‘Otherness’ is part of Munch exhibition, by Emily Genauer

For years now serious connoisseurs of art, the historians, critics, museum directors and students, have looked down their noses at discussion of the personality problems, emotional ills, “anti-social” behavior, in short, at whatever might be called the “otherness” of artists.

The art was the thing, and, of course, historical research about it. That Van Gogh cut off his ear, that Leonardo might have been a homosexual, that Modigliani was a drug addict, that Caravaggio’s brief career saw him perpetually involved with the police for his unbridled violence, were material for popular and, regrettably, too often cheap novelists. No one denied that the work is the man, and in the case of the artist, all of the man. It was simply that so many tales were myth, conjecture or simply impossible to prove that sophisticated emphasis centered on the aesthetic qualities of the works themselves.

Now there is a fascinating change, and I think the reason for it may lie in our own new break-away from conventional moral patterns. No longer are artists a race apart, their follies, foibles, neuroses, even licentiousness of no real consequence to the rest of us — all, clearly, paragons of behavior, because their contribution was so great. Today we recognize in ourselves the same impulses. It has become acceptable for the most respected historians (Dr. Rudolf and Margot Wittkower’s book, “Bom Under Saturn” is a splendid example) and for museum directors, as well, to examine at length the character and conduct of artists in relation to their work.

The latest and most appropriate instance of the new approach is to be seen in a brilliant exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Prints of Edvard Munch,” directed by Riva Castleman, the museum’s print curator.

Now, the Norwegian Munch is no new figure to the New York soene. The Modern Museum presented a large show of his paintings almost a quarter of a century ago. The Guggenheim did one in 1965. His prints are always somewhere around. Forerunner of the German expressionists, a bridge figure between Redon, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Art Nouveau and contemporaries like the late Max Beckmann (Munch himself lived until 1944), he is famous for the mystical, messianic quality of his work; for the feverish and exalted treatment of blazing light that he could obtain with sinuous, serpentine line alone, for the anguish with which he portrayed the embattled relationship of the sexes. He was, in Berlin and Paris, the friend and contemporary of Ibsen, for whose plays he designed sets; Strindberg, Delius, Mallarme and other figures of the period loosely called “symbolist.” We were aware they were a Bohemian lot, brooding and pessimistic, but maybe enjoying their “suffering” a little.

All this, and a few other personal facts, we knew. Now the museum gives us a different kind of show, accompanying the prints with photographs, letters, books and wall labels that flesh out the Munch picture fascinatingly, making not only his work clearer but his life closer as well.

For instance, we see now that our time and his were, in surprising ways, similar. A special section of the show, “Man and Woman,” consisting primarily of prints being exhibited for the first time, demonstrates how obsessive the theme of man vs. woman had become at that time. We know it from Ibsen and Strindberg, of course, but here we see it, with a backup of photographs of the women in Munch’s life, and in practically all the others’ lives, too. Men and women alike drank excessively, took drugs “in order to expand their awareness,” according to one wall label, moved from one. to the other in turn.

Study the exhibited documents, letters and labels carefully, and it becomes apparent that these charming Victorian-looking girls were, in effect, their time’s equivalent of our groupies. A few, attempting to break the inhibiting bonds in which they felt bourgeois morality had imprisoned them, actually became prostitutes, we learn, in order to enjoy and understand the same freedom as men.

But it all ended so cornily. Always they pleaded for marriage; Tulla Larsen, especially, to whom Munch wrote in 1900, “You will understand my need for solitude — which is the regulator of my life. And you will defy it as you have done earlier — you must understand that it means murdering me…”

Tulla threatened to kill herself, and while trying to stop her, Munch got his own finger shot, which for a painter seemed most distressing of all. Another girl involved with several of the men did actually kill herself.

Munch, meanwhile, kept painting and making prints, writing, in a letter in the exhibit of those awful women who dominate submissive men (as in his print “The Vampire”), who rise in triumph (“Ashes”), while men are consumed by the sexual struggle. Except in youth, when the sexes meet on equal terms, “Man is the victim, not the hero,” he said.

It is all marvelously absorbing, reading the documents, examining the prints as they grow ever stronger, bolder, more expressive until we get to the end, with Munch, the supposedly weak and tubercular Munch relentlessly pursued by, but avoiding permanent alliances with women, dying at the age of 80, famous, successful, rich — and still strong and very handsome.

A final thought. It is a fine coincidence that the Munch show opened while the Ferdinald Hodler exhibition is still on view at the Guggenheim Museum. Hodler was an expressionist, too, but, oh, the difference between the German and the Norwegian, with Hodler painting charades in which his themes are visualized by figures who are bad actors, and Munch, whose every whiplash line is itself a projection of passion and violence.

Published by Emily Genauer, on Newsday, March 2, 1973