Edvard Munch [antikvár]

Introduction Before we can realize the stature of Munch in his time and his significance for our age, he has to be seen against the background of the radical change in spiritual values-religious, ethical, philosophical and aesthetic-which the last hundred years have witnessed; a change which, although having its roots deep in the seventeenth century when the foundations for our present scientific outlook on life and the universe were laid, became the main concern of our modern consciousness and of practical consequence only in the second half of the nineteenth century. The artist, who is often considered to be the most sensitive tentacle of mankind in its encounter with the complexities of life, has in the twentieth century, by proclaiming the non-art quality of art, by adopting an attitude of anti-art and of hatred towards culture, not only expressed his hatred of bourgeois art and bourgeois culture, but more than this. Through denying or lowering the value of tradition in art, he has destroyed its very roots for the present generation. Whether a recovery from such nihilism is possible must be left to the future. Having stated this, what more pertinent could be said of an artist such as Edvard Munch than that he, as few others, has maintained for Western art the place which it had conquered through the achievements of two millennia? He suffered, and depicted the condition of modern man, in a time which was not yet conscious of its own predicament. Furthermore, he proclaimed this predicament to be the content and meaning of his art. Writing about Edvard Munch on the occasion of the large posthumous exhibition of his work in the Tate Gallery in London, in 1951, Oskar Kokoschka, the heir to Munch's Expressionism and his spiritual outlook, said: 'As a rule turning-points in history are overlooked by contemporaries. This obituary is intended to recall, eight years after Edvard Munch's death, the work the eighty-year-old master left behind; so we base it upon the fiction that we are looking towards a future that already considers the work of the great painter her own.