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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 6
Lesson 6: NorwayMunch, The Storm
Edvard Munch, The Storm, 1893, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 51 1/2" (91.8 x 130.8 cm), (MoMA) Speakers: Dr. Juliana Kreinik, Dr. Amy Hamlin. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Why are so many of Munch"s characters screaming?(0 votes)
- Munch's life early life was filled with illness (both physical and mental) of himself and other family members, he lost his mother and favorite sister early in his life, another sister was committed to an asylum, his father was a medical doctor in the Norwegian army with low pay (keeping the family in continuous poverty) oppressively religious, moralistic and disapproving of his son's switch from engineering studies to art, who then also died leaving Munch to try to support the remaining members of his family. This particular painting was painted in the same year as "The Scream", soon after his father's death. Any wonder why he's screaming?
But actually in the majority of his other paintings there are no "screamers", though Munch did specialize in portraying the inner emotional life of his subjects and was considered a great influence on the development of German Expressionism.(14 votes)
- Is the woman in the center of the painting supposed to be a bride? Is it supposed to be a wedding? What is the reason for the fear and anguish in the women if it is a wedding?(3 votes)
- Maybe it's because the scene is in the place of the storm. "Maybe their fisherman husbands may not make it back because of the storm"(2 votes)
- how do you pronounce munch?(1 vote)
- You say it like you would say monk. So munch sounds like monk.(2 votes)
- Does it really make sense to talk about northern lights in a painting called The Storm? Wouldn't the sky be cloudy? How can one see northern lights then?(1 vote)
- What is marked as unaudible in this video is: Blaue Reiter(1 vote)
Video transcript
SPEAKER 1: We're in the
Museum of Modern Art, and we're looking at Edvard
Munch's The Storm from 1893. And this is just an
amazing representation of something both
psychic and naturalist. SPEAKER 2: Yeah. External and internal
simultaneously. And the one thing that
has really struck me about this painting is how
dark is compared to The Scream. SPEAKER 1: Which
is the same here. 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 really the only
source of bright warmth. I'm then drawn to the woman who
is standing right in the front. So this is called The Storm. They must be in the
midst of a storm, which we can tell we
look around and see the tree bending and their
hair flying behind them. So they're standing
right near a harbor. SPEAKER 2: Right, or
on the water's edge. The painting was made in a
small Norwegian seaside resort that Munch frequented
in the summer. SPEAKER 1: So all of these
women gathered together in this mob scene, but
they all look really frantic just worried about their
fishermen husbands out at sea, and they're not
sure if the men are going to come back
because of the storm. SPEAKER 2: 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. Those windows look like
eyes staring back at us. SPEAKER 1: 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. SPEAKER 2: Do you
know what is is? It's the Northern Lights. SPEAKER 1: Is it
the Northern Lights? It looks in the upper left,
there's that bit of green. And it blends in in the corner,
but it also calls your eye back to the center
green of the trees. But I've seen pictures
of the Northern Lights, and those can be really
green in the sky. And they look
really otherworldly. So here it looks
like Munch is working on the emotion of the women. SPEAKER 2: And
proto-expressionist too. The expressionist painters
of Die Brucke and [INAUDIBLE] are both really looked
to Munch for guidance in terms of how
brush strokes, how mark making become
an index of emotion. And you see that
especially in the sky. You can actually feel
how his paintbrush moved back and forth,
and back and forth. SPEAKER 1: And 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 that picture now that I look at it more. SPEAKER 2: If you just
put your hand up to image, and you take her form out, the
composition becomes unmoored. SPEAKER 1: 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 and worried,
and looking similarly to Munch's The Scream,
they're bringing their arms up to their faces and
gasping and really with expressions of
fear and anxiety. And the woman in the center has
the most easily readable bodily features so that
you can really see some sort of anxiety
externalized. SPEAKER 2: 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 just take out that piece,
it's an abstract painting. SPEAKER 1: The rocks
are all kind of 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 you see the woman in
the middle of 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. SPEAKER 2: Munch is also really
pulling you into this space. He's using a very
Renaissance technique of using the orthogonal to bring
us into that vanishing point. SPEAKER 1: It's an
amazing painting.