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The work of Edvard Munch, as exhibited recently at the Queensland Art Gallery as Death and Desire, offers a challenge to the way we have accepted art as representation. In the well known The scream which has become an emblem of a certain ·existential" state, the small embryonic figure (hands clasped to head agonised look of terror on Its face, detached from the bourgeois couple at some distance behind. set apart on a jetty and facing the viewer full-on) seems to be caught in a moment of private anguish unnoticed by the world.
Similarly, in Melancholy III another anonymous figure In the foreground, presented In a side-on posture, sits in solemn contemplation on the sea shore while in the background three small indistinct figures can be seen. Like The scream this representation is dominated by a massed streaking and colouring of the landscape which seems to take possession of the figure itself. What appears to be an enormous gap separates the figure from the trio so that we get the effect of a private isolated mood, rather than of a specific psychological state. In both representations, he former a lithograph, the latter a woodcut, the figures take on the form of their surroundings rather than that of human characteristics, and are thus empty of specific detail. Instead we read the detail of the representation in its entirety, as a general "text” and not as a mimesis of any actual personal experience or historical event.
The “setting” of both these representations is the shoreline, where the land and the sea meet; that is to say, the figures are presented on the edge of what we would consider to be the geography... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline