Edvard Munch
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Though certain compositional strategies recur regularly in the paintings and graphic works of Edvard Munch, the origins and specific uses of these strategies have not been fully investigated. The question of compositional types, and their relation to types of expression, has been subordinated to a concern with what is expressed in the individual works, and how this relates to Munch's personal experience. Critics and scholars have, therefore, tended to assess Munch's output in a manner that emphasizes the persistence of thematic material across such formal categories as compositional type, use of line, and others. The equally pronounced persistence of compositional strategies has only become a major subject since recent scholarship returned to the question of sources, including the formal models that influenced the forms of Munch's expression. The reemphasis on the French context of Munch's stylistic development, for example, has enabled a clearer view of the influence of individual French artists. One of the most interesting cases of such influence is that of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, one of the most unlikely godfathers of modernism. Like Gauguin, other Symbolists and Synthetists, and a surprising number of Scandinavian painters, Munch was strongly influenced by Puvis' classicizing allegories. Following a discussion of Munch's compositional strategies as embodiments of symbolic form, the nature of Puvis' accomplishment and Munch's use of forms adapted from Puvis will
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from Germany and into France," is going on at present ("(Re-) Reading" 59).
Yet, when Berman adds that this re-positioning "seems at times over-determined," it is difficult to imagine that the case for French influences could be overstated, at least in view of such determined attempts to ignore it as can be found in some of the literature ("(Re-) Reading" 59). Rosenblum, for example, goes to great lengths to demonstrate the importance of the German Romantic tradition, especially as embodied in Caspar David Friedrich's example, to Munch. He succeeds admirably in this, of course. But he also goes to great lengths to imply the unimportance of French art to Munch. When he compares Munch's The Dance of Life from 1899-1900 (Bischoff 48-9) with Renoir's Dance at Bougival (1883), "in which a dancing couple suggests nothing but the pleasures of a leisure afternoon in the Parisian suburbs," it is clear that Rosenblum protests too much (109-10). The artist with whose work he should compare Munch's Dance is Puvis de Chavannes. But Rosenblum neglects this strain of influence altogether. He cites, for example, the fact that Andreas Aubert owned works by Friedrich, and wrote about the artist in the 1890s (Rosenblum 108). But, he neglec
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Approximate Word count = 7634
Approximate Pages = 31 (250 words per page)
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