Munch Seduces the Masses

"Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul" is a thoroughly engaging and entertaining retrospective that follows the recent trend of mounting "audience-proof" exhibitions. Museums try and amass as many great and popular works of art as they can in order to satiate a public that seeks the comfort of the familiar. There's little revelatory about the show except perhaps to reacquaint New Yorkers with a cross section of Munch's voluminous body of work. That said, Edvard Munch is beyond a doubt one of the most exciting offerings of the spring.

Once you resign yourself to the few inevitabilities, such as big crowds and noisy galleries, there is far too much to be enjoyed in this show in a single viewing. The MoMA has nicely reconfigured its versatile fifth-floor exhibition space for the show. While housed in four spacious rooms, the exhibition teems with so many wall-to-wall paintings that it can, at times, overwhelm.

The first painting that greets the viewer is The Dance of Life (1889-90), which seems half expressionist, half surreal. The bluish-purple splotches of sky feed into the water to form a frigid background against which the eerie figures-both dancing and at rest-seem alternately emotive and blank. The exhibit continues with Munch's naturalistic work from the 1880s. Even in the quiet domestic scenes that comprise much of his early painting, fear and uncertainty seem to lurk silently in the shadows.

Two of the most arresting fixtures in the first room feature the artist's sister Inger. In a portrait from 1892, Munch reduces the figure and background to the same plane until space and surface become one. Such flattening becomes a signature of Munch's style and is glimpsed again in Death in the Sickroom (1893), which shows Munch and his family members around the sickbed of his sister Sophie who died of tuberculosis at the age of 15.

Much of the second room is given over to the work of the 1890s, in particular "Frieze of Life." First exhibited in its entirety during the Berlin Secession of 1902, "Frieze" is the general title of a series of canvases in which Munch tackled the meaning of life itself. The works in the series tell the cumulative story of love from its wondrous conception to its inevitable demise. "Frieze" includes many of Munch's best-known works such as The Shriek (1893)(not on display), Metabolism (1899), Madonna (1894-5), Mermaid, and Vampire. Many will chuckle to learn that it was initially condemned as the immoral fantasies of a sick mind. In these paintings, we glimpse the techniques that will become trademarks of Munch's style. In many of them, he de-emphasizes all unimportant detail by blurring the features. Munch strives to transcend surface reality to produce expressionistic works of deep human psychology.

Tension and loneliness pervade Munch's work from the late 1880s onward and occupy a central place in "Frieze." As in much of his work, the erotic content is always laced with morbidity. In Madonna, he depicts a naked woman in a state of abandonment. Woven in with this depiction of female sexuality is the explicit link with death that marks all Munch's forays into the realm of the intimate; Munch's Madonna wears a "corpse's smile." Vampire (1893-4) was conceived merely to depict a woman kissing a man on the nape of his neck. The absence of anything overtly violent or supernatural feeds Munch's suggestion that a woman can drain a man of all life. Here, the eternal kiss becomes the eternal bite.

A whole gallery space is devoted to Munch's graphic art: etchings, lithographs, aquatint, and woodcuts. Very much attracted by the promise of a wider audience, he increasingly turned his attention to graphic arts in the hopes of spreading his message even further. Among the works displayed are two lithographs of The Scream and numerous reproductions of "Frieze."

The offerings in the final room of the exhibition are all from the 20th century offer a glimpse of the lesser-known Munch. We get hints and glimmers of what Munch was up to during his four final decades, but the spotlight is so focused on the work from the 1890s that nearly everything that comes in its wake seems like an afterthought. Well, I suppose MoMA needs to leave the Munch Museum in Oslo with something to exhibit until mid-May.