Review: The Brooding Mastery of Edvard Munch at the Neue Galerie

Casting Edvard Munch as the presiding genius of Expressionism isn't all that hard. After all, with Munch, the Neue Galerie is dealing with an artist who perfectly straddled the post-Impressionist nineteenth century and the modernist twentieth-the only artist to do so who is as immediately recognizable as van Gogh. (As of this writing, are there more posters of Starry Night on dorm room walls, or images of The Scream as laptop backgrounds? Your guess is as good as mine.) And unlike van Gogh, Munch had the advantage of a following that included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, and Egon Schiele. A Norwegian-born painter turned aesthetic rabble-rouser in 1890s Berlin, he could relate to both the extravagances and the discipline of these younger artists; he would also (and, again, unlike Van Gogh) live to see his eightieth birthday, shepherding Expressionism through all of one world war and most of a second.

All of this makes the venerable Norwegian artist worth a look, and a look well beyond The Scream, though Munch and Expressionism does pay that one inevitable homage: a colored pastel and two black-and-white impress versions of Munch's contorted image get their own compartment-like room, which in turn gets a line of visitors that angles around the nearest wall. Munch can feel reducible in ways that the accompanying artists selected by the Neue Galerie don't; if you can successfully resist reducing him, he feels like a more grounded and accomplished craftsman, a feeling that doesn't necessarily work to his favor when the visionary Kirchner or the brutal Beckmann are in the same room. There is the troubling possibility that Munch can emerge from this exhibition looking impressively uninteresting, like Morgan Freeman or Jeremy Irons stuck in a Batman movie.

I would be lying if I described the Neue Galerie's current show as a blowout on the order of its last one, the searing Berlin Metropolis. For an artist who was so drawn to direct, almost confrontational poses -- the nude women of Madonna, Puberty, and Standing Nude Against Blue Background are all evidence here -- Munch is far less confrontational than one might expect. The genius of those forward-facing nudes, all of which hold forth at Munch and Expressionism, is that they oscillate and fade back and forth with Munch's now opaque, now arabesque backgrounds. Ultimately, this retrospective pleases on much the same level that MoMA's indispensable Gauguin Metamorphoses did. It is a master class in a manipulation of form that never lapses into dry formalism, an elevation of painterly method-curling brushstrokes, gentle woodgrains, then coruscating oranges and greens and blacks-into something that no art critical method I know can fully capture.

Munch and Expressionism starts off with one of the single most intoxicating galleries I have seen in years. Without exactly knowing it, curator Jill Lloyd and organizer Reinhold Heller seem to be making the argument that Munch's most natural medium was the woodcut. Different versions of Towards the Forest -- now dominated by dark emerald, now saturated with honeyed yellow, now laced with campfire orange trees -- raise a simple figure composition to sublime variety. Two renditions of The Kiss -- one with a background of horizontal woodgrain, the second with vertical -- float in their own world of black, gray, fade, and ambiguity. There will be more of this when the show maneuvers around to Munch's urban scenes and the different versions of Angst, which looks like a Dickens illustration on an absinthe hangover. Unlike Klimt, who is always at his worst when he trends too decadent and sentimental, Munch thrives on bringing decadence, sentimentality, craftsmanship, all of it together. In the different takes on Madonna, he begins with a female figure that could have been used to advertise an 1890s brothel and runs it through tones of dried flower pink and skeletal white -- sometimes overloading the background with outlines, sometimes rendering it in almost the same tone as his Madonna's flesh.

Following any of this up is not easy. Much of Munch's later work is larger, more colorful, and less potent. As Oystein Ustvedt explains in one of the show's catalog essays, Munch at the turn of the century was defined by "Anxiety, human vulnerability, love life and soul-searching introspection," while Munch from the early 1900s on was all about robust nudes, flowing landscapes, compositions in which "The colors are clearer, the light stronger, the brushstrokes thicker and more varied." In other words, by the time he hits the variegated pastels of Bathing Men (1907) and the variegated earth tones of Bathing Man (1918), Munch is virtually unrecognizable as Munch. Whether to hide the weaknesses of this material or to play on the show's model-and-influence angle, the Neue Galerie aggressively poses these later Munchs against entries by Kirchner and other top- (or at least mid- ) shelf Expressionists.

The strategy pays off beautifully at times: Kirchner's now-emblematic Street, Dresden defines the final large gallery, rendering the complacencies of Munch's monumentalizing late nudes an afterthought. And Egon Schiele's crisp self-portraits are paired masterfully and at times surprisingly against Munch's The Scream. (I had written off self-portraiture as one of the flimsier sides of Schiele's art when I reviewed him at the Neue Galerie a few seasons ago. Well, Egon, I was wrong.) But keep on the alert for Munch, especially when the dialogue involves not Munch and the Expressionists, but older Munch and later Munch -- for instance, when he revisits the disconcerting Puberty after a span of twenty years, or when he takes the swirling weirdness of some of his figure scenes and translates it into a landscape like White Night. Again, line or no line, don't see Munch and Expressionism for The Scream. Visit it for its dozens and dozens of whispers of greatness.

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