Essay About J.P Hodin And Edvard Munch

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“Edvard Munch created what may be called a ‘spiritual climate’. Two, even three generations of artists have produced works under his influence and spiritual inspiration. He was the initiator of the style of art termed Expressionism, defined as ‘expressiveness’”. (J.P. Hodin) No painter previously achieved such a revolutionary distinct break from the visible world as Edvard Munch. Drawing from personal traumatic experiences, Munch portrayed incredibly powerful works that depicted psychological rigours of the everyday man; something that Edvard had a distinct experience of. (Hatje Cantz)

There never existed a painter with a greater desire for a lyrical emotional life: but his unhappy intellect never lets him forget the worm concealed in every bud, the grimacing skull beneath every face, the beast lurking behind every passion, nature’s arbitrary whims in every painful sensation: and with dazed amazement, beckoned on by mocking insanity with outstretched arms, he walks through the inferno of this life as someone atavistically burdened with talent. (Reinhold Heller)

It is within the purpose of this essay to compare and contrast three publications relating to Munch’s influence on Expressionism and therefore Modernism. Moreover, analysing how Edvard’s technique and psychological situation throughout his life defined his works. The first of these publications

J.P Hodin’s ‘Edvard Munch’ describes a tortured man who depicted the “condition of modern man, in a time which was not yet conscious of its own predicament.”(J.P Hodin) It was this predicament that Munch proclaimed to be the content and meaning of his art. Munch saw art and its future as an “epoch that exhausts itself in experimenting with form without the appearance of any meaning.”(J.P Hodin) Adverse to the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’; a doctrine that was substantiated to save art from “relegation to a role of utility within a mechanized society.”(J.P Hodin) To this extent the doctrine could have been justified. But when the formula is taken to the outer-most limits in which the work of art is deprived of any form of meaning, then a reaction was inevitable.

“Behind Expressionist art stand men who regard it as a sin against the spirit to produce anything by coldly rational means.”(J.P Hodin) The Expressionist artist gravitates towards thinking and inspiration of an archetypal nature. That is, Munch “expresses a collective unconscious whose content and functions are of an ‘archaic’ nature.”(J.P Hodin) This ‘archaic’ nature refers to the psychologically primitive mentality, that truly creative, primordial spiritual force that gave form