The most famous work, «The Scream», is not there (although there is a lithographic version, still exciting): it cannot be seen, but it can be heard, because that «inner cry» which gives the exhibition its title is loud, you listen to it while moving from one room to another, it is no longer just the eyes that see in an exhibition itinerary that seems to realize that synesthesia of the senses, which was in Edvard Munch’s pictorial program. The Norwegian painter (1863 – 1944) is celebrated with a large retrospective (100 works) promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture with the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and the Norwegian Embassy, produced by Palazzo Reale (where it will remain open until 26 January, and then move to Rome, Palazzo Bonaparte, from 18 February) and Arthemisia in collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo, which lent the works, and curated by Patricia G. Berman with Costantino D’Orazio.
«I don’t paint from nature – Munch wrote -, I take from it or serve at its rich table. I don’t paint what I see, but what I have seen.” And again: «When you are in an intense state of mind, a landscape will arouse a certain impression, by depicting this landscape you arrive at an image of your state of mind and this state of mind is the important thing. Nature is only the means.” Finally (and then I stop with the quotes), it is precisely by telling how «The Scream» was born that the synesthetic and visionary journey that this retrospective has the merit of bringing to the foreground is completed (pay attention to its capital letters): «… I colors of nature shattered its lines. The lines and colors resonated and vibrated. These solicitations of the Light not only made my Eye vibrate but also gave as many oscillations to my Ear, so that I actually heard that Scream. And then I painted the picture entitled “The Scream”».
Thus, far from his iconic work that we all know and that we are now used to seeing even as emoticons, the holy card of our times, the artist’s jagged creative path appears clearer to us in its grandiose complexity, which starts from the legacy of impressionism to arrive at symbolism and precede (entering) expressionism. In Munch’s paintings there is the root of everything that came later, even conceptualism and abstractionism: I am referring to that absence of contours in things and people, as well as “unnatural” colors and distorted perspectives, which his contemporary critics considered it a technical flaw (almost as if he were unable to define what he painted) and instead signaled the demolition of boundaries that were reduced only to the vision of the eye. It was his cry. He painted what the mind saw, from a perspective certainly linked to the historical period of the birth of psychoanalysis (but he never met Freud) and to the theater of Ibsen and Strindberg, but he also believed that it could be animated and listened to (through our visions not limited to the eyes) also that part of nature that appears to us without movement, thus partially anticipating some of the concepts that modern quantum physics now tries to demonstrate.
Perhaps Munch was really capable of seeing the unconscious, he had a sort of diversified perception of his senses, which he tried to narrate in his works, aiming to make the invisible visible. He was therefore a painter-researcher, not only in the narrow technical sphere of his work, but above all in the depths of the soul. And he was certainly sad, marked by family deaths (in a few years his mother, older sister, father and brother died), by illnesses (from tuberculosis to nervous weakness), by a single love that ended – after a quarrel with his girlfriend Tulla Larsen – with a gunshot, in a circumstance never clearly clarified, which irreparably damaged the middle finger of his left hand. A fundamental episode taken up in many paintings in which Tulla is depicted as the murderer of Marat, the figure of the French Revolution in which the artist had sublimated his own, considering himself almost a victim with no escape.
However, the artist was also capable of effectively marketing his production, of creating a notoriety throughout Europe that surpassed the criticisms, indeed he used them as the “soul of commerce” (he also had an exhibition together with Picasso), of being an entertaining and solicitous landlord on his property near Oslo, that he has naturist interests (with paintings that seem to predate Futurism), but also in photography and filmmaking.
A figure with many facets, human and artistic, which the exhibition, divided into seven sections, has the merit of telling in its entirety, with shadows and lights (enhanced by the display), but above all with a succession of masterpieces, linked to all the creative periods, which resonate loudly in the mind precisely because of the evident connection with our interiority: from the “Sick little girl” to the “Death of Marat”, from the “Self-portrait in Hell” to the other “Self-portrait between bed and ‘clock’, from the ‘Starry Night’ to the paintings for the Frieze at the University of Oslo.
Munch’s little-known relationship with Italy is also well investigated, having been visited several times, from Rome (with great admiration for Raphael) to Venice, from Tuscany to Lake Como. Here, on the border of Mendrisio, in 1900 he happened to be stopped by the Swiss police because he was suspected of being the anarchist who had killed the king of Italy Umberto I. In reality the murderer had already been arrested, but the border guards they had found that tall, gaunt man with an inquisitive look and little inclined to immediate contact with reality “strange”. He could have been a murderer, but instead he was a genius.
