Love, fear, and desire. Edvard Munch's ambivalent attitude towards women examined through the analysis of two representative examples of his paintings: The Sick Child (1886) and The Dance of Life (1899-1900).

Abstract

Edvard Munch was a prolific and successful Norwegian painter with a career span of over sixty years, who despite initial difficulties became internationally renowned and ‘one of Modernism's most significant artists’ (munchmuseet, n.d.). He experimented with various art movements from Naturalism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, yet he is mostly considered a Symbolist and the precursor of Expressionism. John Launer (2021, p.747) maintains that his ‘style ...  is instantly recognisable’ and George A. Beller (2006, p.309) adds that his art ‘depicts elemental aspects of human psychology love, melancholy, despair, fear, jealousy, and death.’ Munch never married and his relationships with women were complicated what resulted in contradictory opinions among his biographers and art critics. While Rebecca McEwen (2018, p.34) maintains that ‘since 1893 when he shifted from Impressionism to Symbolism ... his art was overwhelmingly misogynistic’, J. Gill Holland (2005, p.3-4) argues that ‘a balanced look at the full range of his pictures and ... reading the pages of his journal refute that charge.’

 The aim of this paper will be to examine Edvard Munch's ambivalent attitude towards women through the critical analysis of two artworks, the early painting The Sick Child (1886) (Fig.1), essential for the Munch’s career and the later one, The Dance of Life (1899-1900) (Fig.2), using two methodologies. The external circumstances which affected the artist’s style of work and chosen themes will be the focus of the biographical methodology, and the critical theory of psychoanalysis will look how the artist's psyche influenced them.