Exhibition Review: Edvard Munch at the Tate Modern (2012)

Exhibition Review from the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Edvard Munch’s art portrays alienation, angst and madness in bourgeois capitalist society at the beginning of the 20th century. Munch grew up in a world turned upside down by Darwin, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. Norway witnessed the development of feminism, and the changing role of women is seen in plays by Ibsen. Munch portrays his ambivalence about this sexual revolution in works like ‘Ashes‘ which evokes a sense of sexual guilt, and ‘Madonna‘ which is a hybrid of Ophelia and Salome, although his ‘Sister Inger‘ portrays a strong, independent woman.

Munch lived in the bohemian milieu in Christiania which was infused with socialism, and opposed the complacency, hypocrisy and reactionary nature of bourgeois middle-class society. He was friends with Bakuninist anarchist writer Hans Jaeger. His ‘Evening on Karl Johan‘ shows an oppressive crowd of bourgeois middle-class people with uncommunicative faces constrained by their norms and values.

Munch’s most famous work ‘The Scream‘ can represent human alienation in bourgeois capitalist society. Marx identified that humans are alienated from their work, their fellow humanity, and from nature itself; in fact, the proletarian is ‘annihilated‘ which can be seen in the horror of the figure in ‘The Scream‘. ‘The Scream‘ can also represent a person experiencing synaesthesia – the union of the senses – a feature experienced by some artists, those in the stages of madness or under the influence of LSD.  Munch wrote that he had been “trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature,” which also has echoes of Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism. Munch’s ‘The Sun‘ is also startling in its synaesthesia, and evokes William Blake’s visionary pictures. Psychological ‘heaven and hell’ were all too familiar to Munch. ‘The Scream‘ evokes the plight of the sane man in an insane society which Erich Fromm identified. He also pointed out that the solution lay in a sane socialist society.

‘Friedrich Nietzsche‘ (1906)

Shortly before his mental breakdown, Munch completed ‘Friedrich Nietzsche‘, a posthumous portrait of the philosopher whose ideas about existential authenticity and eternal recurrence can be elicited from a study of ‘The Scream‘.  Nietzsche posited the theory of eternal recurrence as “the greatest weight” which could be with ‘amor fati,’ the ultimate affirmation of life, and guarantee an existential authenticity or lead to a terrifying nihilism.

Nietzsche was admired by anarchist Emma Goldman who wrote of him as the champion of the self-creating individual advocating spiritual renewal, and she combined this with the anarchist communism of Kropotkin. Nietzsche himself loathed the state, capitalism, ‘herd morality’, and Christianity as all exhibiting a lack of the “nobility of spirit”. The alienated working class in bourgeois society has no self-esteem; it does not have a high estimate of itself, being in the grip of false consciousness. In Nietzschean terms, the working class “is the dwarf of himself… a god in ruins”, and what is needed is a “transvaluation of values”: a class consciousness to create a new man and woman in a socialist society.

Steve Clayton