Edvard Munch, The Storm, 1893, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 51 1/2″ / 91.8 x 130.8 cm (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Juliana Kreinik: [0:06] We’re in the Museum of Modern Art, and we’re looking at Edvard Munch’s “The Storm,” from 1893. This is an amazing representation of something both psychic and naturalist.
Dr. Amy Hamlin: [0:19] Yeah, external and internal simultaneously. The one thing that has really struck me about this painting is how dark it is compared to “The Scream.”
Dr. Kreinik: [0:29] It is. Which is the same year. There’s such contrast. It’s interesting to think about dark and light and internal and external. If you look at the house, the lights inside are the only source of bright warmth, and then drawn to the woman who’s standing right in the front.
[0:44] This is called “The Storm.” They must be in the midst of a storm, which we can tell if we look around and see the tree bending and their hair flying behind them. They’re standing right near a harbor.
Dr. Hamlin: [0:57] Or on the water’s edge. The panting was made in a small Norwegian seaside resort that Munch frequented in the summers.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:06] All of these women gathered together in this mob scene. They all look really frantic, just worried about their fishermen husbands out at sea, and they’re not sure if their men are going to come back because of the storm.
Dr. Hamlin: [1:16] What do you make of the townscape? It’s such an overwhelming presence. The women are human anchors in the picture, but there is something really animate about those houses. I mean, those windows look like eyes staring back at us.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:30] The distance between those women and the house is somehow psychologically really far. The houses on the sides blur into the background, and it almost looks like a twilight scene.
Dr. Hamlin: [1:41] Do you know what it is? It’s the Northern Lights.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:44] Oh, is it the Northern Lights?
Dr. Hamlin: [1:46] The Northern Lights.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:45] In the upper left, there’s that bit of green, and it blends in the corner, but it also calls your eye back to the center green of the trees. I’ve seen pictures of the Northern Lights, and those could be really green in the sky, and they look really otherworldly.
[2:00] Here, it looks like Munch is working on the emotion of the women.
Dr. Hamlin: [2:05] And proto-Expressionist, too. The Expressionist painters of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter both really looked to Munch for guidance in terms of how brushstrokes, how mark-making, become an index of emotion. You see that especially in the sky. You can actually feel how his paintbrush moved back and forth and back and forth.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:26] You can see that also in the women, the gestural stroke that represents their hair flying off. The woman in the center really does anchor the picture, now that I look at it more.
Dr. Hamlin: [2:35] If you put your hand up to the image and you take her form out, the composition becomes unmoored.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:41] She’s a central figure in terms of the painted composition. Everything swirls around that. Then psychologically, who knows how she linked to these other women, all angst-ridden, worried, and [who] look similarly to Munch’s “The Scream.” They’re bringing their arms up to their faces and gasping, and with expressions of fear and anxiety.
[3:03] The woman in the center has the most easily readable bodily features, so that you can really see some sort of anxiety externalized.
Dr. Hamlin: [3:11] And in an abstract way, too. You can see the gesture more in the white-clad solitary woman, whereas this clutch, their arms, their facial features are really indistinct. It almost becomes an abstract picture. If you take out that piece, it’s an abstract painting.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:26] The rocks are all gathered up at the bottom of the painting on the right side in the right corner, and then look behind the wall that bears down the lane. You can see the woman in the middle with the blue dress. There’s something that feels very claustrophobic, but also very open at the same time in the way that the composition is mapped out.
Dr. Hamlin: [3:44] Munch is also really pulling you into the space. He’s using a very Renaissance technique of using the orthogonal to bring us in to that vanishing point.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:52] It’s an amazing painting.
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