Page 188 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 188/206
Edvard Munch: Madonna (lithograph 1895-1902) + The Scream (1893 - 1900) + The Kiss (1895).
Herbert Read in his A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959 )lists the Norwegian Munch (along with Van Gogh, James Ensor and Emil Nolde) as one of the founders of Expressionism. Citing the art- theories of Wilhelm Worringer (from 1912), Read explains Expressionism as when Reality is overcome by ‘this intensified play of fantasy and transformed into a spectrally heightened and distorted actuality.” Munch had experimented with post-Impressionist styles, but from the mid-1990s finds the ‘distorted actuality’ of his own painterly ‘voice’ in works like Madonna and The Scream. Munch’s internal nightmares and fears were no doubt intensely coloured by his experiences of death and illness, and mental illness afflicting his family and himself.The style and form of painting that Munch developed reflected his attempts to express his emotional and psychological responses to growing up in the sexually permissive Kristiana (Oslo) of the fin de siecle, amongst a group of radical, anarchist philosophers that included Hans Jaeger. Munch’s remarkably expressive paintings - perhaps especially The Scream, but see also Girls on a Bridge (1901) and Dance of Life (1900) were to have a lasting influence on 20th Century art - especially on the emergence of German Expressionism post WW1
Edvard Munch: The Girls on the Bridge (1901) This subject engaged Munch for many years - he successfully integrates the actuality of this bridge near Oslo Fjord and his feelings of separateness from the scene.