Edvard Munch: Reflections on Life and Death
- Rossella BLUE Mocerino
- Mar 19, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 1
Memento mori is translated from Latin to mean, "remember you must die." Edvard Munch’s art reminds us to reflect on our mortality.
Munch’s work was intertwined with memento mori, not just as he grew older but throughout his entire life. It is not hard to understand the roots of this preoccupation. He tells us that his mother and his paternal grandfather, as well as many members of his extended family, died of tuberculosis. Those who did not succumb to the disease suffered lifelong consequences. Furthermore, Munch believed that he had inherited the seed of madness from his father and a weak constitution from his mother, writing, "Sickness and madness and death were the black angels that stood by my cradle." Given the rampant illness in his family, Munch firmly asserted that it would have been a crime for him to marry.
He painted The Sick Child with red hair several times. He wanted to capture on canvas the exact first impression he had upon seeing the pallid face resting against the cushion, so he returned to this painting years later and produced three more variations of the theme.
He also produced several versions of The Scream, perhaps his most iconic masterpiece. Recalling its inspiration, he wrote: “I remained immobile, trembling from anguish, and I heard bounce through nature an immense, infinite scream.” The Scream (the original version is not shown in this post) was highly criticized when it was first exhibited in Norway in 1895. Critics viewed the screaming figure, surrounded by a swirl of menacing clouds, as a clear sign of the artist’s own mental illness. Someone even vandalized the canvas by penciling in the top left corner, “Could only have been painted by a madman.” Ironically, it is now widely believed that the author of that vandalism was Munch himself.
Munch was prone to profound bouts of existentialism, once writing: “I don’t have any more hope. Nothing to expect with joy, so why work—why bother when I will have to eventually die one day? The knowledge to have done something great should be its own recompense. Which is the best painting? A miserable copy, a miserable representation of life.” As Munch viewed it, life and death held hands in a constant partnership; everything alive has a beginning and an end—an indisputable fact.
He painted several self-portraits where parts of his body are already turning into a skeleton. In this black-and-white portrait, his arm is depicted as merely bones—a hauntingly literal example of memento mori art.
Despite all this negativity, Munch declared that he truly loved life, perhaps engaged in a frenetic race against the time he had remaining. His lovers, intertwined in a tight embrace beneath an all-encompassing blanket of the woman's cascading red hair, speak to an intense, "now-in-the-moment" passion. In fact, Gustav Klimt was deeply influenced by Munch’s depiction of these lovers when creating his own iconic masterpiece, The Kiss.
To those who labeled his work morose and too unsettling, Munch declared: “I have tried to understand my life and its significance. I intended to help others do the same about their own lives.”
Note. I had the opportunity to see Edvard Munch: A Poem of Life, Love and Death in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay in October 2022. All the images reproduced here are from that Paris exhibition.
A few months later, while browsing through a bookshop in Venice, I stumbled upon Edvard Munch: The Dance of Life, subtitled "my art as told by me." To understand Munch better, I bought the book. Because Munch wrote about his art and feelings throughout his entire life, I have quoted him extensively in this post. The original Norwegian text was translated into Italian by Ingrid Basso; the rough translation from Italian to English falls entirely on my shoulders. Munch had a deeply poetic way of breaking up his sentences, a stylistic choice I did not adhere to here.
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