THE MORBID AND THE BEAUTIFUL
Edvard Munch Painter of the Modern Soul Life
I will never forget the first time I walked into the rooms of the Munch collection in Oslo. I was twenty-one, poor, haunted, friendless, in a foreign country, a country I had chosen to make my home—in soul-sick, self-imposed exile from America. Lonely as only a young poet can be in a country where he cannot speak the language, I would walk around for days enveloped in a misty cloud of dread, in the grip of a vertiginous anxiety that transformed the harbor streets of Oslo into the smoky mineral light of the Inferno. My forced fundamentalist childhood religion was dying an agonized death. The Void was opening.
And then—those paintings! Those paintings of Edvard Munch! What precise visionary testaments of the soul's private hells and salty torture chambers! Brushed and slapped on mammoth canvases: paint streaked, striped, pasted, daubed, even squeezed directly out of the tubes! Paintings scratched, combed, gouged; feverishly worked paintings paintings of dissolving faces, ghoulish, madly staring, sunken-eyed creatures; putrefying corpses; emaciated, consumptive, sick, dying, wounded, bloodied bodies painted with, oh, what ferocity and sureness of expression, and what unexpected tenderness! I recognized them all. Oh, how did he know? How did he know the tortured, crying, crippled figures of my dreams?
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