«An art work can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed on the nerves, the heart, the brain and the eye of man». This is how Edvard Munch (1863-1944) spoke of his painting, which was inevitably expressionist and arose from an innovative process of internalisation, which perverts the natural colours of things and transforms the colour brushstrokes into the connecting medium between the self and the world. In the wake of this suggestion, Palazzo Reale in Milan hosts, until 26 January 2025, the exhibition Munch. The Inner Scream. Conceived on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Munch’s death, the event is organized in collaboration with Arthemisia and curated by the expert Patricia G. Berman. More than one hundred pieces, coming from the MUNCH museum in Oslo and dating from 1880 to 1944, compose a fascinating itinerary in synergy with the softly lit environment and the strong, sombre walls. The atmosphere of the exhibition is intended to echo that feeling, anguish, to which Munch was able to give visible form. The spectator is fully involved and taken to the limits of his or her perceptual certainties: the colours become unreal, the lines shaky, the traits disturbing.
“Munch. Il grido interiore”, installation view at Palazzo Reale, Milano. Photo © Arthemisia
Shaken from the passive attitude of those who simply see an exhibition, one is compelled to visit, inhabit the rooms animated by shrill, shouting signs and, through these, enter the “sick room”. Feeling that same anguish that colours the paintings, one walks through the rooms with a certain sense of vertigo, fuelled from time to time by the painter’s statements, marked on the walls. The inner scream, the exhibition’s subtitle, invites the public to free themselves from aesthetic canons and naturalistic constraints. So the paintings offer themselves as keyholes through which to spy on the artist’s unconscious workings, constituting his autobiography. Flamboyant and unnatural colours fill free fields, hinted forms of a world that flows directly from Edvard’s gaze, corrupted by pain. His childhood was pervaded by illness and death, but to this harshness the painter responded with soft brushstrokes and lines reminiscent of the Art Nouveau style. Despite the tragedy, the young man did not give in: «For several years I was almost mad, then I found myself staring straight into the frightful face of madness».
Edvard Munch, “Melancholy”, 1900-01. Oil on canvas, 110.5 x 126 cm. Photo © Munchmuseet
The Milan exhibition well highlights the medium through which Munch translates his experience: colour extravagance. His palette gives new meaning to iconic colours, i.e. those belonging to objects, making imitative use of them, i.e. more faithful to reality, or evocative, simplifying the lines to portray a memory, and finally symbolic, to represent states of mind (note the green for jealousy). Symbolic colour gives shape to the «modern life of the soul» – Munch asserts. Here, the adjective “modern” refers to the cultural environment of the time, marked by the turning points of Freud, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche or, again, Ibsen and Strindberg. Munch’s canvases, translated into prose, are nothing more than the image of Kierkegaard’s “frightening thing”. The same all-encompassing sense of anguish characterises the artist’s hand and the philosopher’s voice, both clinging to a life inhabited by despair and, at the same time, a paradoxical teleological illusion. Munch’s poetics ultimately manifests the Northern European phenomenon of baffling self-exploration.
Edvard Munch, “The Scream”, 1895. Lithograph, 35.4 x 25.3 cm; Edvard Munch, “Self-portrait in Bergen”, 1916. Oil on canvas, 90 x 60.5 cm. Photo © Munchmuseet
At the core of Munch’s work there is the totality of that perceptive and emotional world by which we seem to be phagocytised and in relation to which we are accustomed to feel a sense of the sublime, that disquiet that throws us before the grandeur of the whole and proves our impotence. And yet, there is a checkmate in this unequal game, played between the smallness of the overwhelmed subject and the overwhelming nature: the knowledge that this perturbing totality is already within us. Hence the artist states: «Hell is within us, like paradise. It is in everything, in every stone, in every flower».
“Munch. Il grido interiore”, installation view at Palazzo Reale, Milano. Photo © Arthemisia
From this perspective, painting becomes a narrative device through which to ex-press (literally “press out”) the frightening and sublime whole of which we are part, the manifestation of the I-world organism. If the creative process used to involve the transposition of the external world onto canvas, now it is the exact opposite. As Domenico Piraina, director of the Palazzo Reale, states: «The painter’s point of view is not on the eye or within the eye but has withdrawn behind his eye, which looks inside the soul and then projects its own psychic phenomena onto the canvas». Starting from the artist’s intimate biography, we will broaden our understanding of an artist who still appears contemporary, an ambassador of universal and at the sametime singular themes, in front of which indifference is not contemplated.
Ginevra Ventura
Info:
Munch. Il grido interiore
14/09/2024 – 26/01/2025
Palazzo Reale
Piazza del Duomo, 12 – Milano
www.palazzorealemilano.it
Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
NO COMMENT