On the deathbed

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On the deathbed (Edvard Munch)
On the deathbed
Edvard Munch , 1895
Oil on canvas
90 × 120.5 cm
Art Museum, Rasmus Meyer Collection, Bergen

On the deathbed , also Am Totenbett ( Norwegian Ved dødssengen ) and Fieber ( Norwegian Feber ), is a motif by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch , which he executed from 1893 in various sketches and studies as well as a pastel . The main version is an oil painting from 1895, which is exhibited in the Rasmus Meyer Collection at the Bergen Art Museum and is part of Munch's frieze of life . In 1896 Munch implemented the motif as a lithograph . In 1915 he returned again with two oil paintings under the titleDeath struggle ( Norwegian Dødskamp ) back to the motif. In the pictures, Munch processed the death of his older sister Sophie (1862–1877) and a serious illness of his own in his youth. The people shown can be assigned to members of the Munch family.

Image description

On the left side of the picture there is a person lying in bed. You can only see the back of her head and her hands folded over the bedspread. On the right side of the picture are five people whose silhouettes merge with one another. You stand by the bed, bend over the patient. An old man with a beard and bald head has raised his hands in pleading prayer. A woman in the foreground turns away while her hand is clutching the bedpost. Her pale, pensive face seems to foreshadow imminent death. The other faces are also reduced to masks, the eyes shortened to black dots or lines.

In terms of color, the picture lives from a strong contrast between the red of the fever and the pale green of the disease. The family is completely dressed in black, as if in mourning, and is united by shadows into an almost uniform black surface. Their faces are alternately pale, fearful white and troubled red, which expresses their emotional tension in relation to the impending encounter with death. In addition to the faces, only the hands stand out from the black color zone. In this, for Ulrich Bischoff, "the dark shadow of death [...] pushes itself up to the bed of the sick."

The greatly foreshortened perspective leads the viewer's eye over the bed to the emptiness of the bare back wall of the hospital room. According to Ulrich Bischoff, it makes him “an immediate witness, yes, a visitor to the hospital room”. Arne Eggum goes even further and sees the viewer identified with the dying woman, whose point of view he adopts without seeing her himself. This will force him to take part in their agony.

background

Edvard Munch experienced illness and death from an early age. At the age of 33, Munch's mother died of tuberculosis in 1868 when he was just five years old. In 1877 his older sister Sophie died of the same disease at the age of 15. His father died twelve years later. As a child, Munch was weak and often ill; his childhood and youth were overshadowed by constant fear of death. He later said: “Illness and death lived in my parents' house. I probably never got over the misfortune from there. It was also decisive for my art. ”Munch's earliest artistic processing of the death of his sister Sophie and his own fear of death was the motif The Sick Child , with which he struggled for a year until its completion in 1885/86 and which he he at regular intervals repainted. At about the same time as he was working on his deathbed , in 1893, Death in the Sick Room was also written , in which Munch depicted the death of his sister in the family circle. Both pictures, as well as the thematically similar odor of corpses and The Child and Death , belong to Munch's frieze of life .

Images of death and sickness were of increasing importance in 19th century art. As the family developed into a supporting pillar of civil society, it became the task of art to depict the important events within the family. However, according to Arne Eggum , the works primarily had the purpose of privatized devotional pictures , whereas the depiction of agony and agony was taboo. Søren Kierkegaard described precisely this “fear to the death” as Munch's big topic. His pictures displayed agony, suffering and despair in a previously unknown openness, where they fed themselves through their own experiences and memories. The painter described: “I painted from memory without adding anything, without the details that I no longer had in mind. Hence the simplicity of the paintings - the obvious emptiness. "

Like Death in the Sick Room , the Death Bed hardly shows the dying woman, while the other characters can be assigned to the Munch family. However, this time, according to Arne Eggum and Ingebjørg Ydstie, the painter omitted himself. The father Christian Munch stands out with a beard and bald head. Behind it are three siblings of the painter. The woman in the foreground identifies Ydstie as Munch's mother, who actually died before Sophie. In this way, Munch would once again bring people from different time levels together in one picture. In the lithograph, however, the female figure can be recognized as Munch's aunt Karen Bjølstad, who took over the role of mother in the family after the death of her sister.

Pictorial history

On the deathbed. Fever (Edvard Munch)
On the deathbed. fever
Edvard Munch , 1893
Pastel on unprimed cardboard
59 × 78.5 cm
Munch Museum Oslo
Agony (Edvard Munch)
Agony
Edvard Munch , 1915
Oil on canvas
140.3 x 182.4 cm
Statens Museum for Kunst , Copenhagen

Mille Stein identifies the specific reason for the motif On the Deathbed in the painter's serious illness in his youth, about which he noted in retrospect on February 5, 1890: “And he [his father] folded his hands over the bed and prayed ... and around the bed all the others, some red in the face from crying, others white - “. The first version of the picture, painted as a pastel and now owned by the Munch Museum Oslo , is for her a visualization of this diary entry. In this version, she also identifies Munch himself as the sick person lying in bed, while his feverish fantasies project ghostly grimaces and a skeleton of the dead onto the walls.

The development of the picture can be followed through various sketches. In two early sketches the point of view is reversed. In a composition that is reminiscent of The Sick Child , the viewer sees Munch, who is bedded on pillows and surrounded by his family. Here too, the father is lost in prayer while a girl throws herself on the bed who can be identified as Munch's sister Sophie. However, Munch did not pursue this composition either as a painting or as a graphic.

In the oil version of Am Totenbett from 1895, which is now in the Rasmus Meyer collection of the Bergen Art Museum , Munch largely took over the composition of the pastel, although the grimaces of the feverish dream and the skeleton have now disappeared. Munch worked with heavily thinned paint on canvas that was only sparsely primed, which resulted in opaque but dull colors. He later reworked faces and sheets with thick layers of white paint. Then he painted the contours of the face, hands and body under the sheets. He made final corrections with crayons and crayons, especially on the sheet and the face of the woman in the foreground.

When Munch cut the lithograph for the motif in 1896 , he reverted to the masks over the bed that had been omitted from the oil painting. Based on the degree of post-processing with pen and ink, Gerd Woll made four different classifications of the prints. The Munch Museum houses a total of 21 prints of the motif. In German-speaking countries, prints are shown in Chemnitz, Dresden, Essen, Hamburg, Hanover, Lübeck and Vienna.

In 1915 Munch took up the motif again for two oil paintings with the changed title Death Throes. The one that was probably created first will be shown in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the second, even larger-format version in the Munch Museum. The style of painting has changed completely in the twenty years since the early oil painting. The colors are now brighter, more translucent, brighter. The white table in the foreground gives the hospital room more spatial depth. The translucent texture of the canvas on the faces looks like the figures are trembling with fear. The pastel masks of the feverish dream have turned into yellow and red markings on the wallpaper, giving the whole room an irregular, fluctuating effect. Where there was gloomy rigidity in the first picture, there is now the impression of movement. Mille Stein traces the different painting styles back to a general paradigm shift in art of the 20th century: Modernism has supplanted Expressionism .

literature

  • Arne Eggum : At the deathbed. In: Edvard Munch. Love, fear, death . Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld 1980, without ISBN, pp. 207–222.
  • Mille Stein: Patterns in Munch's Painting Technique . In: Garry Garrels et al. (Ed.): Edvard Munch. Between the clock and the bed . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-5883-9623-5 , pp. 38-40.
  • Ingebjørg Ydstie: By the Deathbed (Fever) . In: Mara-Helen Wood (ed.): Edvard Munch. The Frieze of Life . National Gallery London, London 1992, ISBN 1-85709-015-2 , pp. 108-110.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ingebjørg Ydstie: By the Deathbed (Fever) . In: Mara-Helen Wood (ed.): Edvard Munch. The Frieze of Life . National Gallery London, London 1992, ISBN 1-85709-015-2 , pp. 108-109.
  2. ↑ a b c Mille Stein: Patterns in Munch's Painting Technique . In: Garry Garrels et al. (Ed.): Edvard Munch. Between the clock and the bed . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-5883-9623-5 , p. 38.
  3. ↑ a b Ingebjørg Ydstie: By the Deathbed (Fever) . In: Mara-Helen Wood (ed.): Edvard Munch. The Frieze of Life . National Gallery London, London 1992, ISBN 1-85709-015-2 , p. 109.
  4. ↑ a b Ulrich Bischoff: Edvard Munch. Taschen, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8228-0240-9 , p. 56.
  5. ^ Ulrich Bischoff : Edvard Munch. Taschen, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8228-0240-9 , p. 55.
  6. ↑ a b c Arne Eggum: At the death bed. In: Edvard Munch. Love, fear, death . Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld 1980, without ISBN, p. 209.
  7. ^ Uwe M. Schneede : Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 29-32, 38, 60-62.
  8. ^ Hans Dieter Huber : Edvard Munch. Dance of life. Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-010937-3 , pp. 69-70.
  9. ↑ Ingebjørg Ydstie: By the Deathbed (Fever) . In: Mara-Helen Wood (ed.): Edvard Munch. The Frieze of Life . National Gallery London, London 1992, ISBN 1-85709-015-2 , p. 108.
  10. ↑ Edvard Munch: dødssengen Ved. February . In the Munch Museum Oslo .
  11. ↑ Ved dødssengen, February and February . In the Munch Museum Oslo .
  12. ^ Arne Eggum: At the death bed. In: Edvard Munch. Love, fear, death . Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld 1980, without ISBN, pp. 207–222.
  13. ↑ Munch Museum in Bergen on kodebergen.no.
  14. ↑ Edvard Munch: dødssengen Ved . Search results in the category graphics at the Munch Museum Oslo .
  15. ↑ Gerd Woll: Edvard Munch. The Complete Graphic Works . Orfeus, Oslo 2012, ISBN 978-82-93140-12-2 , p. 62.
  16. ↑ Edvard Munch: Dødskamp . In the Munch Museum Oslo .
  17. ^ Mille Stein: Patterns in Munch's Painting Technique . In: Garry Garrels et al. (Ed.): Edvard Munch. Between the clock and the bed . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-5883-9623-5 , pp. 38-40.