The Phenomenological Loss of the Soul

by Mark Daniel Cohen

Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

February 19 - May 8, 2006

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2006. Copyright © 2006 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

If there are dead souls, they float up in variation. They arise like spectra to the introspective eye. They are modulated by signatures, tempered to a range of staves, keyed to play in the tonalities of nullity and agony, in the pitches of nothingness and anguish, in the registers of soundlessness and song. They enter upon us in either vacancy or torment, descend in the diaphane deadening of the sensate or plunge to the dying fall and the dirge.

For the imagination of nullification comes in palettes. We conceive of our eradication, congenitally it seems, in two variants—in vaporous negation as a thinking vacuum capable of thinking its own non-existence, capable of thinking that it cannot think, or feel, or live, and in the tormented degradation of what plummets endlessly toward nothingness, intimately and ever aware of nothing so much as its incipient nothingness, until, in fact, in the end, it becomes nothing. We know ourselves in our darker insights, in the moments during which we are willing to see the encroaching truth, as void or as capable void, as corpses or as patients, as dead or as dying. We are caught between death and mortality. Keats found himself poetically captured in the intrinsic dilemma, and he envisioned "easeful Death" in order to elude mortality, in order to sidestep the "hungry generations" that he felt treading him down. And Beckett hovered in the borderland, touched sensitively by the sweet piquancy of its delicate and inexorable bleakness.

Such considerations are appropriate in the question of Edvard Munch, for Munch is a visionary of the dusk of the spirit, a seer and portrayer of the twilight of the human enterprise, of the occlusion of our hopes and our possibilities for success in life. His is a vision of the mortality that constitutes existence, of the death that is in life. He is keenly alive to the touches of decay in ordinary events, to the promise of ultimate failure in the exercises of the passions of the soul, to the final bad news we all must face. He is vibrantly aware of it all, and his paintings and prints seem to glow with the deposit of brooding darkness and flame with the torment of the knowledge of where we are headed. His art is the living awareness of the necessary death of the things we cherish.

And as such, Munch's art is ill at home in our time, for his imagination of disaster is the diametric opposite of our own. Unlike the mind that created the candle flames of dark insight and willing confession that shimmer on his surfaces, we are at a loss in the darkness. Unlike his honed sensitivity to the import of doomed circumstance, we are deadened to the imagination of death, we are paupers in the dreaming of disaster. Where Munch sees the dusk, we fail to see; where he feels the touch of mortality, we feel nothing; where he senses the proximity of death in the warmth of family, the possibility of love, the levitating moments of deep introspection, we know nothing of death and live as if we are going to live forever.

And as such, Munch is as well ideally appropriate to, and indispensable for, our time, for, if art is capable of teaching—or, if in a time of nullified feelings, art remains capable of teaching—then he may be the tonic for the degradation of our ardencies and the ignorance that resides where we should possess our deepest knowledge, the vacuum that stands for the heart of our wisdom of life. It would be to our gain, even though there is nothing to regain—the darknesses that Munch saw are necessary darknesses—for there is a nobility in the imagination of destruction and a dignity to the insight into the necessity of death. We acknowledge so in our regard for the tragedies of Shakespeare, of Moliere, of the Greek dramatists. Giacomo Leopardi, the nineteenth-century Italian poet, once observed, "All works of genius have this in common: even when they demonstrate and make us perceive the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most dreadful despair, they nevertheless comfort the noble soul that finds itself in a state of depression, disillusionment, nullity, boredom, and discouragement, or in the most bitter and deadening misfortunes. Such works rekindle our enthusiasm, and though they treat and represent nothing but death, give back (to us) that life that had been lost." Nietzsche asserted much the same point: "All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even every good book which is written against life." Even every good painting.

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So out of keeping now is Munch's work that, at the recent extensive exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—an exhibition that appeared from February 19 to May 8, 2006, and that covered the entirety of the artist's career—room after room of riveting, compelling, and often well-known paintings contained an atmosphere of strangeness that surrounded the works like an aura. Despite its status as a key development in early Modernism—or in the preparation for Modernism, if we take Munch as a precursor of the German and French Expressionists—Munch's art has entered the realm of history, for it has the air of the museum about it, the air shared by work that comes from another period of time, that seems as if created by a mind not entirely like our own, from a world not entirely like our own. In slightly more than 100 years, Munch's art has gone from the esoteric to the exotic—what he created to teach insight into, as the subtitle of the exhibition put it, "The Modern Life of the Soul" has been transformed by time into souvenirs from another time, a time that had a different sense of mortality.

And yet, not entirely. Nietzsche observed, "A joke is an epitaph on an emotion." The emotional density of the works, the sheer thickness of mood they carry, is the foundation of the sense of the strange about them, it is the quality by which they differ in extremis from the art we have become accustomed to seeing in galleries today, the art we accept as speaking for our time. Yet, there is no humor in this exhibition—no inadvertent humor that results from the temporal distance over which we view these works, from the alien quality about them. No one laughs at these paintings and prints, and this fact, along with Nietzsche's guidance, tells us that the emotions Munch evokes are not dead, that they have not come to seem quaint and overwrought—that Munch's sense of mortality, his sense of the imperative of knowing the darkness about us, remains within our capabilities. Put simply, Munch continues to speak to us, regardless of how we argue the nature of art and regardless of how we characterize ourselves and the contemporary world.

The density of drenching mood is the heart of the seeming strangeness to these works, but it is not merely a matter of the vigor of the emotional import. Munch's work is distinctive among the range of Expressionist Art, not for the emphasis on the dark vision—Expressionism is marked by dark visions, from the nightmarish dreams of Soutine's fish and animal carcasses to the works of the members of Die Brücke and the German Expressionists, such as Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, and Otto Dix, who drew their tone and subjects from the First World War and, in some instances, from intimations of its approach. Unlike them, Munch set his sense of desolation in domestic scenarios—with figures walking through city streets and milling in drawing rooms and bedchambers. With most of the Expressionist painters, most of the artists who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distorted the rendition of appearances to convey an intensity of emotional response, the images are iconic—visual formulations that seem, at their best, the visual "name" for the emotion itself. With Munch, the image is narrative—we sense ourselves looking in on a moment drawn from an ongoing story, we get a glimpse in media res of a tragedy unfolding. (Perhaps only Kollwitz matches Munch in narrative ability, but her stories are drawn from the war. They are perhaps the most devastating images of war ever rendered into fine art.)

It is likely this quality, the rendering of small but devastating terrors of domesticity, that underlies the standard alignment of Munch with the dramatists Ibsen and Strindberg. (Munch knew them both, created over his lifetime hundreds of works based on Ibsen's plays, and designed sets for several productions. Portraits of both dramatists were included in the exhibition.) If one had to select one play to serve as the literary equivalent of Munch's art, Ibsen's "When We Dead Awaken" would serve well—a story that blooms into a monumental tragedy as one listens to the seemingly innocuous conversations, as one hears dialogue that seems almost entirely idle talk, a story of characters who die well before they die, whose souls die and who spend the majority of their lives as living corpses, and who attempt, one last time, to live again before they finally die. James Joyce wrote of Ibsen's manner, and of this very play, "At some chance expression the mind is tortured with some question, and in a flash, long reaches of life are opened up in vista, yet the vision is momentary unless we stay to ponder on it." Ibsen's plays are devised to evoke such moments and hold them before the mind. Munch's small but not so small tragedies are just such pondering. Where other painters rendered the idealized iconic imagining, the invented image drawn from the dreaming mind, Munch, like a great dramatist, selected the perfect moment from the stream of time that floats a developing story, the moment that somehow sums up the emotional reality of the entire event. His images find in real circumstances and portray what T. S. Eliot called the "objective correlative"—the naturally arising images that are the "formula" for a particular emotion, "such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."

Thus, the distinctive quality of Munch's art is its intelligence about emotion, or rather, its thinking into the emotional realities of life—the meaning and value of the sheer events that constitute the natural course of existence. It is not facts that Munch was after, but the implications of the facts, which are revealed in the emotional tonality of the event and are as real as the facts themselves, as objectively present as material fact. In short, the emotional significance of the event is inherent in the event, and the lesson to be drawn is real. Munch thought of his work as pursuing an understanding—he wrote of The Frieze of Life (a term he used for the principal works of the 1890s and the 1900s, the period in which he found his mature style and produced his most recognizable works) that, in those paintings, he wished to "understand the meaning of life [and] help others gain an understanding of their lives." He wished to understand: to discover a meaning that was not for him alone, and to teach that meaning to others, for whom it would be, presumably, as pertinent as it was for him. And thus, the distortions of fidelity to life were not understood by Munch to record merely his own emotional reactions. They were renderings of his discoveries of something there to be discovered, something outside of him, something capable of being understood, thought about, for it is something to be observed, conceived, considered, and conveyed. The emotional shadings are universals—as universal as are the crises that repeat in every life. And thus, his dark vision is not one of a suffered nullification of feelings but of a keenly observed and felt comprehension of the meaning of life, a sensitivity to and, necessarily, a sufferance of the twilight truths of existence.

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In works throughout the exhibition, one could see the intelligence, the sheer thoughtfulness, of the emotional comprehension of the realities of life. In Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1892, and again in Angst, 1894, figures walk along a street and close to a body of water, staring straight ahead, staring straight out of the canvas, with a look of dull terror on every face. But the dullness is not of the wits; their eyes are not blank but are alive with fear. These are not people who have become senseless. Rather, they are people in shock—aware of their condition and in a state of ceaseless horror.

Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1892
Oil on canvas, 33 11/16 x 47 5/8" (85.5 x 121 cm)
Bergen Art Museum, Rasmus Meyers Collection
(c) 2006 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In Melancholy, 1891, Munch virtually gives us Rodin's Thinker, 1880, reconceived—the long evening sky and the dim mauve and teal stretch of rocks and sand tells us unmistakably what the sole, lonely figure is pondering. In The Storm, 1893, a work composed in such flat layers and in such a self-containing space it could be the design for a stage set, the emotional density is so heavy and permeating, it seems the very air the figures breath, it seems the very substance of the winds of the storm. And it blows with such ferocity, the figures hold their hands to their ears. They know what assails them, they are aware, and they struggle to fend off the awareness. And, they are rendered with such quick and so few twining, vertical strokes, they seem to the viewer little more than flames, lit wicks being blown to a terrified brightness by the gale.

Edvard Munch, The Storm, 1893
Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 51 1/2" (91.8 x 130.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. Irgens Larsen and acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss
and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Funds. (c) 2006 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York

At the heart of Munch's vision are the lessons of love, and they have been digested and their false promises dispelled—they have been thought through. In Summer Night's Dream (The Voice), 1893, a young woman stands in a forest before a lake on which a small boat is passing with two figures, which we somehow know are a man and a woman. The woman leans forward with a quality of yearning, and the moon streaks the water with a column of light, which along with the tree boles makes a setting of phallic images. This is an image of burgeoning desire. Yet, it is an evening image, an image of illumination descending, not mystery arising, for it is sheerly quotidian in its details, and the woman's eyes are purely black. The tonality of foreboding is in the physical situation, in the scenery itself. It is not an extrapolation of the woman's feelings—she is aware only of her yearning, and in Mystery of the Beach, 1892, we find a similar scene in similar dark hues, but, in this case, it is a landscape without figures. The dark mystery is there, of its own.

In The Dance of Life, 1899-1900, Munch makes his most deliberately symbolic statement about the nature of life. The painting embodies the central themes of his work, as he phrased them in speaking of this work: "the awakening of love, the dance of life, love at its peak, and finally death." The four states are represented by four figures or pairs of figures—a lone young woman gazing at the dancing couples, a young couple staring into each other's eyes, an older couple swaying in passionate embrace, and an old woman staring at the dancing figures. Death is never far from the consideration of love in Munch's work, but here it is more than acknowledged—it is the dominant tone of this deliberation on the meaning of life. The entire work is done in somber tones of green, blue, red, and black. The young girl standing to the side looks forlorn in her solitude, and the old woman, representing death, is positioned to the other side of the painting, in a similar pose, to match her. The girl's lust for life has no joy in it as seen here, and it implies death. And all the faces, including those of the embracing couples, seem like skulls, with sunken eyes and yellowing or graying skin. The sober and forlorn tone of this work is not a function of the minds of the figures portrayed or of the painter in response to the scene—it is posited as the nature of the situation per se. Life itself is such as this.

Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life, 1899-1900
Oil on canvas, 49 3/16 x 75 3/16" (125 x 191 cm)
The National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design/National Gallery, Oslo. (c) 2006 The Munch
Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In essence, what we see in these works is Munch as the Romantic sufferer. As they come to us through him, it is the traumas and fortunes of life that possess an epic proportion—they are, in fact, and as simple fact, terrible. The enormity of felt comprehension, the epic nature of the emotionality, is in the nature of life and not in the sufferer. (The view of Romanticism as little more than aesthetic ego—inflation has always been a misreading, or a biased reading, emphasizing the Byronic rendition and ignoring the Wordsworthian, or even Keatsian, sensibility of heightened sensitivity to the lessons that nature can be found to teach regarding the meaning of existence—the tradition of humility before the enormity of emotional life in response to nature. It is a misreading that, in the visual arts, has extended itself down to the estimation of Pollock in the minds of many contemporary artists and art observers.)

Art such as this, art of tonal density in which everything portrayed is steeped with the emotion of its incursion into the life of the observer, art that reveals the emotional truth, is not what we have been accustomed to in our time, and the reason stretches back beyond the contemporary period. In fact, the story of Modernism is the story of the intellectualization of art. The turn toward the idea in place of the emotion is not an invention of Conceptual Art and is not a failing, if it is a failing, of the Post-War era. Ever since the development of Cubism, visual art has been increasingly focused on conveying an idea rather than the emotions, which is to say that life as found in Modern Art has been decreasingly comic, touching, tender, piquant, and tragic. Cubism was a thought about the possibilities of artistic rendering and the new scientific conception of the world at the start of the century. Abstraction followed from it and moved even farther into a terrain in which there was nothing for the emotions to embrace. Surrealism attempts an emotional response, but it is one deliberately beyond the pale of normal emotionality. The incursion into new terrain of emotional and intellectual response is the very point of the method. Of course, there have been exceptions—Ernst, Dali, and above all Giacometti, along with others—but the principal effort in visual art for more than a century now has been in new thoughts about artistic vision and not about intensity of emotional reaction, or the invocation of an emotionally rich view of life. Clement Greenberg's view that Modern Art initiated a search on the part of artists for the foundations of their methodology, a stripping down of each mode of artistic creation to its essential aspects—a version of art for art's sake—is little more than an admission that art was not to be about the emotional response to existence, which is as much as to say, and one must believe that Munch would have said as much, that art was no longer in the business of wisdom. It is difficult to say the same of Modernist literature—Modern and experimental writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, Nabokov, and many others knew something about life and meant to say it. But with the exception of master artists of the last century who clearly saw deeply into the human dilemma—again, Giacometti chief among them—visual art has been oriented on something other than a depth of comprehension regarding the nature of the human condition, and any explanation of an alternate purpose is little more than an excuse. Those who have something profound to say always will say it.

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