This Painting Is Sadder Than It Looks. Here's Why

Edvard Munch's paintings may strike the viewer with the hallucinatory intensity of the subject's gaze. In the scream and anxiety, the eyes of the people depicted are so unsettling that they appear monstrously enlarged. But if the anguish and disquiet of these almost skeletal chasms seem explicit and undisguised, what they're looking at is less clear. So is the nature of the artist's vision. But stay through till the end and you'll get a better picture of the mystery and transformation that are the foundation of Munch's work. The Sick Child was a turning point in Munch's art. It depicts the artist's bedridden sister Sophie, withering from tuberculosis. When I look at this work, I cannot help but wonder, what is it that grips the girl's attention, rendering her facial features so eerily serene? To consider that she's actually tripping on morphine might be a sound idea, but definitely not very exciting to speculate on. So I'll leave it at that. To the right of her is her aunt, Karin Bjulstedt, the aunt to care of the troubled Munch household after the death of his mother. And surprisingly enough, she was an artist herself. While she may have been relatively unknown, her influence inspired the young Edvard to paint. In the painting, we see her head is heavy with the weight of grief. Her eyes, we can only assume, are closed and turned inwards. Their conjoined hands are the focal point of the composition, which emphases a deep emotional bond. The bond even borders on dissolution. Well, at least the hands are dissolving into one another. As if the feeble life of Sophie, as well as, I dare say, the reality of the painting itself, are only sustained through this gesture. Devoid of clearly defined outlines, it is on the verge of dissolving into mere patches of color. That was actually the public's main concern with the work, not really digging the discoveries of Impressionism and German Expressionism, which had a strong influence on the style of the work. They condemned it vehemently when it was first exhibited at the Autumn Exhibition in Christiana in 1886, calling it deviant French art. And as the icing on the cake, are those meant to be hands or are they blobs of fish mousse smeared in lobster sauce? The author of this one must have been preoccupied with their hungry stomach more than the painting, I suppose. In defense, Munch said, I don't paint what I see but what I saw, and what he saw is the transmission of vital energies of souls. A mysterious act of love and sympathy. No wonder decades later the Nazis hated it too. Going back to the protagonists of the painting. As I mentioned, Aunt Karen is completely absorbed by sorrow. Sophie, however, leaning on a large pillow which resembles a strange rectangular halo, holding the frail body in its opaque embrace, is astonishingly alert. But to what? Edvard Munch made a total of six paintings in this series. Almost each of them repeats the same scene and the pose of his sister, looking to the right of her, as if magnetized by an unearthly presence. Let us look for a moment at another rendition of the same motif in Spring. In this one, the right side of the painting is occupied by an open window with gently swaying curtains, but the dying sister looks away from it, as if she can no longer relate to the world of Spring. Back to The Sick Child and all of its more or less identical versions. This ominous patch of dark, which Munch perpetually situates a gaze away from the main subject, may evoke a suspicion that it is the same curtain that we've just seen in Spring. Though its texture suggests that it is way beyond the mundanity of decor. Or, if it is indeed a curtain, it exists there as a veil before a realm that no living being can be a witness to with their own eyes, unless they already belong to it more than to life. And if we consider it a symbol of death, there is something enticing in it that makes Sophie want to look at it so peacefully. In a word, death gives one the chills. But Sophie is...chill. It isn't at all groundbreaking to claim death enticing. Death has been with us since the beginning, and been a wonder, a mystery since then. In Munch's era, Sigmund Freud wrote of eros and thanatos, the drive of life and the drive of death, as the primary impulses that guide the human psyche. And as with any two forces in opposition to each other, there is a point where they share some of their respective qualities. A Jungian term, enantiodromia, helps to understand this better. Jung used it to denote the tendency of a thing to turn into its opposite when it has reached its extreme. And in regards to psyche, the extreme of feeling, which is precisely our case if you think of Munch's heightened sensitivity. An example of this convergence can be found in puberty. Young naked girl is sitting on her bed's edge, legs tightly pressed together, her hands forming an X over the source of the trouble. As if in a vain attempt to cross out the repercussions of the embarrassing process of becoming a woman. Again, we are confronted by the eyes, which are suffused with terror. The terror of an almost fatal transformation that her body is undergoing. It is the end of childhood and the onset of a new phase that the work is preoccupied with. The depiction of Sophie entering death is parallel to the unnamed girl of puberty entering womanhood. Hence we could say that both paintings portray a scene of transformation. And it is this very point that Eris and Thanatos intertwine in the painter's anxious or spiritist vision. If this assumption sounds far-fetched, just look the menacing shadow looming over the tragedy of the teenage girl. A blob of darkness, it does not repeat the outlines of the body that allegedly casts it. Instead, it appears as a separate entity, which is simultaneously a part of her own being. The ambivalence of the image is in fact that she both gives birth to this ominous creature and is threatened to be swallowed by it. Indeed, the unknown of womanhood in puberty is already externalized in the shadow. The mystery that appears around the girl. Munch would write in his diary, which in itself is a work of art, Are there spirits? We see what we see, because we have eyes constituted as they are. What are we? A gathering force, in motion, a light, which burns with a wick. Inner warmth, exterior flame, and finally an invisible glow, which is sensed. What if we imagine for a second that Munch's daring experiments with style, his abandonment of line, the hazy imagery and expressionistic brushstrokes are not purely formal. That perhaps behind the ingenuity of his technique lies a reality which is only accessible through such means of expression. Our eyes are constituted as those of spirits and we can sense an invisible glow. He says in the passage above, Our eyes may not be this way congenitally, rather this sight is acquired. A transformation of vision, a new way of seeing, is the foundation of the novelty of expression. And it's only in its being expressed that the vision becomes tangible. In this sense, the peculiar nature of Munch's shadows becomes slightly more revealed. Envoys from another world, they are not mere pictorial elements or symbols, but a vision imbued with a life of its own. It's a mysterious view of life, bordering on death, always transformative, a breath from beyond. It is the beyond that captivates Munch's characters, arresting them with fear, anguish, or rendering them incomprehensibly tranquil. As in the case of Sophie, her fascination with the ominous patch of dark mirrors Munch's own fascination with the transcendental, the realm his artistic eyes truly belong to. To capture that which cannot be captured is the pathos of Edvard Munch's art and a mystery no criticism could encompass. What are your thoughts? Please share in the comments below. And may your life ever be artful!