Victorian Visual Culture

One of the art exhibits that have stuck with me the most has been The Clark’s show title Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth. The exhibit ran from June 10 to October 15, 2023. I had visited The Clark over the summer and was amazed by this section that I had originally not intended to look over very closely.

Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth takes a departure from the well-known portraits of Munch’s and instead focuses on his landscape work, mostly on the forests that surrounded him. Munch (1863-1944) lived in Norway and Germany alternately throughout his life, and preferred the peace of the countryside. His abundance of landscapes came from an attempt to wrestle with the vitality of nature against his own mental state during the time of industrialization (“About the Exhibition”). This was the only appearance of the exhibition in the U.S., before it travelled to Potsdam and Oslo. The Clark groups the works in sections by their formal qualities, such as “Snow and Storm,” “Cycles of Nature,” and “On the Shore.” While the paintings may seem to be only linked by their setting, there are also symbolic linkages that can be found throughout each collection. Particularly in “On the Shore,” representations of a romantic relationship are present in a way that is not found in the other landscapes. The Clark attributes this to Munch’s aim of attaching the shoreline to evocations of “melancholy” and “human isolation” (“On the Shore”). Human connection and the lack of it seemed to be a large consideration of Munch’s work, such as the innocent friendship of the group in The Girls on the Bridge, 1902. The exhibition shows that these pieces were not just recreations of his environment, but of his emotional state and social considerations as well — calling into question the very idea that the human can be separated from the natural.

However, it is important to not ignore the landscapes themselves. Munch’s style is far from strictly realistic in this collection. Seen in pieces like The Fairytale Forest, 1927-29, color and size were manipulated greatly to portray a sense of wonder, fear, or disorientation within the audience. Small figures stand against a forest brushed across with a myriad of greens, reds, and yellows in a frenetic fashion, looked over ominously by a blue and purple sky. While I read most of these paintings as a daunting or magical representation of the natural world, it must be noted that others were very much celebratory of nature’s offerings, and that Munch himself took his greatest solace in these spaces.

Munch’s landscapes remind me very closely of class discussions on the private and public spheres, particularly when it came to physical land. While Victorian era paintings may have made efforts to portray land as central to a class conflict — in which open land lies dangerously outside the controlled, private sphere of upper class homes — Munch seeks to relish in the unknown space, appreciating it for its undefined nature. Considering them together, it prompts me to ask what potential for human connection or self-realization is left out to the wilderness, untouched by efforts to remain in the private sphere.

Ultimately, I found this exhibition to be an exciting and enlightening one. The Clark made efforts to show a well-known artist through a lens that most never find out about; as someone largely unfamiliar with his work, it presented as a deeply personal look into a larger than life figure. Each section stood simply in its categories, yet subtly built a narrative of loneliness, imagination, and content across each painting. It is an exhibition that I will be thinking about for a long time.

Works Cited :

“About the Exhibition.” Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth. The Clark. https://www.clarkart.edu/microsites/munch/exhibition-overview/about-the-exhibition. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.