Edvard Munch: Screaming for or from religion?

(Edvard Munch, 1921)

From the very beginning, the life of Edvard Munch was fraught with religious possibilities.  The very name “Munch” means “monk.”  His father’s name was Christian Munch, and his father’s father was a priest.

Christian Munch was described by his son Edvard as “obsessively religious–to the point of psychoneurosis.”  Wikipedia mentions that Christian was influenced by Pietism, a movement which “combined the Lutheranism of the time with the Reformed emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life.” Christian would discipline his children by warning them that their deceased mother (who died from tuberculosis when Edvard was only about five years old) was watching them from Heaven and was upset about their behaviors.  Christian’s idea of children’s entertainment was to

immerse Edvard and his siblings in Edgar Allan Poe tales and hair-raising ghost stories.  All this (plus the tuberculosis death of his older sister, and the mental illness of his younger sister) led Munch to later write:   I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies – the heritage of consumption and insanity.

Adherents.com not surprisingly reports that Edvard Munch later “abandoned the strongly-held Protestant Christian beliefs that had shaped his childhood” and “was never again an orthodox member of any religious denomination.”  However, this report also states that Munch “remained intensely interested in spirituality

and religion.”  This led his friend, Jens Thiis, to write the following in 1909:   … I am convinced that Munch’s artistic temperament has a profound leaning towards the metaphysical, something which gives to his art an air of almost religious celebration of the wonders of life.     

Munch’s adult religious leanings have been described as Pantheistic.  Wikipedia describes Pantheism as the “view that that Universe (or Nature) and God (or divinity) are identical.”  This excerpt from a Munch manuscript seems to resonate with that viewpoint:  God is within us and we are within God – primitive and original light is everywhere…

Perhaps this “primitive and original light” is that which illuminates a Munch expression into the Scream heard round the world.

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Munch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism

http://www.adherents.com/people/pm/Edvard_Munch.html

Copyright May 3, 2012 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved