Edvard Munch: Storytelling in Art

One artist I have long admired is the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch and, as such, he figures in the first chapter of my novella, "Manhattan Morning."  Indeed, that chapter is entitled "A Particular Girl in the Frieze of Life" -- a reference to a series of paintings Munch made that are rich in psychology.

"The key to Munch's originality is storytelling with a potent pictorial rhetoric of rhythmic line and smoldering color," Peter Schjeldahl said in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. He was reviewing an exhibition of Munch works of art that recently opened at the Neue Galerie on Manhattan's Upper East Side, not far from the Metropolitian Museum.



"If only one could be the body through which today's thought and feelings flow," Munch wrote at one point, the article notes.

While the artist may not have been the conduit for the thoughts and feelings of the world in general, his art strongly reflects his own fears, dread, despair, sadness, disappointment and often frustrated sex life.

 As a young man, Schjeldahl notes, Munch was part of a bohemian circle in Kristiania (Oslo) that, among other things, advocated free love. The artist had what the reviewer describes as a harrowing affair with the wife of one of his cousins followed by other relationships that were just as traumatic and unhappy.

These are illuminated in a series of works entitled "Madonna;" -- "a woman in orgasm as seen by her lover to whom she is supremely indifferent," Schjeldahl notes. Munch, insisted, he said, that every drawn or painted mark in his work register a motive or feeling.

Like Gauguin and van Gogh: the Norwegian's work reflects a "willingness, amounting to a compulsion, to use art as a vehicle of emotion in extremis," Holland Cotter, reviewing the Neue Gallerie exhibition in The New York Times, said. In addition, he continued,  Munch brought to his work up-to-the-minute content and a  new-century attitude toward sex, psychological disturbance, occult spirituality and utopian politics."

In light of all that, it is not insignificant that my protagonist, Dan Morrison, puts an imaginary girl into an intriguing dress he sees in a 5th Ave. window display, and then visualizes her a tableau resembling a Munch painting.