Munch, Kirchner, and the Inward Gaze

Munch, Kirchner, and the Inward Gaze

We look at them, and they look back — the women at the heart of two masterpieces, as seen by artists working twenty years apart.

We look at them, and they look back — the women at the heart of two masterpieces, as seen by artists working twenty years apart.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Melancholy, 1922 and Edvard Munch’s The Sin, 1902 are featured in our Editions & Works on Paper sale on 22 October in New York.

With shattering clarity, these two works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Edvard Munch confront the reality of the profoundly anxious states of mind at the heart of the crisis of modernity. Neither is simply a portrait. Over time, these artist’s depictions move from the intimate to the symbolic. But let’s not lose sight that it all began with real women who had their own identities.

Notably, in both these works, the woman is front and center — and it’s only natural to want to know who they are.

 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Melancholy

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Melancholy . - Naked Woman. - Self-Portrait with Erna, 1922, woodcut with monotype coloring. Editions & Works on Paper.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s nude double portrait, Melancholy, is a deeply personal revelation of the challenging despair of mental illness and depression that plagued these two lovers. As a WWI soldier in 1915, the artist experienced a breakdown, and his well-documented struggles only continued when he returned to Berlin after being dismissed from service.

Erna Schilling takes center stage in Kirchner’s life around this time. She had been his model, muse, and partner since 1911 when Kirchner met Erna and her sister Gerda at a nightclub soon after he arrived in Berlin. As glamorous dancers, they embodied the city’s burgeoning ideal of the Neue Frau — an emancipated, fashionable, and often androgynous urban woman who was active, strong, and confident. These two didn’t just personify modernity. They lived it.

Kirchner’s artistic style radically changed when he met Erna. In his early images of her, everything about her — from her striking face and severe bob hairstyle to her statuesque dancer’s physique and crisp, commanding movement — resonates with bold confidence rooted in an awareness of the sensual power of her own image. For Kirchner, she epitomized the dynamism and complexity of Modernism.

Erna Schilling, Walter Kircher, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Davos, 1923. Image: Ausstellung Kirchner Kunsthaus Zurich, 2017.

As time went on, Erna’s impact on Kirchner only deepened — as his model, lover, and muse, but also as his anchor through worsening episodes of mental illness. In 1917, when things came to a head, the artist fled Berlin to recover at a sanitarium in Davos, ultimately settling in Switzerland permanently. Erna initially stayed behind in Berlin to manage his affairs but soon relocated to be by his side. She was an urban woman who didn’t thrive in the country as he did, and she suffered from a depressive melancholy of her own that included experiencing a “black spring” every year. It was never lost on Kirchner that in coming to Davos, she’d chosen his well-being over hers. It was an act of true love and self-sacrifice.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Schwarzer Frühling (Black Spring), 1923. Sammlung Eberhard W. Kornfeld. Image: akg-images.

The artist created Melancholy during their early years together in Switzerland. Kirchner mindfully focuses on Erna’s deep subjective experience of herself, showing that the strength and resolve of her spirit remained intensely present despite her persistent depression. We are moved by Kirchner’s depiction of compassion and empathy towards her, so evident in his comforting gestures of physical support. It’s clear in this remarkable double portrait that their psychological entanglement was a profound source of empowerment for both.

 

Edvard Munch’s The Sin

Edvard Munch, Woman with Red Hair and Green Eyes, The Sin, 1902, lithograph. Editions & Works on Paper.

Why do so many contemporary women artists — including Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, and Tracey Emin — love Munch? The Noted Munch scholar Patricia Berman sees it in the power and impact of his vulnerable self-revelation. She notes that “his problematic revelation of pain and unresolved trauma has made him a kind of mentor to generations of women who explore the body and memory, and the body as memory, in their art.” As much as Edvard Munch was a Symbolist, he was also a diarist who inscribed his works with a deeply personal account of his own life.

The emerald-eyed beauty in Munch’s The Sin appears to invite us to indulge in her spell. The work’s title and composition allude to the sensuous vampire in a series of popular eponymous paintings by German allegorical painter Franz von Stuck.

Left: Photograph by Munch of model in his studio, Berlin, 1902. Munch-museet, Oslo, 2927. Image: © Munchmuseet
Right: Franz Stuck, Die Sünde, 1893. Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Bavarian State Painting Collections, 7925.

There were two women Munch fixated on at various times as red-haired incarnations of sin — his ex-fiancée, Tulla Larsen, and his first lover, Milly Thaulow. It was long assumed that the model for The Sin was Larsen, but recent scholarship suggests otherwise. The subject was more likely a prostitute who regularly modelled for him. However, echoes of Larsen and Thaulow persist, haunting all of Munch’s work in complex and ambiguous ways.

Tulla Larsen was an independently wealthy and liberated upper-class woman, the daughter of a successful wine merchant. She was Munch’s model, lover, and muse from 1889 to 1902 — just before he created The Sin. It was very progressive in this era for a woman of her class to pose for an artist in the nude. Though she sought to marry Munch from the beginning, he only warmed to this idea over time. Unfortunately, bliss did not last, and their engagement devolved into a stormy relationship. Their final encounter ended with a fired gun and a bullet that pierced Munch’s middle finger on his left hand. While there has been much speculation over who shot the pistol, and most now agree it was probably accidental, it was clear from that point that reconciliation between the pair was no longer viable. Soon afterward, Tulla married another painter. This was arguably the single most traumatic experience of Munch’s adult life, leaving deep emotional wounds. After that, he thought of Tulla only as a multi-layered femme fatale.

Munch had previously explored his commingled themes of shame, sin, sex, and death in a series of red-haired vampire paintings between 1893 and 1895, which many have read as a veiled reference to his traumatizing two-year affair with Milly Thaulow — the wife of a distant cousin — nearly a decade before. He once said, “I don’t paint what I see — but what I saw.” The past was always present for him and his memories infused his every picture. Is it Larsen, Thaulow, or the model that we see here in The Sin? We will never have a definitive conclusion, but it’s not a stretch to say that his vivid memories of traumatic relationships played their part in this complex, magnificent work.

 

The Mind as Mirror

Munch and Kirchner are heirs to the Symbolists who championed dreams and emotions over the in-vogue naturalism of realist painting and Impressionism. These Expressionists see through the cracks of reality, drawing from their own traumas and mental illnesses. Their work brought art history forward as they unearthed the ambivalent complexity of their primitive emotions. Kirchner’s Melancholy and Munch’s The Sin are deeply personal works of startling immediacy and impact, and the women at their centers are perhaps more poignant and compelling than their art historical counterparts.

Kirchner and Munch spoke to the relationships and crises of their times — often through the women who ignited their art-making — and no less do they speak to ours. Milly, Tulla, and Erna were also mirrors of their own states of being. Today, we can only open our eyes and take in all they continue to illuminate about us and the world around us.

 

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