The child and death
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| The child and death |
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| Edvard Munch , 1899 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 100 × 90 cm |
| Kunsthalle Bremen |
The Child and Death is an oil painting by Edvard Munch from 1899. It has been in the Kunsthalle Bremen since 1918 . It shows a little girl on her mother's deathbed, looking fearfully at the viewer. In 2005, a second, previously unknown painting by the painter was discovered under the canvas. A version of the motif that relates to the Munch family and the early death of their mother was made between 1897 and 1899 and hangs in the Munch Museum in Oslo . In 1901 an etching was created based on the motif.
description
The picture is slightly taller than it is wide. In the left half of the picture, shown slightly from above, a small child with blond hair can be seen, who, facing the viewer, is standing in front of the bed of a dead or dying woman, to whom it has its back. His arms are raised, his hands seem to be pressed against his ears, his head slightly lowered. His expression is unhappy, his blue eyes wide open. The child wears a white top, the sleeves of which reach up to the elbows or have slipped back there, under a knee-length, pale purple dress, black stockings and dark boots. The toes almost reach the bottom of the picture. From here, the shadow falls diagonally to the rear, so that it creates a connection between the child's figure turned away from the bed and the figure lying in the background. This is bedded on a bed or sofa, the lower edge of which begins as horizontal at about the level of the lowest third of the picture and the head end is on the right side of the picture. The dark-haired woman's head can be seen in profile and rests deep in a white, puffy pillow with her eyes closed. Part of her upper body, covered in white, can also be seen; the arms seem to be crossed on the chest. The greenish cover is pushed back to about below the chest. Its color merges almost imperceptibly into that of the gray-green wall behind the bed, while the dull orange of the floor is repeated in the shadows on both sides of the pillow, allowing associations with blood stains. The dead woman herself looks extremely gaunt and emaciated and the color of her skin hardly differs from that of the pillowcase. It contrasts strongly with the healthy skin color and the tense posture of the child, who is apparently trying to defend herself against the impressions of death.
The painting allows associations with traumatic experiences from the childhood and youth of the painter. Munch lost his mother, who died of tuberculosis , at the age of five and, nine years later, one of his sisters, Sophie, who had suffered from the same fatal disease. His sister Laura became depressed.
According to a comment on the picture, Munch created “harrowing figures of expression that touch the viewer directly. The child's silent horror in the face of the dead mother "turns out to be" a variant of the famous picture The Scream . "
history
The picture was purchased by the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1918 . Art gallery director Emil Waldmann paid 20,000 marks for the picture, which was the first Munch painting to be acquired for a German museum.
| Girl and three men's heads |
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| Edvard Munch , 1895–1898 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 100 × 90 cm |
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Kunsthalle Bremen
Link to the picture |
At the request of the Munch Museum in Oslo , which wanted to compile a list of Munch's oeuvre and required precise data, the Kunstverein Bremen had it examined more closely in 2005. X-rays then led to the discovery that under the picture The Child and Death there was a second canvas of the same format with another painting by Munch. This work is unsigned and undated, dates from around 1895 to 1898 and shows a graceful sitting nude girl next to several large, brightly colored mask-like heads and gripping hands. It is titled Girls and Three Male Heads . The picture The Child and Death , bought in 1918 , was mounted on a new stretcher after this discovery .
It is not clear why the second picture was under the canvas. Possibly the work, which according to the museum curator Dorothee Hansen is “not a masterpiece”, served as a support screen for The Child and Death and was used because of a shortage of materials or because it did not meet the artist's requirements. Numerous fingerprints on the edges of the picture suggest that the work was often moved back and forth when the paint was not yet hardened, so that it can be assumed that Munch was occupied with the composition over a longer period of time.
Both pictures were shown in the exhibition Edvard Munch - Riddle Behind the Canvas 2011/12 in Bremen.
Further versions
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| Dead mother and child |
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| Edvard Munch , 1897-1899 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 104 × 179.5 cm |
| Munch Museum Oslo |
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| The dead mother and the child |
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| Edvard Munch , 1901 |
| etching |
| 32.4 x 49.4 cm |
| Norwegian National Gallery, Oslo |
A first sketch of the motif dates back to 1889. Between 1897 and 1899 Munch completed his first painting, which is now in the Munch Museum in Oslo . It is painted using a thin casein technique that gives the picture a dreamlike transparency. Unlike the painting from 1899, it is laid out in landscape format and offers a glimpse into the wide, empty hospital room. The color scheme, especially the terracotta red floor and the dark green walls, takes up the colors from other depictions of death, such as Death in the Sick Room . The figures in the background also assume familiar poses from there, so that they can be identified as members of the Munch family: from the left, the youngest sister Inger looking directly at the viewer, back to back Aunt Karen and father Christian, Edvard and the averted his brother Andreas in a pose that is reminiscent of the picture melancholy .
The girl in the foreground is Munch's older sister Sophie, who was six at the time of her mother's death. Unlike the people blurring in the background, she immediately catches the eye with her red dress and her presence. In a sense, she serves as a spokesperson for the other family members and expresses their grief very directly. However, it comes from a different time than the adults in the background, so that Munch allows two time levels to merge in the picture: the immediate tragedy of death and its impact on the bereaved many years later.
The change from the first painting from 1897/99 to the second from the Kunsthalle Bremen is, according to Ulrich Bischoff, typical of Munch's artistic radicalization, which takes place in both the composition and the painting technique. With the change from landscape to portrait format, the psychological representation of family and hospital room has been omitted. All that remains is the child on his mother's deathbed. The painting technique has also changed: the wet oil paint only covers the canvas in a few places (collar and sleeves of the child), the facial features are drawn with oil pastel. The child protrudes from the reddish-brown floor into the dark blue zone of death. It thus connects life and death.
A mirrored version of the motif can be found on an etching made in 1901 . Prints of the etching are shown in the Munch Museum and the Norwegian National Gallery in Oslo, as well as in German-speaking countries in Bremen, Chemnitz, Hamburg, Leipzig and Mannheim.
The Dead Mother with a Spring Landscape (1893), Munch Museum Oslo
The Dead Mother and the Angel of Death (1893), Munch Museum Oslo
Two forerunners of the motif from 1893 depict the deceased mother in her death bed without the child or other grieving relatives. Although both were created in 1893, they are very different in both the setting and the style: the dead mother with a spring landscape makes an allegorical one Statement about the essence of death and is two-dimensional and synthetic , the dead mother and the angel of death depicts a concrete scene and is painted rather impressionistically . Reinhold Heller deduces from this that Munch adapted his style to the subject of his pictures.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Kultur-Szene ( Memento of the original from January 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Time
- ↑ Altertümliches.at
- ↑ a b Bremen.de ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Art-Magazin ( Memento of the original from May 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Radio Bremen ( Memento of the original from December 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Nordsee-Zeitung
- ↑ evening paper
- ^ Exhibition Edvard Munch - Riddle Behind the Canvas
- ↑ a b Marit Lande: The Dead Mother and Child. In: Mara-Helen Wood (ed.): Edvard Munch. The Frieze of Life. National Gallery London, London 1992, ISBN 1-85709-015-2 , p. 111.
- ^ Ulrich Bischoff : Edvard Munch. Taschen, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8228-0240-9 , p. 56.
- ^ Ulrich Bischoff: Edvard Munch. Taschen, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8228-0240-9 , pp. 56-57.
- ↑ Gerd Woll: Edvard Munch. The Complete Graphic Works . Orfeus, Oslo 2012, ISBN 978-82-93140-12-2 , pp. 161-162.
- ↑ Reinhold Heller: Edvard Munch. Life and work. Prestel, Munich 1993. ISBN 3-7913-1301-0 , pp. 74-75.
