bets, rake in winnings for the bank, take notes, or are held tightly to the body. The exaggerated perspective of the table allows many of the hands in play to appear etiolated, nothing more than pathetic, withered appendages. This is especially the case with the female figure in the spotted dress and oval hat, the only figure present in all three paintings, whose tiny hand protrudes from her hat like a useless decorative feather. A later, engraved version of the composition using a more exaggerated perspective makes this pathological play of hands even more explicit (fig. 84). In the print, more hands appear on the table, and Munch more literally deformed them by using a variety of very deeply and very shallowly etched lines. In fact, most of the sites of action in the print, including the circular contour of the roulette wheel, many of the hands, and the croupier’s stick, were engraved very lightly into the plate, creating an actual void at the center of the composition. By barely engraving the hands, Munch made them both deformed and unformed. The most extreme case is once again the feather-hand, barely visible as it protrudes from the woman’s hat to come into contact with the faint line of the croupier’s stick. Almost impossible to discern, the misshapen instrument of the gambler’s downfall, the hand that places the bet is other, both in its form and in the technique of its representation.
| 84 | Edvard Munch, The Roulette Table, 1903. Etching, 26–26.8 × 43.3–44 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
The 1893 roulette painting, however, stops short of the pathological form of the later etching. The painted surface remains for the most part even and consistent, with Munch pathologizing the work through spatial distortion, deformation, the use of color, and caricature. Indeed, it is among Munch’s earliest uses of caricature to distill formal essences for the purposes of generalizing, a strategy linked to physiognomic illustration, an echo of which appears in the female profile in the lower center of the painting that might be compared with a phrenological illustration of an “idiot” (fig. 85).32 At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo also includes one of Munch’s earliest painted avatars of himself, the large figure on the left of the painting in profil perdu with an angular jaw and distinctive hairline, a figure also seen in Death in the Sickroom of the same year (fig. 86).33 Viewed from the back, Munch’s avatar takes notes or possibly sketches, indicating his roles as both the gambler with a system and the artist who observes. But the gambler-artist is himself under observation, not only by the painting’s viewers but by an older man in the upper left corner who is also, it seems, taking notes. This final version of the roulette motif implicates the viewer in the psychological drama of the game, suggesting that she is already gambling, peeping over the figure’s shoulders in order to get a good look at the table before placing her bet, perhaps connecting with one of the disembodied arms reaching from the lower edge of the canvas.
| 85 | Idiot, 25 Years Old, plate II in J. G. Spurzheim, Phrenology, or The Doctrine of the Mind; and of the Relations Between Its Manifestations and the Body, 3rd ed. (London: Treuttel, Wurtz, and Richter, 1825). The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. |
| 86 | Edvard Munch, Death in the Sickroom, 1893. Oil on canvas, 134.5 × 160 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
In comparison to the diluted oil paint and tempera, as well as the mixed and intermedia approaches that would become hallmarks of Munch’s painting practice in and around 1893, the surface of At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo remains fairly conventional, eschewing the particular dialectic of form and content that would become hallmarks of Munch’s symbolist form.34 But it reveals the emergence of another aspect of symbolist dialectics, Munch’s desire to use the inextricable link between the normal and the pathological, posited by experimental psychology, to reject the norms of naturalism in order to represent the psychologically fragmented modern self. The self-portrait introduced at the beginning of this chapter, which I linked with Munch’s time in Monte Carlo, not only points to the importance of Munch’s experiences in Monte Carlo for his emerging pathological symbolist practice; it also performs for the viewer that modern fragmented self in its (un) natural habitat of the casino, revealing the singular experience of staking one’s last coin as a risky but aesthetically productive encounter with madness.
The Scream as Symbolist Experiment
Although the event on which Munch based his Scream motif took place on the outskirts of Kristiania (present-day Oslo), Munch wrote the first extant text based on his memory of that event while in the south of France, traveling almost daily to the casino in Monte Carlo and reflecting on various forms of despair, including the despair provoked by gambling that in extremis could lead to suicide: “I was walking along the road with two friends—the sun was setting—I felt a wave of sadness—The sky suddenly turned blood-red. I stopped, leaned against the railing dead tired—looked out at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and swords—over the blue-black fjord and city—My friends walked on—I stood there, trembling with fright—and I felt a loud, unending scream through nature.”35 Munch took this memory, and probably the text itself, with him to Berlin, where, in the crucible of the Black Piglet group, he was recognized and celebrated for having finally achieved symbolist form. Black Piglet members, among them Stanisław Przybyszewski, August Strindberg, Richard Dehmel, Carl Ludwig Schleich, and Max Asch, further exposed Munch to a host of new and often radical scientific, philosophical, and social ideas, including French experimental psychology, all of which doubtless drove Munch to develop a more thoroughly experimental and pathological approach to his symbolist visual practice, an approach exemplified by the best-known version of The Scream (1893) (fig. 6).36
Sympathetic to Munch’s efforts visually to communicate universal truths about modern human experience, including love—which, Przybyszewski claimed, in an appropriate metaphor, “rolls around . . . the perception of happiness like a roulette ball”—the Polish writer supplied a model for viewing Munch’s symbolist works and reflected on their genesis in his 1894 article “Psychic Naturalism” (“Psychischer Naturalismus”). Identifying Munch’s work with French symbolist aims of “synthesizing nature,” Przybyszewski judged Munch’s paintings to be “revelations of a naked individuality . . . creations of a somnambulant, transcendental consciousness . . . vulgarly called the unconscious.” More crucially, Przybyszewski likened Munch to an experimentalist, a scientist working in the laboratory, making “[chemical] preparations of the soul” with which the artist and the viewer could study the modern self’s most intimate psychological functions. But Munch’s works, Przybyszewski contended, were not just any “preparations,” but were “preparations of the animalistic, irrational soul” in which “every conceptual process has ceased to operate.”37 In Przybyszewski’s view, in other words, Munch painted psychological alterity with a view to experimenting, offering his paintings up as objects of investigation from which both artist and viewer could derive knowledge about the inner lives of human beings.
Przybyszewski was well positioned to make such claims, having formally studied medicine, neurology, and experimental psychology in the 1880s and 1890s.38 In his memoirs, he maintained that reading Théodule Ribot, Hippolyte Taine, and Herbert Spencer had in fact prepared him for Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy he viewed not as a paradigm shift but as a natural extension of the new scientific psychology.39 Nietzsche’s philosophy had only recently become a topic of intense conversation among the Berlin-based avant-garde, introduced to the group by the Swedish writer Ola Hansson through Georg Brandes’s lectures.40 Not long before Przybyszewski publicly identified Munch’s paintings as chemical preparations, the art critic Willy Pastor echoed Nietzsche’s metaphor of pathology as a magnifying glass on the normal in a lengthy and very positive review of Munch’s solo exhibition. Pastor insisted that the artist painted by training a microscope on his own psyche, directing a scientific instrument to examine, “deeper and deeper,” the “gaping abyss” of his soul.41 Under Przybyszewski’s editorial direction, his own article and Pastor’s were republished in July 1894 in the volume The Work of Edvard Munch, which also included a text by Black Piglet member Franz Servaes that amplified his colleagues’ visions of Munch’s works as both creations of and the basis for studying the less highly developed mental functioning of the unconscious. Servaes praised Munch for having “the certainty of a sleepwalker” who is able “to view and to experience the primitive aspects of human nature,” by which he meant the less highly evolved unconscious mind.42
Przybyszewski’s claim that Munch’s paintings were scientific “preparations,” along with Pastor’s comparison of Munch’s practice to using a microscope on the inner self, and Servaes’s insistence on Munch’s ability to access the primitive parts of his own soul, represented Munch’s works as a form of psychological experimentation very much in line with the new experimental psychology.43 As nature’s experiments dictated, the nature that Munch’s paintings synthesized was an abnormal one, an “animalistic, irrational soul,” a primitive form of humanity summoned to investigate universal psychological processes. Evidently, Pastor’s, Przybyszewski’s, and Servaes’s articles squared with Munch’s understanding of his own practice. He took pains to ensure that friends and family both at home in Norway and in Berlin read Pastor’s text. And according to Przybyszewski’s much later and possibly fanciful recollections, Munch had been so thrilled with “Psychic Naturalism” that he presented The Scream to the Polish writer the day after reading the article.44 But if it was to be understood as a form of psychological experiment, how, visually and materially, did The Scream signify as a symbolist “experiment prepared by nature,” as a scientific “preparation” of an “irrational soul”?
According to Servaes, The Scream revealed the “world as a madhouse . . . in insane colors rudely screaming together.”45 But far from being dashed off in a mad frenzy, Munch had deliberated on the painting for nearly three years, reworking the original text, producing a number of drawings, and aborting at least one painting before arriving at the 1893 composition, which nevertheless “could only have been painted by a madman,” as the tiny pencil inscription in the top left corner of the work declares.46 Insanity was hardly a new subject for painting. Théodore Géricault had painted portraits thought to be of monomaniacs, including a gambling monomaniac, in the early 1820s (fig. 87), and Béraud had more recently rendered the stereotypical gestures and physiognomies of the insane with his characteristic precision (fig. 88). But Munch overtly rejected what Przybyszewski called the “shallow” aesthetic of naturalism in order to produce a work that looked as if it had been made not by an artist named Edvard Munch but by an unknown madman. In order to do so, he must have had some notion of what the art of the mentally ill looked like, a set of visual schemata shared with his ideal audience members, most obviously members of the Black Piglet.47 Apart from Przybyszewski and Strindberg, who both continued to read voraciously in medicine and psychology during the Berlin period, a number of Black Piglet habitués could have helped Munch gain access to asylums in and around Berlin, where he could easily have seen works created by patients, which were then beginning to be much more widely collected in asylums, although still largely for the purposes of diagnosis.48 Like Strindberg, Munch may have received an invitation to visit an asylum from one of his Berlin patrons, Max Asch, according to some a gynecologist and to others an expert in mental illness.49
| 87 | Théodore Géricault, The Woman with Gambling Mania, 1819–24. Oil on canvas, 71 × 65 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. |
| 88 | Jean Béraud, The Insane, 1885. Oil on canvas, 112 × 142 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Engraving in Henry Havard, Salon de 1885 (Paris: Librairie d’Art, 1885). |
Black Piglet members would also have been familiar with reproductions of drawings by the mentally ill and by mediums thought to be mentally ill in the periodical Sphinx, the eclectic fin-de-siècle journal introduced in the previous chapter, which sought to investigate the relationships between “Man, Nature, and the Universe.”50 Sphinx’s original subtitle, Monthly Journal for the Historical and Experimental Foundation of the Transcendental Worldview on a Monistic Basis, announced, among other things, its lofty scientific ambitions. The journal was connected to both the Munich-based Psychologische Gesellschaft and the Berliner Gesellschaft für Experimental-Psychologie, organizations that regularly corresponded with the Society for Psychical Research in London and the Société de psychologie physiologique in Paris. These societies tended to distance themselves from more spiritist organizations, including theosophy groups, staking their reputations on rigorous scientific experiments that aimed to establish new truths about human psychology. Many Black Piglet members, including Dehmel, contributed to Sphinx. Two months after it appeared, Przybyszewski’s “Psychic Naturalism” was favorably reviewed for the journal by Franz Evers, a regular writer for Sphinx and erstwhile Black Piglet member who owned some of Munch’s earliest etchings.51
In August 1888, in an article titled “Somnambulic Drawing,” Gustav Gessmann discussed two very different works of mad creativity by a young male patient under the care of Viennese doctors who claimed at times to channel a dead painter named Seleny.52 While apparently acting as a medium for Seleny, the patient labored over highly composed drawings such as Symbolic Representation of the Soul’s Uplifting (fig. 89), whose technically accomplished detail, symmetry, and almost hyperrealism recall scientific illustrations. But when not under this influence, the patient experienced convulsions, between which he sketched rapidly and with little to no deliberation, creating drawings such as A Spirit Head in less than an hour (fig. 90). Gessmann described how each drawing reflected different symptoms of the patient’s psychopathology. The first displayed a mania for geometric detail and an obsessiveness that, in conjunction with the claims of mediumism, identified the patient as delusional. The other presented expressive peculiarities and an overall irrational abstraction that revealed the patient’s extreme emotional instability. Gessmann took special interest in the patient’s more frenzied work, and gave an account of how he had produced drawings such as A Spirit Head by hatching the surface to build up form. Out of what had previously seemed to be a dark, indistinct chaos, a head or a landscape would suddenly emerge as if it had emanated directly from the patient’s soul. These more expressive drawings, Gessmann contended, rejected any traditional and willed process of art making, in which, for example, one might draw the outline of a head and then fill in the features. The insane mind, Gessmann implicitly argued, worked in ways foreign to the conscious mind, outside of the rational logic instilled by the systematic training of art academies, training that Munch knew extremely well.
| 89 | Symbolic Representation of the Soul’s Uplifting, from Gustav Gessmann, “Somnambules Zeichnen,” Sphinx 6, no. 32 (August 1888): 105. |
| 90 | A Spirit Head, from Gustav Gessmann, “Somnambules Zeichnen,” Sphinx 6, no. 32 (August 1888): 104. |
In addition to these visual traces of somnambulistic creativity, Sphinx also published a series of drawing-based experiments into so-called thought transfers (Gedankenübertragungen), individual instances of telepathic communication, a phenomenon that aroused the interest of a number of Black Piglet members, including Strindberg and Dehmel.53 These thought-transfer experiments typically involved controllers, usually called “agents,” and mediums, called “percipients,” who were often young women deemed especially susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion.54 The agent, an “experienced experimenter” who was invariably male, would create a drawing out of sight of the percipient. Then, placing it behind the percipient’s head, still out of the medium’s sight, the agent would concentrate on the drawing with all his cognitive might. When the percipient signaled that she had received the mental suggestion, the drawing was removed from the room, and the percipient would then attempt to replicate it. Reporting on these experiments, Sphinx published the agent’s “original” drawings next to the percipient’s “reproductions” (Wiedergaben), implicitly claiming, regardless of how different the two drawings looked, that some essential formal aspect of the object image had been transferred telepathically from agent to percipient. The reproductions were almost always more schematic and childlike, and often bore almost no likeness at all to the originals. The drawing of a man with a cigarette, for instance, resembles the wormlike drawing labeled “reproduction” only by virtue of being placed next to it and labeled “original” (fig. 91). Nevertheless, the thought-transfer experiments implied that the two drawings existed within some larger genus, face, or, perhaps even more broadly, a category that might be composed of elongated, phallic things.
| 91 | “Gedankenübertragung,” Sphinx 2, no. 4 (October 1886): 246. |
A number of Munch’s drawings from the mid-1890s function similarly, reducing an object to its essential formal aspects and thereby inviting a thought-transfer-like aesthetic response. On the reverse of a more finished ink drawing, a representation of art nourished by male-female copulation (fig. 92), Munch inhabited the roles of both agent and percipient, producing a crayon and ink drawing of a man’s head in profile that superimposes a controller original onto a mediumistic reproduction (fig. 93). Hesitant and schematic blue pencil lines are hardly if at all recognizable as a face without the tusche lines overtop that synthesize elements of the profile. Underneath the strokes of tusche, three lightly drawn noses suggest not so much that Munch changed his mind in drawing the picture as that he may have had his eyes closed and lifted the pencil a number of times as he drew the jerky lines, later to be smoothed over with ink. For those familiar with Munch’s visual vocabulary from such works as At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo and Death in the Sickroom (fig. 83 and fig. 86), the profile displays a strong chin and nose and distinctive hairline, recalling Munch’s avatars. As agent, Munch has concentrated on a mental image of his own profile, and as percipient, he has re-created that image without looking. The process conjured up by the drawing seems designed to access perceptual and creative faculties beyond or before artistic training as part and parcel of a search for an essential formal language that will, eschewing naturalism and with a minimum of elements, communicate “man’s head in profile” to the greatest number of viewers. In adding the tusche, Munch effectively restored an original to the reproduction, visually enacting the mental work necessary to synthesize the image. The presence of the two media encourages a back-and-forth between original and reproduction, thus instantiating a dynamic, dialectical mode of viewing that proclaims the existence of both essential form and mediumistic communication.
| 92 | Edvard Munch, Art, ca. 1894–96. Tusche on paper, 22.5 cm x 44.5 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, T408A. |
| 93 | Edvard Munch, Man’s Head, ca. 1894–96. Blue crayon and ink on paper, 44.5 × 22.5 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, T408B. |
The Scream combines different elements of the mad and mediumistic creativity described by Gessmann and suggested by the thought-transfer drawings disseminated in Sphinx, providing a schema for both producing and receiving the 1893 painting as an instance of insane, somnambulistic, or mediumistic art. Functioning according to the expressive abstraction of A Spirit Head rather than the detailed realism of Symbolic Representation, The Scream invokes an irrational, anti-academic art-making practice rather than a delusional performance of artistic skill. While the shading of A Spirit Head produces a very different visual effect from Munch’s brightly colored linear forms, the drawing’s disembodied head, very summary evocation of facial features, and suggested orifices reveal structures analogous to Munch’s partially formed, seemingly primitive embodiment of anxiety, fear, and insanity. The O that emerges toward the bottom of A Spirit Head’s teardrop-shaped face, and the dark, fuzzy area, presumably where one discerns eyes shaded by heavy brows, play with the visual conventions of anxiety and fear.
Likewise, the screaming figure of The Scream is more an evocation than a depiction of human form. Only cursory circles, dots, and small x’s signify the sufficient orifices—eyes, nostrils, and mouth—needed to identify a humanoid face. Similar reductive processes appear to be at work in the thought-transfer reproduction of a fish drawing (fig. 94). It would not signify fish were the original not reproduced alongside it, but the schematic representation of a celllike body, which also looks like a rudimentary head and three orifices, nevertheless conveys the idea of a primordial creature. Reversing the processes carried out by the thought-transfer experiments, The Scream invited its late nineteenth-century viewers to receive the mental suggestion of universal emotions such as fear and anxiety and then to re-create their own personal experiences. As percipient, Munch provided something to be read as essential, universal form, and asked his viewers to conjure up originals from a reproduction, ideally retrieving their own individual emotive experiences by engaging with the work.
| 94 | “Gedankenübertragung,” Sphinx 1, no. 1 (January 1886): 37. |
Munch took enormous pains to signify The Scream as typical of insane expressivity, as anonymous and programmatically unimportant, as if it really “could only have been painted by a madman.” He used seemingly undeliberated and often translucent strokes of oil and tempera, left the pastel lines largely unblended, and incorporated large areas of blank cardboard, including much of the main figure’s face.55 For its earliest intended viewers, these choices reiterated the ostensibly mad author’s ignorance of artistic traditions and training, and displayed a professed lack of concern for permanence. Munch and his supporters immediately recognized that The Scream was a significant achievement; it was regularly exhibited almost from the moment of its creation, purchased by a Norwegian collector in 1909, and given to the Norwegian National Gallery the following year. And yet the painting looks as if it has been dragged through the mud, an impression emphasized by the slightly ridiculous gilt frame in which it usually hangs today. Flecks of dirt, paint, and other media are present all over the work, including a poetically placed tiny x in the left eye of the screaming figure. Splatters of a translucent white substance, possibly candle wax, appear in the lower right-hand corner and elsewhere. The cardboard is creased in a number of places, and a long horizontal scratch in the surface bisects the O of the screaming mouth. Perhaps one of the oddest elements is the long vertical incision in the cardboard running from the top to the bottom of the work about five centimeters in from the right edge of the painting. It borders one broad vertical stroke of translucent red paint, which makes it seem as if a strip has been added, as if some unknown person included a spacer so that the painting did not have to be custom framed. It is no small irony that many reproductions of The Scream crop this red strip out, as if it were somehow extraneous to the work.
In the early 1890s, the art of the mentally ill was rarely called art. It was valued primarily for diagnosis, for therapy, and, increasingly, as a curiosity. In one sense, The Scream was not in the end a painting but only a signifier of madness, a symptom and a site for diagnosis and experiment, useful only as a “soul preparation” that would enable putatively universal truths about humanity to be established. In another sense, however, The Scream was the ultimate avant-garde act, a painting so radical in its anonymity, in its antinaturalist form, and indeed in its fundamental experimentalism, as to establish itself as the first avant-garde performance of madness.
Munch and the Parisian Psychiatric Avant-Garde
If Munch’s Berlin supporters most fully grasped and promoted his scientist-like ambitions, his Parisian critics most thoroughly recognized the connections between Munch’s pathological subject matter and his pathological form. In fin-de-siècle Paris, there was remarkable agreement about the existence of the pathological in Munch’s works, but the meaning, value, and function of pathology in his practice provoked stark differences of opinion. Less enthusiastic critics wrote disparagingly of his “horrors,” his “inept drawing,” “barbarous color,” “childlike etchings,” and “paintings of a sick mind.”56 But other critics proclaimed Munch’s “feigned naïveté” the result of “a terrific mental effort” and insisted that works such as The Scream were the products of “an intelligent man,” even an “intellectual,” as Yvanhoé Rambosson wrote in a review accompanied by a reproduction of one of Munch’s lithographs (fig. 95).57 Alcanter de Brahm infused his criticism with the language of experimental psychology, highlighting Munch’s subtle understanding of “natural hypnosis” and “multiple personality.”58 Writing in French, the critic William Ritter, having seen Munch’s 1905 exhibition in Prague and struggling to grapple with art he instinctively abhorred, explicitly connected Munch’s use of ugly technique to his depictions of the ugliness of modern life, calling him “a laboratory and hospital Velazquez” in a volume published by the press of the Mercure de France. “The great merit” of Munch’s work, Ritter wrote, was that it “urgently affirm[ed] the demented nature of modern ugliness, adding the ugliness of the facture to the ugliness of the main subject matter, the ugliness of the presentation to the physical ugliness of the motif.” “It is the cacophony of means,” he concluded, “in the service of the cacophony of modernity.”59 For the critic and psychiatrist Marcel Réja, Munch’s “clumsy, even puerile realism” was precisely what enabled the artist to achieve his symbolist syntheses. “It objectifies,” Réja stressed, “what is subjective.”60
| 95 | Yvanhoé Rambosson, “Le Salon des Indépendants,” La plume, no. 194 (15 May 1897): 311, with reproduction of Edvard Munch, Death in the Sickroom, 1896. Lithograph. Bibliothèque nationale de France. |
In the late 1890s, Munch continued to explore the potential of a pathological approach to symbolist visual practice, especially in paintings and prints depicting institutionalized illness. In Paris, he befriended doctors and psychiatrists who gained him access to hospitals and asylums where he found numerous subjects in the patients and doctors he observed. Munch’s Parisian circles included, in particular, psychiatrists who identified with a movement of asylum reform that justified itself by reiterating the basic assumption of the pathological method, that the normal and the pathological related to each other on a continuum, and that madness was therefore merely an exaggerated form of normal human psychological functioning. In paintings such as Women in Hospital (fig. 96), Munch politicized the pathological, using a pathological method to produce works that were aligned with the reforming rhetoric of an emerging psychiatric avant-garde.
| 96 | Edvard Munch, Women in Hospital, 1897. Oil and crayon on canvas, 109.5 × 99.5 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
After nearly three years of shuttling between Germany and Norway, Munch returned to Paris at the beginning of 1896 for a number of lengthy stays that extended into 1898.61 By this time, the Black Piglet group had largely dispersed, many of its members, including Strindberg, having left Berlin to seek fame and fortune in the French capital. In Paris as in Berlin, Munch came to fraternize with an eclectic group of literary, musical, artistic, and scientific avant-gardes. These included the group centered around William Molard and Ida Ericson’s apartment at 6, rue Vercingétorix, where Gauguin had rented a studio when he returned from Tahiti in 1893, and other groups associated with the symbolist journals Mercure de France and La plume.62 During part of this period, Munch rented a studio on the edge of Montparnasse at 32, rue de la Santé, an address surrounded then, as now, by hospitals. Munch’s neighbor on the “street of health” was the enigmatic Dr. Paul Gaston Meunier, who published under the pseudonym Marcel Réja. A practicing psychiatrist at the Villejuif Asylum on the southern outskirts of Paris by day, and a symbolist poet and art critic, presumably by night, Réja would not only correct Strindberg’s French for the autobiographical novel Inferno but would also write The Art of the Insane (L’art chez les fous, 1907). Réja’s study, based on the collections of a number of French psychiatrists, is often considered the first critical assessment of the art of the mentally ill and a precursor to Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), the best-known source of the avant-garde’s interest in mental alterity.63
Judging by their correspondence, Réja’s published praise for Munch’s work, Munch’s woodcut portrait of Réja (fig. 97), and the friendly dedications in Réja’s books, conserved in Munch’s library, the two were close during Munch’s Paris period. Réja seems to have been Munch’s main conduit to the many Parisian institutions that treated and housed the mentally ill at the fin de siècle, many of whom were suffering from the neurological pathologies associated with the dreaded tertiary stage of syphilis, a disease that greatly preoccupied Munch and his cohorts.64 Munch’s good friend Fritz Delius, who lived on the outskirts of Paris in Grez-sur-Loing, had been diagnosed with the secondary stage of syphilis in 1895, the same year that Munch’s supporter Julius Meier-Graefe was falsely rumored to have taken to his bed with “a serious syphilis.”65 This was also the year that Gauguin probably contracted the disease, and the year that Strindberg was vehemently denying that the skin condition on his hands, for which he was being treated at the Hôpital Saint-Louis, was a sign that he too had been infected. There is some evidence that Munch visited both the Salpêtrière and the Hôpital Saint-Louis, but he probably also spent time at Sainte-Anne Asylum, the largest and most prestigious of the Parisian clinics for the mentally ill, a short walk from where both he and Réja were living.66 In 1899, Réja would arrange for the artist Paul Herrmann, a close friend and colleague of Munch’s, known in Paris at the time as Henri Héran, to sketch dancing women at Sainte-Anne’s to publicize a fete at the asylum.67 Such collaborations between psychiatrists and the symbolist avant-garde were hardly unusual. Réja’s mentor at Villejuif, Dr. Auguste Marie, would soon invite the poet Gabriel Randon, better known as Jehan Rictus, to perform at Villejuif.68 Rictus came into the Molard circle in 1896, exactly when Munch did; 1896 was also the year that Rictus made an anarchist splash with his scandalous recitation of the Soliloquies of the Poor at the Cabaret des Quat’z’Arts.69
| 97 | Edvard Munch, Marcel Réja, 1896–97. Woodcut, 40 × 32.6 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
Munch himself claimed that an emotional visit to the Hôpital Saint-Louis was the basis for the painting now known as Inheritance, his “syphilis art,” as he called it when it was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1903 (fig. 98).70 He had martyred himself, Munch declared, in order to produce a “poster-like” image of a mother holding a syphilitic child in her lap. It was a “highly moral work” with a “true message of pain,” in which he intended nonnaturalistic elements, including overtly religious iconography, to inspire in the beholder the same deep pathos he had felt in viewing the tragic scene.71 A lithograph from 1896 (fig. 99) combines elements of Inheritance and the painting Women in Hospital, identifying the latter with Munch’s category of “syphilis art.”72 The lithograph shows a doctor examining a woman’s hand, looking perhaps for the rash characteristic of the secondary stage of syphilis. Dark spots on the figures in the background denote the chancres of syphilis, while the figures’ varying states of undress, mussed hair, and caricatured expressions serve as visual signs of both mental illness and prostitution.
| 98 | Edvard Munch, Inheritance, 1897–99. Oil on canvas, 141 × 120 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
| 99 | Edvard Munch, Women in the Hospital, 1896. Lithograph, 35 × 49 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
The literary and pictorial tradition of representing the mad, especially the mad poor, in various states of undress dates at least as far back as the sixteenth century.73 Undress, often to the point of nakedness, connoted degradation, otherness, irrationality, animality, and childishness—in short, the mad person’s close proximity to nature. Examples abound, from the chained figures that graced the gates of Bethlem Hospital in eighteenth-century London to William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, in which Tom Rakewell’s increasing state of undress signifies his loss of material comforts and his progressively worsening syphilis, all of which eventually land him in Bedlam. When madwomen were shown in a state of undress, additional associations inhered between madness, unbridled sexuality, and prostitution, as in Tony Robert-Fleury’s painting of Philippe Pinel supposedly liberating the patients of the Salpêtrière from their chains (fig. 100) and Albert Londe’s photographs of hysterics, taken at the Salpêtrière under the auspices of Jean-Martin Charcot (fig. 101).74
| 100 | After Tony Robert-Fleury, Philippe Pinel Releasing Lunatics from Their Chains at the Salpêtrière Asylum in Paris in 1795, 1876–78. Photogravure, 24.4 × 30.5 cm. British Museum, London. |
| 101 | Albert Londe, Mlle Baranes (hystérie): Tympanite, ca. 1883. Photographs mounted on paper. Private collection, France. |
In Women in Hospital, Munch deployed the familiar topos of the undressed mad, but he used a pathological means of painting to defy expectations about the madwomen depicted. The half-dressed women in the background are entirely painted but highly schematized, while the fully naked central figure is rendered naturalistically in crayon. This main figure thus reads simultaneously as the most mad and the most human of the four, conveying a message in line with the moral stance taken by the specific psychiatric community to which Réja and his mentor Marie belonged. To call oneself a psychiatrist in Paris in 1896, as both Réja and Marie did, was to reject the label “alienist” and to embrace an emerging critique of the asylum system and its deeply institutionalized regimes of confinement and what was called the moral treatment.75 French psychiatric reformers allied themselves with the Revue de psychiatrie, founded in 1896 by Édouard Toulouse, the most well placed of the self-declared reformers, who spent most of his career at Villejuif.76 Before retiring from Sainte-Anne’s in 1936, Toulouse claimed a final, albeit belated, reformist victory by having the words “asylum,” “alienist,” and “the insane” struck from the official lexicon; institutions such as Sainte-Anne’s and Villejuif would henceforth be known as “psychiatric hospitals,” their doctors as “psychiatrists,” and their patients as “the mentally ill.”77 By the mid-1890s, Toulouse had taken a number of young reformers under his wing at Villejuif, including Réja, Marie, Paul Sérieux, and Nicolas Vaschide, some of the earliest collectors of the art of the insane, men who, nearly two decades before Prinzhorn, had begun to think about the artistic productions of their patients outside the contexts of curiosity and diagnostics. For these psychiatrists and others, collecting the work of patients and aligning themselves with literary, musical, and artistic avant-gardes were inextricably linked to their self-conscious identity as reformers.78
Évariste de Marandon de Montyel presented this new breed of psychiatrists as champions of the poor and politically disenfranchised, likening them to musicians whose genius can be realized only if their instruments—asylums—are properly tuned. Moreover, he compared the mentally ill to poets, in their heightened ability both to absorb their surrounding environment into their “state of soul” and to reflect that “state of soul” back onto their environment. Like artists, he argued, the mentally ill were particularly sensitive to their environment; a more liberated environment, he reasoned, therefore had the potential to free them from their disease. Similarly, when Réja’s mentor Auguste Marie introduced his collection of patient art to the public, he maintained that it demonstrated the fundamental humanity of his patients. “The brain of the insane man is not that different from ours!” he insisted. “The only difference between him and us are exaggerations. . . . It is an all too common error to consider the insane as beings outside of humanity, to believe that their mental incoherence and disordered imagination are part of a world foreign to us.” To underscore the point, Marie claimed that the majority of works in his collection were actually quite normal, or at least not nearly as “eccentric and baroque” as what one was likely to see at the Paris Salons.79
No doubt, Marie, like a number of Parisian critics, would have viewed Munch’s work as “eccentric and baroque,” but his protégé Réja proclaimed that Munch’s “barbarous brutality,” although it might have appeared insane, in fact resulted directly from Munch’s attempts to produce symbolist works of art.80 Ideologically, it seems, Munch, Marie, and Réja were quite close, for Women in Hospital argued that even the maddest were individual human beings, not so different from “us,” and therefore deserving of care and compassion. The three background figures, all half-dressed and highly schematized, are all partial, either doubled over, faceless, or cut off by the edge of the canvas. But they are all resolutely painted; their matter, though unevenly applied, is made self-evident. The saturated colors of their bare torsos—yellow and peach—draw attention to areas of thick paint, often single strokes, while in other areas, sketchily applied or thinned paint reveals the underlying blue of the background. The main female figure, however, is altogether different. An uncommon painted depiction of the elderly female body, she is about two-thirds life-size and dominates the canvas, head slightly tilted down, eyes apparently closed, in midstride or perhaps midshuffle. Munch chose not to paint her but to render her naturalistically, even individualistically, in colored crayon. Her sunken cheeks, visible collarbones, emaciated torso, and muscular legs are thoroughly realized, as if taken from the life. There could be no greater antithesis to Munch’s otherworldly, youthful Madonnas. By virtue of their being half-dressed and painted, the three background women register as more mentally and materially present; in places, their bodies even protrude slightly from the surface of the canvas. By contrast, the fully naked, unpainted figure is shallower, rendered before the matte background. Munch often began his painted compositions by sketching directly on canvas in crayon, pastel, or pencil.81 Therefore, from the point of view of his working process, the figure can be read as a painterly other, unfinished or incomplete.
In this strategic return to naturalistic depiction, the central woman is at once the most diseased and least material, but also the most complete and particularized of the four figures depicted. That self, however, is disintegrating on the canvas. Especially between her legs and near her lower body, a chalky green medium, probably crayon or pastel, comes into view like a haze on the surface of the work, as if emanating from the woman’s body. Using a much more friable medium than paint, Munch shows that the selfhood of this central woman is unstable, in the process of disappearing before our eyes. Her incomplete state derives not from the fact that she is not yet formed but that she was once formed and is now in the process of losing that form. Her liminal position between subjectivity and objectivity within the setting of a medical institution is what gives the painting its particular pathos. It is as if Munch painted the process of the subject becoming an object, the event of objectifying the subjective.
Women in Hospital highlights Munch’s lifelong concern with the shifting subjectivities and objectivities in institutionalized settings of health and disease, but its message had a particular import for the fin-de-siècle Parisian psychiatric avant-garde. In this work, he posited the selfhood of the mentally ill as in the process of being lost, but even in their most vulnerable and fragile state as still connected to humanity. In Women in Hospital, Munch sought to provoke in the viewer the same emotional response he had experienced in the service of a moral message tied to asylum reform, which resulted in a posterlike piece of propaganda for the psychiatric avant-garde. Yet there nevertheless remained something clinical about the gaze he invited, an experimental gaze that rendered the individualized woman penetrable, her pathological body knowable. In the 1890s, despite his professed sympathy for the mentally ill, Munch identified more readily with doctors than with patients. His attitude, like that of psychiatric reformers such as Marie and Réja, remained paternalistic. In the 1896 lithograph In the Men’s Clinic, Munch made this position explicit by including his avatar among the observing doctors (fig. 102).
| 102 | Edvard Munch, In the Men’s Clinic, 1896. Lithograph, 33 × 55 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
The strategic alliance between psychiatrists and the avant-garde, between experimentalists and artists, would be stretched to the breaking point in the twentieth century, as the institutional critique brought forth by the avant-garde’s so-called discovery of the art of “madmen, primitives, and children” was channeled into the antipsychiatry and anticolonialist movements of the 1960s. Munch registered this shift in subtle ways after the turn of the century, especially after his own voluntary stay at Dr. Daniel Jacobson’s private clinic in Copenhagen in 1908–9. While he still often cultivated the authoritative gaze of the medical experimentalist, notably in his claims to be an anatomist, he also at times attempted to inhabit the much less certain role of the patient. Evidence of this shift appeared not for the first time in 1907, when Munch, in almost all of the media available to him at the time, revisited the figure of the striding or shuffling naked female, giving her an impenetrable, downturned face and an ambiguous contrapposto stance (fig. 103), in the process transforming her into a much less knowable entity. While this figure may derive from Women in Hospital, it is unclear whether she should be addressed as an object of eroticism, compassion, or even science. The relative certainty invited by the earlier painting, and indeed by the quantitative relationship between the normal and the pathological, and by the pathological method as a pathway to truth, had by then disappeared.
| 103 | Edvard Munch, Weeping Woman, 1907. Oil on canvas, 121 × 119 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo. |
Dissecting the Soul
Later in life, Munch identified his work of the 1890s as a form of experimentation and stressed that his practice was intentionally engaged with the pathological.82 “From 1894 to around 1915, I printed and experimented a lot,” he wrote in a draft letter to an unidentified correspondent; “the main thing is that I experimented.”83 The Frieze of Life, the series of motifs that preoccupied Munch for much of his life, “dealt with inheritance as a curse,” as he insisted in a letter from the 1930s. “It had something of an Osvald mood to it,” he wrote, referring to the main character in Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts, dying of hereditary syphilis.84 Munch’s use of the pathological, and in particular the psychopathological, was intertwined with a historically specific discourse of experiment. Nineteenth-century experimentalism positioned pathologies such as madness as privileged pathways for attaining knowledge about the most complex mechanisms of modern human psychology. The paradigmatic relationship between the normal and the pathological, the inextricable and functional links between what were imagined as two poles of being, encouraged Munch to chart the boundaries between health and disease, the normal and the pathological, and to play productively with reversing those poles with a view to making his work speak truth in universal terms. One irony of Munch’s achievement, and indeed of the achievements of Denis, Vuillard, and Strindberg, was that they helped establish a new norm, that of symbolist simplification and distortion, which, in the accelerated logic of turn-of-the-century avant-gardes, would soon be superseded by even more radical experiments in abstraction. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining what appears to be Munch’s return to a form of naturalism in the twentieth century. Structurally, Munch’s works needed the dialectical tensions of naturalism and symbolism, the normal and the pathological, that had implicitly operated in the term “psychic naturalism,” Przybyszewski’s extremely apt coinage of 1894.
Like Strindberg in the guise of Arvid Falk, Munch eventually wrote a manifesto on the usefulness of his artistic research into pathology, a compendium of notes initially titled The Mad Poet’s Diary. And, also like Strindberg, he made clear that he thought of himself as a vivisectionist who dissected not bodies but souls in an experimental quest for truth. Although The Mad Poet’s Diary began in the third person, Munch quickly dropped this pretense of objectivity, while still insisting that his aim had always been to study the soul scientifically, to objectify the subjective, and to do so through means such as “exaggeration” and the “use of others.” “It is important for me to study the various inherited phenomena that form the life and destiny of a human being,” he wrote, “especially the most common forms of madness. I am making a study of the soul, as I can observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical soul preparation. The main thing is to make an artwork and a soul study, so I have changed and exaggerated, and have used others for these studies. . . . Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the recesses of the human body and dissected cadavers, I try to dissect souls.”85 Munch never came closer than this to elucidating the role of madness in his art. Stressing the importance of an objective study of insanity, of the soul’s pathologies, as well as of the use of exaggeration and alterity, he delivered his own version of Strindberg’s Madman’s Defense, the manuscript of which Strindberg, not insignificantly, gave him as a gift in the 1890s.86 Munch positioned madness as the fundamental crux in a creative method aimed at achieving the most ambitious and idealistic of symbolism’s goals: to determine and to represent objectively the mechanisms of the modern psyche. In the 1930s, as Max Nordau’s diagnosis of the symbolists as mentally ill was increasingly extended to modernist artists, and to ever more horrific ends, Munch’s pathologies were repathologized. When “Madness Becomes Method” appeared as a slogan to be ridiculed on the walls of the Nazis’ Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937,87 the perverse reference to a central tenet of Munch’s symbolist practice could only have been devastating.