Munch's Muse: Is Norwegian painter Edvard Munch an unsung fashion hero?

The work of Edvard Munch is so elusive, even one of Scandinavia’s most beloved writers struggled to describe it. In Karl Ove Knausgård’s 2019 book about the Norwegian painter entitled So Much Longing in So Little Space, the author, who usually delves into the depths of the human condition with erudite clarity, is suddenly left grasping for an interpretation.

“Sometimes it is impossible to say why and how a work of art achieves its effect,” Knausgård writes. “I can stand in front of a painting and become filled with emotions and thoughts, evidently transmitted by the painting, and yet it is impossible to trace those emotions and thoughts back to it and say, for example, that the sorrow came from the colours, or that the longing came from the brushstrokes, or that the sudden insight that life will end lay in the motif.” The state Knausgård explores is not an uncommon reaction to Munch’s work – in fact, it might be the essence of its enduring appeal.

Though the Norwegian artist’s body of work is overshadowed in popular culture by a single image (you know the one), Munch was one of the most prolific and influential figures in modern art. A restless innovator whose personal tragedies flowed into his works. His paintings, woodcuts, and lithographs are teeming with moods that speak to our collective unconscious even a century or more after their creation.

Still, there is a reason Munch’s most iconic painting has endured. The Scream, painted in 1893, is steeped in the anxiety and uncertainty of the modern age. Munch’s oblong-faced creature – its mouth wide open and eyes frozen in a state of horror – was, according to the artist, suddenly attuned to “the enormous, infinite scream of nature.”

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It was also a result of a challenge he had set for himself: namely, to capture on the canvas a sense of sound; an audible expression of angst. Two world wars later, amid the alarming urgency of a climate catastrophe and an ongoing pandemic, one would be hard-pressed to claim that this scream has ceased to resonate.

“He's trying to paint emotions and inner states; strange inner psychic landscapes that we all inhabit,” says Jon-Ove Steihaug, director of exhibitions and Collections at Oslo’s Munch Museum. “He's able to do this in a very nuanced and intriguing way so that all the complexity is actually something you can sense in the image.”

“Munch was also precise in capturing the light and temperature, the atmosphere in his images. There is a Nordic light in that sense that colours some of his paintings,” Steihaug adds. A striking example is Inger on the Beach, painted in 1889 during Munch’s first summer in Åsgårdstrand, a resort town on the Oslofjord. The painting’s blues, greys and yellows, as well as the white dress worn by the model – the painter ’s sister, Inger – are awash with a peachy glow. The image was influenced by a series of studies Munch made between nine and 11 pm to analyse the lighting conditions of the endless Norwegian summer night.

Munch’s formative years were marked by tragedy. His mother, and later his sister Sophie, died of tuberculosis. Another sister, Laura, was diagnosed with a mental illness. Munch himself was a sickly child who was kept out of school in winters, turning to drawing to ease his loneliness. As an adult, and even as a successful artist, dread was his constant companion, stemming from the notion that he possessed an innate darkness that could destroy him. He began drinking heavily, but later swore off alcohol following a breakdown in 1908.

“I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies – the heritage of consumption and insanity,” he said at the time. While much has been written about these unfortunate events and their impact on his distinctive artistic style, it is a lesser-discussed detail that Munch was a smart dresser who paid careful attention to the sartorial tastes of his time. This extended both to his own wardrobe choices and in the garments captured in his works.

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“Munch was a well-dressed man all his life, although a friend remarked he always looked a little sloppy, even in his finest suit,” says Munch expert Lasse Jacobsen, Research Librarian at the Munch Museum. A dandy in his younger years, Munch grew a broad moustache which he kept for the rest of his life. He took to wearing a top hat, dark suits and white shirts with a bow tie, a look captured in many of his self-portraits.

“He always had a set of white shirt collars with him when traveling,” says Jacobsen. “Later in life, he wore wool and tweed suits with a soft hat and a colourful tie, and a fine wool coat while painting outside in the snow.” A variety of Munch’s hats are part of a collection of personal belongings now held by the Munch Museum, which recently opened its new 13-story location in Oslo.

The artist spent some 20 years traveling across Europe. In France, he was influenced by the use of colour he observed in the works of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. But it was in Germany that he had found a community of avant-garde artists and wealthy supporters who appreciated and collected his work. They also enabled his costly style. During an exhibition in Berlin in 1895, a tailor to whom he owed money stormed into the gallery and threatened to take some of the paintings off the walls unless the payment was settled. A wealthy patron stepped in and footed the bill.

Munch took note of the shifts in fashion trends throughout the years, his own painting style changing with the times. In the 1930s, he remarked in a letter to a friend: “For isn’t the simplified women’s dress of today a consequence of that period’s striving for simplicity in art? And likewise of functionalism? [...] Are there not points of similarity between the groups, the movements, and the lines and costumes of [his group of paintings] 'Frieze of Life' and the youth of today?”

Despite his interest in fashion, he was not one for specifics. In his portraits, Munch painted with, as Jacobsen puts it, “a keen eye for the men’s suits and women’s dresses, the colour and fabric, but never in a detailed way.” He achieved this effect with “broad, quick brushstrokes.” This omission of specific details signifying the fashion of his era lend the paintings a certain timelessness. Nothing about the style of dress in his Self-Portrait (Against Two-Coloured Background), for example, gives away the fact that it was painted 117 years ago.

Munch’s ability to portray moods over details became a major influence on contemporary artists such as Tracey Emin, Marlene Dumas, and Bjarne Melgaard as well as a source of inspiration for fashion designers. Carolina Herrera cited a specific painting as setting the mood behind her autumn/winter 2007 collection: Munch’s 1889 portrait of anarchist and bohemian Hans Jaeger, who had exerted a sizeable influence on the artist as a young adult. Interestingly, Herrera’s collection repeats none of the cool blue hues or the shape of the tight-fitting overcoat Jaeger is wearing in the painting. Instead, it channels the subject’s casual poise, his aloofness, through haute sophistication and power-exuding cuts.

Oslo’s Munch Museum welcomes these new perspectives on Munch’s work. The museum has been running a series of exhibitions by living artists who position their work in dialogue with Munch’s. When the new building opened, an entire floor was dedicated to Tracey Emin, who, much like Munch, uses her emotional inner states and formative experiences as raw materials for her work. In recent years, Emin has become more preoccupied with the effects of sickness and ageing on the body, a motif that also defines later self-portraits by Munch.

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In his major work Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed (1940 -43), the artist, who is aware of his approaching demise, places himself between the two titular symbols of death, a clock and a bed. His stance, however, is defiant, and he is immaculately styled in his signature white shirt collar and a casual blue morning jacket. The wall of the room behind him is laden with art works, pointing to his full and rich career as an image-maker.

At this point in his life, the artist who has given us motifs that resonate throughout our culture – ‘Madonna’, ‘Vampire’, ‘Angst’, ‘Melancholy’ and of course, ‘The Scream’ – can intuit the immortality that these “children” would grant him. He is looking straight at us, his future viewers, with the knowing eyes of someone who has come to accept that deep ennui, anxieties and traumas are inextricable from the human experience. These emotional states are known to him, they are registered. Here, in his oeuvre, they find eternal expression.