In this season of sub-freezing temperatures and primary politics, New Yorkers are allowed a shade of existential dread. While alcohol and Netflix binges may be the typical self-prescribed antidotes, this week brings a more culturally and intellectually fulfilling option: a trip to the Neue Galerie’s new exhibition, “Munch and Expressionism,” opening Thursday. Standing in front of Edvard Munch’s masterpiece, The Scream, in which an embryonic figure on a bridge opens its mouth in an ostensible scream, you’ll think, There’s a guy who gets it.
Munch created four versions of this iconic work, and the one on view was publicly unseen for many years before it was auctioned at Sotheby’s a few years ago. You’ve likely seen the image reproduced on coffee mugs and tourist T-shirts and in Internet art—it is in that rarest class of fine art so well known that it has been parodied in the styles of cultural figures ranging from Homer Simpson to Osama bin Laden.
Viewing the original work in person is an entirely different experience.
“In a way, it’s the most exciting version because it’s very fresh, it’s in beautiful condition. It hasn’t traveled much,” said Dr. Jill Lloyd, a scholar of German Expressionism based in Paris and London, who curated the exhibit. It resonates with a 21st-century audience, she believes, because “it’s like the existential image of man’s anguish, of man’s suffering, of man’s vulnerability in the world.”
When we spoke about Munch and the Expressionists a week ahead of the exhibit’s opening, Lloyd’s soft voice and delicate British accent made it seem as though she was narrating a drama. In many ways, she was—the tumultuous lives of artists such as Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Max Beckmann, all exhibited in the show, would make for a good docu-series. From turbulent relationships with women to political confrontations (Kokoschka and Beckmann both fled the Nazis), the commotion in the men’s personal lives radiates through their work. Looking at the paintings feels as intimate as reading a diary.
At the end of the 19th century, Lloyd said, society had to contend with “urbanization, the loss of belief in the Christian faith, and the way that women’s roles were changing in the world.” Many of those issues continue to reverberate today.
“We have all this violence and disturbance in the world. We’re in a very unstable moment, aren’t we?” she said. “I think that’s how they felt at the dawn of the 20th century. They were entering new waters, but nobody knew quite where they were going or where it was all leading.”
“Munch and Expressionism” features four rooms, which the curators have divided thematically. Experiments in printmaking fill the first. Munch’s revolutionary techniques in the form influenced the Expressionists Emil Nolde, Hermann Max Pechstein, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose works are interspersed with his. There are three versions of Munch’s famous and deliciously eerie Madonna. In two of them, a nude woman closes her eyes and arches her back into a nebulous, swirling space, as though she’s falling into an abyss. Sperm-like figures swim across the border around her, and a form that looks like an angry infant lurks in the left-hand corner. In the third version, the creepy background and figures are gone and all that remains is the woman. Yet, it’s impossible to see this version without thinking about the dark images in the other two. In Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, a woman’s red hair envelops a man’s entire head, as though consuming it. Munch, notably, had some issues with women.
“Munch had a very troubled love life,” said Lloyd. “He had an affair with a married woman who was married to one of his cousins. Then he had a very turbulent love affair with a woman who shot off one of his fingers. He ended up as a loner, a hermit almost totally absorbed in his experimental ideas about art.”
Lloyd and her team curated an entire section devoted to the battle of the sexes, where Munch’s romantic woes become more apparent. In Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), a man and a woman stand beside each other but are not touching, looking away from the viewer. They each gaze into the distance in front of them, seeming alone even in each other’s company. In Separation, a man stoops by a tree, his hand over his heart as a ghostly figure of a woman drifts away from him. It’s a poignant breakup painting, if such a thing exists, resonating like a Smiths song. In this section, Egon Schiele’s Man and Woman I (Lovers I), depicting two entwined lovers, provides a more lustful, vivacious alternative to Munch’s bleak views.
“Schiele had rather happy love affairs,” said Lloyd. He died young, so the “passions and conflicts of youth” resound in his early work. She mentioned the raw, “extraordinarily graphic and explicit sexuality” that riled up the public. The artist spent weeks in prison because he’d left explicit drawings lying around his studio. While the authorities condemned him, the public confirmed its taste for Schiele’s sexual edge, and his erotic works sold very well.
Another titillating section is devoted to adolescence. In Erich Heckel’s Girl with Doll (Franzi), a nude girl reclines with a doll on her lap as a pair of dark legs loom in the background. The work’s bright colors and the yonic shape on which the girl’s arm rests add to its provocation.
Other subjects in the exhibition include bathers, urban scenes, and landscapes. No matter the subject, Munch and the Expressionists convey a profound depth of emotion with mere brushstrokes and other marks. Lloyd and her team have curated the show to offer multiple perspectives on the same theme, inspiring a greater understanding of the varied attitudes of the artists and the range of emotion that a work of art can convey.
Heartbreaking, naughty, and unnerving, it’s a show for anyone who’s ever felt anything deeply and sought confirmation that others have felt it, too.
When you walk into the exhibition’s final room, where The Scream looms, you may even momentarily forget your own problems as the power of the timeless image fills the small, dark room. Unlike the Netflix-binge approach to girding against February dread, there is no “watch next” option.
