He’s a Scream! The Night the Art World Met Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch, "The Scream" (1893). Oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard. 91 x 73 cm. Located at the National Gallery of Norway.
Imagine the night before your first big solo exhibition opening. You’re walking through the large, echoing halls, a paintbrush in hand, tenderly adding last-minute dabs to your paintings. The gentle smell of linseed oil is in the air. There are no critics or curators or admirers, and certainly not the entirety of the Berlin art scene, telling you that you’ve destroyed art forever. All of that will come tomorrow night. For now, you’re just an artist and your paintings, about to meet the world.
This was the experience of Edvard Munch, the late-19th century Norwegian Expressionist artist, and the exhibition that made him famous. Munch is a notorious painter, most often recognized by his iconic painting of a figure holding his screaming, skeletal face against an undulating red sky, appropriately titled “The Scream.” You can see echoes of that painting everywhere, from the Ghostface mask in the Scream movies to the emoji. But before Munch was an icon, he was a struggling painter, an artist who bounced around from one technique to the next, and from one city to the next across Europe, hoping that a member of the art establishment would recognize his talent, his thirst and excitement for experimentation, and hand him a break.
And eventually someone did, an artist and teacher by the name of Adelsteen Normann. He’s an artist you most likely have never heard of, and yet, without him, you would have never heard of Edvard Munch. Normann was a landscape painter from the Northern island coast of Norway, who had established himself by painting the fjords and dramatic skies of his youth before settling in Berlin at the end of the 19th century. He was middle-aged by then, yet uniquely progressive and forward-looking for an establishment artist: he was interested in elevating younger artists, even incorporating elements of their painting style into his own work.
His relationship with Munch began in 1892 when Normann, on behalf of the Union of Berlin artists, offered the younger artist his first solo exhibition. Normann had been following Munch’s erratic career up to that point, intrigued by his quirky mix of finished and unfinished brushstrokes and deep expressive emotion. Normann approached Munch first and foremost like a teacher, a mentor, offering him opportunity just one step beyond his experience and, if we’re being honest, his maturity. “Adelsteen Normann is very friendly,” Munch wrote in a letter to his aunt, “a few days ago he took me to an artists’ get-together.” In the same letter, he gets quickly to the point, which is that he anticipates easy acceptance into the art establishment, and needs his aunt to send him a cheap frock coat as soon as possible, “because…it’s reasonable to expect I shall be invited to parties once the exhibition opens.”
From these correspondences, it’s clear that Munch had no idea what he was stepping into when he brought his work to the Berlin art establishment, just as Berlin had no idea what kind of artistic bomb was about to explode in their echoing halls. The exhibition opened on November 5, 1892, and only days later, the papers were screaming their disapproval for Munch’s work. “Art is in danger!” blared the Frankfurter Zeitung on November 9. “Call forth the rescue squads… A mad Impressionist has broken into our herd of fine artists!”
What about Munch’s work was so upsetting to the Berlin establishment? Quite simply, it felt too real, too emotionally accessible, while at the same time breaking all the rules of what a painting was supposed to look like. Berlin artists, like Normann himself, prided themselves on tight, realistic landscapes and portraiture, painting the world as if it were a perfectly-lit stage set and you were in the audience, watching from a distance. But a landscape by Munch brings you to the scene with all your senses. We see this most strikingly in a painting by Normann that nods heavily to Munch’s influence, “Friedrichstrasse in the Rain,” from 1893, after the exhibition and their budding friendship. It is a painting of a rainstorm at night, its thick brushstrokes dragging solid, bright paint like light glaring off a wet street, and invites you deeply inside the frame. You can feel the moody dampness. You can smell the puddles. Munch is a revolutionary part of creating the late 19thcentury Modernist painting style, inviting a viewer directly into the show.
Adelsteen Normann, "Friedrichstrasse in the Rain" (1893). Pastel on board. 44 x 49 cm. (17.3 x 19.3 in.)
But despite the harsh words and clutched pearls – or perhaps because of them – Munch came out of the exhibition, now referred to as the “Munch Affair” by historians, remarkably unscathed. It was, in fact, a career-launching controversy: “A better advertisement I couldn’t have wished for,” he wrote his aunt. He painted “The Scream” a year later, and is now considered one of the founding fathers of Expressionism, one of the most formative artistic movements of the 20th century.
And Adelsteen Normann, for his part, returned to his landscape paintings, his waterways and his fjords. He was keenly aware that he had shaped the trajectory of a struggling young artistic genius, but mostly likely unaware that he had shaped the trajectory of art history as well. All of that will come with the history textbooks. For now, it’s just a teacher and his student, an artist and his paintings, and what happened when they met the world.
Adelsteen Normann, "Steamboat on the Fjord in the Midnight Sun" (19th century). Reproduced with permission by the Adelsteen Normann Foundation.
Ready for more? Listen to Tamar’s podcast on Adelsteen Norman and Edvard Munch.