Edvard Munch Landschaft (Norwegian landscape)
Drypoint, 1908
Ref: Woll, Edvard Munch: The Complete Graphic Works, 298 state ii/iii
But now I have a second Munch print, another drypoint, that emanates happiness and friendship, and a simple pleasure in life. The two couldn't be more different. It's a 1905 portrait of Erdmuter Luchsinger, the daughter of his friend Herbert Esche, then aged around three. I expect her smiling face cheered Munch up, at least for a while, and his record of it has the same effect on me.
Edvard Munch, Kinderkopf (Herbert Esches datter)
Drypoint, 1905
Ref: Woll, Edvard Munch, the Complete Graphic Works, 261b
3 comments:
Congratulations on your new acquisition! The little girl is charming. It's nice to think that Munch had a few good days.
Interesting that you pair such a dour quote with a charming, straightforward image. The angst may have been genuine but that doesn't preclude happiness at other moments. Possibly, Munch found it useful to burnish his image as a tormented artist. He wouldn't be the first or last to give the public what it seemed to want.
I think my view of Munch as the epitome of Nordic gloom is very influenced by a film made about him in 1976 by Peter Watkins - over two hours long and so far as I can remember nobody so much as smiles! I'd be interested to see it again - he's an important filmmaker who's been rather sidelined. His first film Culloden portrayed the Jacobite uprising as if it were the Vietnam War; I remember being very impressed by that.
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