The sick child

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The sick child (Edvard Munch)
The sick child
Edvard Munch , 1885/86
Oil on canvas
119.5 × 118.5 cm
Norwegian National Gallery , Oslo
The Sick Child (second version) (Edvard Munch)
The sick child (second version)
Edvard Munch , 1896
Oil on canvas
121.5 × 118.5 cm
Art Museum, Gothenburg
The Sick Child (third version) (Edvard Munch)
The sick child (third version)
Edvard Munch , 1907
Oil on canvas
118 × 120 cm
Thielska galleriet , Stockholm
The Sick Child (fourth version) (Edvard Munch)
The sick child (fourth version)
Edvard Munch , 1907
Oil on canvas
118.5 x 121 cm
Tate Gallery , London
The Sick Child (fifth version) (Edvard Munch)
The sick child (fifth version)
Edvard Munch , before 1925
Oil on canvas
117 × 116 cm
Munch Museum Oslo
The Sick Child (sixth version) (Edvard Munch)
The sick child (sixth version)
Edvard Munch , 1927
Oil on canvas
117.5 × 120.5 cm
Munch Museum Oslo

The Sick Child ( Norwegian Det syke barn ) is a painting by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch . In the picture Munch processed the tuberculosis disease and the death of his older sister Sophie (1862–77). The first version from 1885/86 is considered an early artistic breakthrough for the painter. Like many of his main works, Munch repainted the motif in later creative phases. By 1927 he had created a total of six paintings as well as further sketches, etchings and lithographs .

Image description

A red-haired girl sits in an armchair that protrudes diagonally into the picture. Her lower body is wrapped in a blanket, while her upper body is supported by a large white pillow. His gaze is averted to the right to a woman who is sitting next to him with her head bowed and holding his hand. In the strong brightness of the light, the girl's face appears almost transparent, the features are barely recognizable. The face of the woman sitting next to him remains hidden. The picture space is limited at the front by two pieces of furniture, the corner of a chest of drawers with a medicine bottle and a table with a half-filled glass; the back of the armchair forms the end to the rear. On the right a window forms the end of the room, on the left it is open. While the lower half of the picture contains pieces of furniture and objects, the upper half of the picture is reserved for the upper body and head of the two people. At the intersection of the diagonals of the almost square picture format, the two women hold hands.

In terms of color, the first version of the picture is determined by green-gray tones that contrast with the different shades of red of the hair, the chest of drawers and the tablecloth. The special way of painting, in which numerous thick, impasto layers of paint were applied on top of each other and then scraped off and scraped off, creates a gray veil. Especially in the upper half of the picture there are numerous of these scratch marks, which give the picture a relief-like impression. Later versions sometimes have different color nuances and appear generally more colorful and less three-dimensional. The scrapes are no longer the result of a long, hard-fought creation process, but a deliberately used stylistic device and are replaced by brushstrokes in the last pictures.

interpretation

Not only through the title of the picture, but also through the entire pose and surroundings, the girl is characterized as having a serious illness, while the woman providing support is a mother figure. For Munch, the window that the sick girl turns her face is a metaphor for life. However, the light does not penetrate through the dark window; rather, according to Uwe M. Schneede, it is an "inner, image-immanent" light that has no natural origin. The girl's almost transparent face suggests both a pathological pallor as well as a semblance of transcendence and death. The key gesture of the picture is the touch of the two hands in which the young and the older woman meet. But it is precisely this point that is particularly smeared and scraped off, so that it cannot be determined whether there is consolation or pain in the gesture, whether it is taking place at all or whether the hands are looking in vain.

Hans Dieter Huber sees the picture as a “universal formula for the viewer's empathic concern” for a mother's suffering for her sick child. Schneede, on the other hand, perceives a “cold layer around the figures” despite the warming gesture, between which there is no eye contact. Separated by their different life perspectives, they remain alone with their feelings. And the viewer, in contrast to the frontal view of a motif-like picture of Munch's Norwegian compatriot Christian Krohg , remains excluded from the scenery. For Reinhold Heller, the picture is an “attempt to capture the silence and helplessness in the face of illness and death”.

Artistic and biographical influences

The motif of a sick child leaning against a pillow was extremely popular at the time Munch's painting was created, so that Munch himself spoke of a “pillow time” in a 1933 letter. In addition to Krohg's Sick Girl (1880/81), his painting The Mother at the Bedside of Her Sick Child (1884) and The Dying Child (1882) by Hans Heyerdahl , two compatriots who influenced Munch's early development, should also be mentioned. Artists outside Norway also took up the topic, such as Ernst Josephson in Convalescent (1881) and Michael Ancher in Das kranke Mädchen (1882). What all works have in common is their pronounced naturalism , which accurately captured every detail of the sick bed. In his letter, however, Munch claimed that, unlike him, none of the painters had "lived through the subject to the last cry of pain", since the work for him was determined by memories of his own family.

At the age of 33, Munch's mother died of tuberculosis in 1868 when he was just five years old . In 1877, Munch's older sister Sophie died of the same disease at the age of 15. His father died twelve years later. Munch himself was weak as a child 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. "In the armchair in which the sick girl in the picture is bedded, his family members would have" sat winter after winter and longed for the sun - until death took them ... "For Uwe M. Schneede is The Sick Child at the same time a processing of the sister's death as well as one's own fear of death.

At the same time as The Sick Child , two other central pictures of Edvard Munch's early work were created, the first versions of which were destroyed by fires and which are only preserved in later versions: Puberty and The Day After . With these three pictures, according to Hans Dieter Huber, Munch spans a thematic arc from growing up and awakening sexuality to illness and death. This makes them a thematic forerunner of the life frieze , which includes many of Munch's major works. In addition to The Sick Child , Munch dealt with the subject of death in two other work complexes from 1893: Death in the Sick Room and On the Death Bed . A variation of the picture The Sick Child is Spring (1889). However, this picture was created for a completely different intention: Munch wanted to prove his academic skills in a competition for participation in the World Exhibition in 1889 and gave the motif of the sick girl a hopeful, optimistic note. According to Reinhold Heller, the picture was intended to answer the criticism of the earlier work as an “academic piece of renown in a naturalistic manner and coloring”.

Work history

Edvard Munch (ca.1889)

The occasion for the picture The Sick Child was Munch's encounter with eleven-year-old Betzy Nielsen during a visit from his father to the sick, where the girl sat despondently at her brother's bedside. She became the model for the sick child, while Munch's aunt Karen Bjølstad modeled the mother figure. The picture was taken in the winter of 1885/86 in the family apartment in Oslo . The painting process was extremely tedious. Munch described that he tried to capture a mood that he lost again and again at work: “I painted the picture repeatedly over the course of a year - scratched it out again - let it fade into color - and tried again and again to get the first impression to capture - the pale transparent skin - the trembling mouth - the trembling hands ”. In the end, according to Hans Jæger , he was satisfied with the fact that the picture remained a “sketch”, and this was the title under which he presented it at the 5th autumn exhibition in Oslo in 1886, which the jurors Krohg and Jæger had helped him achieve. Reinhold Heller described the result as a “mutilated relic” of a physical and psychological struggle of the painter, which left real scars in the picture.

The reactions were so violent that Munch judged in retrospect: “No painting has caused so much annoyance in Norway.” There was “shouting and laughter” in the hall. In the press one read later judgments such as “Schweinerei”, “Scandal”, “Fish porridge with lobster sauce” ( Norske Intelligenssedler ), “Foolish” and “half-finished draft” ( Morgenbladet ), “raw executed” ( Aftenposten ) and “Humbugmaler”. The naturalist Gustav Wentzel summed up the criticism: “You paint like a pig, Edvard. You can't paint hands like that. They look like sledgehammers. ”Similar criticism, which saw his departure from naturalism and anatomical accuracy as an attack on morality and decency, accompanied Munch through many years of his career. Andreas Aubert accused Munch of making it too easy for himself with his self-development, and even his advocate Jæger advised the painter not to attempt such ambitious topics in the future as long as his technique was still inadequate.

Despite the negative reception, Das kranke Kind meant a “breakthrough” for Munch's work in his own words, to which most of his later works owe their creation: “It is perhaps my most important picture” and marked a first break with Impressionism : “I was looking by expressivity ( Expressionism ). "it is, according to Uwe M. Schneede the uproar that the image has generated, not in the conventional and zeitgeist motif, but in the" Personal himself without detours enrolls reformulation of paint and canvas to the article in which : the pictorial body as a catcher of the inside ”in the sense of Munch's often quoted formula“ I don't paint what I see - but what I saw ”.

The painter left the original picture to his advocate Christian Krohg. It ended up in the Norwegian National Gallery via detours in 1931. He painted a second version in 1896 for the manufacturer Olaf Schou. In the same decade, Munch must have revised the original again, as Arne Eggum's comparison with an old photograph shows. He also made a series of eight drypoint etchings with the same or slightly different motif. The painter's preoccupation with the motif did not let go of his career, and he painted a new version of the picture about every ten years (with the exception of the 1910s, in which no picture can be proven). Munch's variants are not mere copies of the original; instead, he applies a distinctly different style to the same motif. He stated that he wanted to make connections with his "earlier period". A motif "with which I struggled for a whole year is not finished with a single painting."

Painting versions

  1. Norwegian National Gallery , Oslo: 1885/86, partly repainted in the 1890s.
  2. Gothenburg Art Museum: 1896, painted in Paris on behalf of the manufacturer Olaf Schou.
  3. Thielska galleriet , Stockholm: 1907, painted in Warnemünde on behalf of the art collector Ernest Thiel .
  4. Tate Gallery , London: 1907, probably also created in Warnemünde, earlier estimated at 1916; originally owned by the Dresden State Painting Collection , confiscated and sold during the Nazi era .
  5. Munch-Museum Oslo : 1925 or earlier, partly also estimated to be 1916, but only proven in 1925.
  6. Munch Museum Oslo: 1927, subsequently signed with the date 1926.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 24-26.
  2. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 33-34.
  3. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 52-60.
  4. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 25-28.
  5. ↑ a b The sick child . Video lecture by Hans Dieter Huber on YouTube .
  6. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , p. 29.
  7. ↑ a b Reinhold Heller: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Prestel, Munich 1993. ISBN 3-7913-1301-0 , p. 29.
  8. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 19-22.
  9. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 30-32.
  10. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , p. 5.
  11. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , p. 31.
  12. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , p. 25.
  13. ↑ Reinhold Heller: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Prestel, Munich 1993. ISBN 3-7913-1301-0 , p. 37.
  14. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 13-14, 29.
  15. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 14, 36, 38.
  16. ↑ Reinhold Heller: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Prestel, Munich 1993. ISBN 3-7913-1301-0 , p. 28.
  17. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 9-12.
  18. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , p. 43.
  19. ^ Poul Eric Tøjner: Munch. In His Own Words. Prestel, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7913-2494-2 , pp. 143-144.
  20. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 39-43.
  21. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 15-18.
  22. ^ A b Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, a drypoint ( Memento from January 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) at the British Museum .
  23. ^ Uwe M. Schneede: Edvard Munch. The sick child. Work on memory. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23915-X , pp. 61-62.
  24. ^ Catalog entry for The Sick Child 1907 in the Tate Gallery .