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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Ideas about what the world is made of — its constituent elements — were running riot when Edvard Munch (1863-1944) came into his own as an artist. Geology — and specifically stratigraphy, or the study of rock layers — had rolled back the age of the Earth by hundreds of millions of years. An 1886 experiment by <a href="https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2011_8434.php#:~:text=It%20is%20made%20possible%20by,in%20Karlsruhe%3A%20The%20electromagnetic%20wave." target=_blank>Heinrich Hertz</a> had meanwhile demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves, proving James Clerk Maxwell’s idea that electricity, magnetism and light were different manifestations of the same phenomenon.

Munch was not the only young artist trying to divine what lay beneath or beyond the visible world. But given Hertz’s breakthrough, it’s interesting that the Norwegian writer Sigbjorn Obstfelder thought Munch saw “in wavelengths”: “He sees the shoreline weave next to the ocean,” noted Obstfelder; “he sees women’s hair and women’s bodies in waves.”

Rocks, too, were as alive to Munch as amoeba or jellyfish. And he seems to have felt electricity everywhere. His hotly charged and wavy worldview is the subject of “<a href="https://www.clarkart.edu/microsites/munch/exhibition-overview/about-the-exhibition" target=_blank>Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth</a>,” a dazzling summer show at the Clark Art Institute in western Massachusetts. (Organized in collaboration with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, and the Munch Museum in Oslo, the exhibition will travel to Potsdam in November and Oslo in April.)

Juri Kobayashi

The exhibition, organized at the Clark by Jay A. Clarke, curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, covers the decades-long psycho-fantasy that was Munch’s career. But it presents a fresh side to the Norwegian artist, who stands alongside <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/06/01/van-gogh-aic-met-exhibits/" target="_blank">van Gogh</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/cezanne-drawings-moma-exhibit/2021/06/14/d3ae53d8-c9f9-11eb-afd0-9726f7ec0ba6_story.html" target="_blank">Cézanne</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/07/30/doubting-gauguin-an-amateur-detective-takes-national-gallery-art-world/" target="_blank">Gauguin </a>and Seurat as one of the five great postimpressionists.

The show’s focus is not on the Munch of “The Scream” and “<a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/62017" target=_blank>Madonna</a>” and the series of haunting, semi-autobiographical pictures comprising his 1890s “Frieze of Life” cycle. Rather, it presents the Norwegian through the lens of his responses to landscape.

Munch was certainly no impressionist. But he often painted outdoors, including in a large, open-roof studio that he built on his property in Norway. His manner was so fast and intuitive that his effects can sometimes seem flimsy. His landscapes can have an unkempt, proto-hippie vibe, resembling certain kinds of summer painting from Maine.

But Munch knew how to put bones on his brisk brushwork. He was a superb draftsman with a powerfully original sense of design and composition. He dramatized his encounters with nature by emphasizing specific pictorial tensions. He liked, for instance, to set looming foreground figures against deep-rushing diagonals. He bolstered thin paint and loose brushwork with gracefully curling Art Nouveau outlines. And he used strident color in concert with dull and indeterminate hues.

Pyms Gallery, London

Indeed, apart from anything else, the show confirms Munch as a superb colorist. It is alive with bosky greens and palpitating mauves, setting off nasturtium-like lozenges of localized red and yellow.

Munch basically agreed with Émile Zola that art is “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” But wanting to add urgency to the matter, he switched out “temperament” for “mood.” Moods, unlike temperaments, are always changing.

“If, in the morning,” Munch wrote, “you come from a dark bedroom into the living room, then you might see everything in a blue light.” As an artist, he believed, you “cannot merely sit and stare at everything and paint it ‘as accurately as you see it.’ You must paint it as it appeared when the motif seized you.”

This seizing was key. Munch, you feel, was always emerging greedy-eyed from inky bedrooms and being seized by what he saw. His pictures of trees, shorelines, rocks and moons are startlingly sensate. You can feel the life stirring inside them and wavy, invisible arms reaching out to seize you.

Sidsel de Jong

Dark bedrooms were a constant of Munch’s youth. He was the sickly second of five children, too ill to attend school. Wracked by chronic asthmatic bronchitis and rheumatic fever, he was forced to spend entire winters indoors. The family of his mother, Laura, he wrote, was “rotten to the core with tuberculosis.”

Edvard was just 5 when Laura died. Her sister Karen moved in and took over the household responsibilities. Recognizing his talent, she encouraged Edvard to draw and conscientiously preserved all his work. By the time he was 17, he had resolved to become an artist.

In 1877, Edvard’s beloved elder sister Johanne Sophie also succumbed to tuberculosis. This, even more than his mother’s death, was the defining catastrophe in Edvard’s life. He was 13 at the time. Sophie’s demise cut a swath through his future.

But he had his art, which bubbled up from a cauldron of morbidity into sinuous vapors of eroticized melodrama. The 1890s were a whirlwind of artistic success, scandal and setback; disastrous romances (including a lovers’ quarrel that resulted in a gunshot wound to his hand), drinking, gambling, depression and the death of his father. Munch spent much of the decade in Paris, Berlin and Nice, France, mingling with the writers August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen and Stéphane Mallarmé and the Polish poet, bohemian and self-declared Satanist Stanislaw Przybyszewski.

Artistically, Munch’s reputation was assured by 1907. But this did not prevent a bout of paranoid psychosis (he was convinced he was being followed) and an alcohol-induced nervous breakdown. He checked himself into a psychiatric hospital in Copenhagen and stayed eight months.

Nostalgic for the melodrama of the “Frieze of Life” imagery, critics have tended to dismiss Munch’s post-breakdown work as repetitive, diluted, even escapist. “Trembling Earth” is a successful correction to this bias. It demonstrates that late Munch — while uneven — was regularly ecstatic.

Munch treated nature not as a sentimental projection, a consolation, a pathetic fallacy, but as something animated, interconnected and potentially annihilating. In his mind, humans, rocks and trees were all endowed with an invisible kinship. Death was not off to the side; it was part of the whole stew, an active ingredient.

Munch believed that the cells and protoplasm in blood were connected to the earth. He made a drawing to demonstrate this and his belief that “death is the beginning of a new life.”

It shows, in cutaway, a dead woman beneath the ground. Her body sprouts sperm-like bulbs and flowers with human faces, while, above ground, a pregnant woman stands beneath a flourishing tree with sinuously curving branches.

Halvor Bjørngård

Similarly, “Separation,” a painting, shows a ghostlike woman who has turned away from a man dressed in black (Munch returned to the image repeatedly in different media). Her hair and gown blend with the wavy lines of shoreline and trees. The man’s blood-rimmed fingers clutch at his heart. Munch, explains the curator’s wall label, “believed that human pain and suffering could nurture creativity; the blood from the man’s heart nourishes the plant below.”

Munch was a fan of Denmark’s great Christian philosopher and proto-existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s phrase “the dizziness of freedom” could be an alternative title to “The Scream,” and this show’s title, “Trembling Earth,” evokes Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling.” There are passages in the philosopher’s “The Diary of a Seducer” that read like prompts for Munch paintings: images of spiritual annihilation in the arms of a loved one; of lovers obscured by being “too near, when lips are closed on lips”; or of individuals “carried along into that nebulous realm, that dream world where every moment one is afraid of one’s own shadow.”

But stronger still are the tendrils connecting Munch’s landscapes to the novels of his compatriot Knut Hamsun. In Hamsun’s “Mysteries” (1892), the central character, Johan Nagel, is forever walking around town, along the shore and into the forest, fired with yearning as he slides from sanity. The fairy-tale quality to “Mysteries” is echoed in many of Munch’s paintings.

“What would it be like to be floating around up there among the planets, feeling the tails of the comets brushing against one’s forehead?” wonders Nagel. At which point a “tremor of ecstasy ran through him. He felt himself carried away and engulfed by the magic rays of the sun.”

Did either Munch or Hamsun have some deep insight into the nature of existence that we have all overlooked? Maybe. But it’s not a line I’m especially tempted to pursue. As in Hamsun’s fiction, there is a tendency in Munch to slide past mystery into an overstimulated state approaching hysteria. It’s a state that can endow the idea of annihilation with a little too much allure and is always verging on a collapse into the cheap and preposterous.

Munch, who has had a massive impact on such frantically ambitious contemporary artists as Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz, is best known for his impact on the German expressionists. The novelist Thomas Mann thought that German expressionism and Nazism both sprang from the same root of emotional self-abandonment. That judgment sounds harsh — almost to the point of cruelty, since many expressionists, and Munch himself, were persecuted and humiliated by the Nazis, their art pulled from museum walls and labeled “degenerate.” But there’s an insight lurking in Mann’s claim.

Svein Andersen/Sidsel de Jong

Munch’s pseudoscientific preoccupation with blood and earth can feel uncomfortably close to the Nazi slogan “blood and soil.” Unlike Hamsun, who wrote an infamous obituary for Adolf Hitler, describing him as “a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations” and “a reforming character of the highest order,” Munch was strongly opposed to Nazism.

Still, I’m not sure how interested I am in the claim that the artist was some kind of seer sharing special insights into the nature of existence. Rather, he was a kind of vitalist or animist who believed in the interconnectedness of things. His thinking loosely aligned him with recent scientific discoveries and with a rich vein of Eastern philosophy, not to mention narrower tributaries in the Western tradition (Heraclitus, Lucretius). But it didn’t make him a prophet.

Let’s face it: Just as artists and novelists should never be trusted with political responsibility, they are also prone to bastardizing and misunderstanding science. Munch was no exception. But he was a painter of genius.

What he brought to art, in quantities rarely seen before or since, was urgency, intensity and conviction. Alloyed to his artistic gifts, his unique life’s experience and the inimitable landscape of Norway, Munch’s passion to seize the world in pictures was unassailable.

Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth is at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., through Oct. 15. <a href="http://clarkart.edu/" target=_blank>clarkart.edu</a>

Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, 2011. Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, 2009

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University of Sydney, BA, with first class honors, Fine Arts

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Sebastian Smee

Edvard Munch was so much more than ‘The Scream.’ This show proves it.

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