“Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth” succeeds in recasting our perception of the artist. While he was renowned for his ability to render the anomie and suffering of the modern world, he could also capture its sublime beauty. With transcendent skill, he visualized our intrinsic desire to connect with nature as well as our profound estrangement from it.
The Yellow Log, 1912, centers a moment of astonishment in a violet forest, a feeling of encountering something sudden and unexpected that wakes you from a daydream. In this painting we see the cut end of a recently felled tree, perhaps knocked down by a logger’s saw. The tree’s long gold body darts back into space—an interruption that enlivens the senses and pulls the gaze inward, deep into the work’s snowy beyond.
Apple Tree by the Studio, 1920, is a canvas that bursts with life. The trunk of the titular plant leans almost out of the picture plane as its lumbering fruit hangs over a field of trembling yellows and greens. To the left of the tree, the ghost of an erased figure is trapped beneath a passage of paint. Munch, like a gardener, reaps and sows as he works, building up layers and removing them to reflect a world of endless flux.
And what of the psyche during this time of change? The Girls on the Bridge, 1902, suggests that it is divided. On the left side of the painting, a large foreboding tree stands alone in the distance. On the right, a group of young women huddle on a pier. The work’s human and vegetal subjects take on a strange bell shape, inviting us to consider their similarities. However, the forms are separated by the wharf, making it known that despite the likeness, their connection is agitated, fragile—a tenuousness that has, sadly, only grown at a violently rapid pace since the making of this work, more than a century ago.
— David Whelan
