Angela Lampe & Clément Chéroux (Eds) (2011/2012) EDVARD MUNCH: THE MODERN EYE. London, Tate Publishing.

 Depth of Field

Clément Chéroux

Since the 1960s, several art historians have shown how great the advent of photography was on the compositional methods of two or three generations of painters from the second half of the nineteenth century, and on the impressionists in particular…the perspective effects claimed by Degas, Caillebotte, van Gogh, and also by Munch, are surprisingly close to those produced by stereoscopic photography.

At a time when he was using these very marked composition effects, Munch was not yet taking photographs himself. He could not, however, have failed to see the stereoscopic proofs that were widely disseminated at the time, as postcards would be in the twentieth century, in very popular locations such as boulevards, amusement parks and holiday resorts.

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Accelerated perspectives, shifts in the picture plane, the presence of diagonal structural lines, prominent foregrounds cut off by the frame; the system of composition used most frequently by Munch in the last two decades of the nineteenth century is as marked by impressionism and japonisme as by the instrumental vision of a light, dark or photographic chamber. It would be a mistake to attribute a predominant influence to any one of these visual sources. It is much more likely that the register of spatial representation adopted by Munch is the product of the intersection of several of these influences, of the assimilation of one by the other, or rather the combination of all of them.

With the new century, Munch would accentuate these optical effects even further. The stretching of space between the foreground and the background increases (no. 52). Bodies are often depicted in foreshortening (nos. 47 and 54). The painter uses more counterpoint perspectives, placing faces and parts of bodies at the edge of the picture in order to increase the feeling of depth in the pictorial space (nos. 45, 46, 52).

Beyond the accentuation of perspectival effects already used in the previous decades, Munch also develops new pictorial strategies. His painting now seems more liquid. He plays more on the transparency of bodies, such as, for example, for workers on Their Way Home, in which the pavement along which they move is revealed by their feet. In this work, as in others, the outline of the bodies is not always completely delineated; the line hesitates deliberately and repeats itself, as if concerned with not fixing the human figure in too static a pose. This is undoubtedly the painter’s most striking stylistic development. In the 1880s and 1890s, his figures seem petrified, seated on a rock, motionless at the water’s edge, gripped by fear, by an embrace (nos. 14 and 16), or by melancholic contemplation. In the twentieth century, the beings he represents in outdoor scenes are most often in motion. They come forward towards the viewer, sometimes staring right at him.

According to Eggum, his visit to the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912, where cubism and futurism were very well represented, was at the origin of his new experiments with perspective, viewpoint, and the effects of transparency (See Eggum 1989, pp. 156-7).

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When analysing Workers on Their Way Home from 1913-14, Gerd Woll also explains that the three figures in the foreground are not depicted from the same viewpoint. The worker on the left is painted from an angle located approximately at the level of his chest. The one in the centre, with a paler face, is seen from a gaze located above his head, while the one on the right is seen from a high angle. These altered viewpoints, combined in a simultaneous depiction on a single painted surface, explicitly echo the research of the cubists. The perspective of the picture, reinforced by highly visible diagonal compositional lines, and the jerky breakdown of the movement of the marchers as suggested by the multiplication of dark silhouettes in the background, also serves to increase the energy of the work. The viewer is no longer contemplating the advancing crowd from a distance, he finds himself caught up in the movement. As well as for the futurists themselves, explains Woll when citing their 1910 manifesto, this is a question of placing ‘the spectator in the centre of the picture’.

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A projected image, which was not content to move towards the audience, but that, quite literally, threw itself at it (fig. 41). There is no doubt that this was what attracted Munch to the spectacle of the cinema. In any case it is this that is shown very clearly in some of his most important pictures of the second decade of the twentieth century, Galloping Horse, Murder on the Road and Workers on Their Way Home (nos. 44, 46 and 51). When in 1927 the painter purchased a small amateur camera, he did not fail to film life in the streets, the passing of the tramways and horse-drawn carriages, a friend walking towards the camera, or himself approaching the lens as if he wanted to pass over to the other side of the looking glass (fig. 1 and nos. 84-5).

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In the twentieth century, Munch therefore continued the research into the representation of pictorial space that he had undertaken in the previous century. The artist intensified the compositional effects he had already tried out in the 1880s and 1890s. however, he also integrated new suggestions that take into account as much the experiments of cubism and futurism as the development of photography, the illustrated press and cinema. The challenge still consisted in intensifying as much as possible the relationship between the work and the viewer. In the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth, it was therefore still about locating ‘the viewer in the centre of the picture’, to pick up on the formula used above. The methods of achieving this differ noticeably, however. The system of composition used by Munch at the end of the nineteenth century had a tendency to deepen the canvas, thus producing the effect of absorbing the viewer.

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The movement of the figures towards the front of the pictures, the slight tremble of their bodies, and the transparency of the parts of their bodies in the greatest motion provide an increasingly strong impression that they are about to propel themselves out of the canvas.

It is true that by choosing a scopic scheme that distances itself from the traditional perspective dominant since the Renaissance, in favour of a way of addressing the viewer that had been established by photography, the illustrated press and perhaps cinema in particular, Munch displays great modernity.

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Radiation : Metabolising the ‘new rays’

By Pascal Rousseau

Filled with flickers, shadows and ghosts, Edvard Munch’s painting is inhabited, if not obsessed, by the enigma of sight, his acutely sensitive eye seeing a hallucinated vision of reality. This physiology of perception tackles a series of obstacles all of which are empirical surveys in the field of the retina, including residual image, peripheral image, focusing and centring, distortion and blindness, even the most troublesome effects of ocular disease, illustrated by the famous sketches on Distorted Vision.

He not only examines the workings of the retina; he also tests out its limits…

All this leads him towards an aesthetic of the dematerialisation of forms into the surrounding ether, where the limits of the body blend together with the flow of thoughts equipped with a morphogenetic power, ‘ideoplasty’.

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Seeing is no longer a passive function of the eye that faithfully records what is real, but a productive activity that appears over time.

The eye is not only in ‘affinity’ with the light but in conformity with it: ‘Light devotes itself to an organ that becomes its fellow, and in this way the eye is created by the light, so that the interior light comes to meet the exterior light.’

‘Painting is what the brain perceives through the filter of the eye’

Over the following weeks and months the haemorrhage was slowly reabsorbed. Munch gradually recovered his sight over the summer. During his convalescence, in August in September, he created a systematic graphic documentation by projecting on paper the impressions of his diseased retina, resulting in a series of vivid watercolours and drawings. As always, the artist studies what he could see; this time the distortion that the injury had caused in the internal workings of his eye.

Covering his left eye with his hand, he obtained a greater concentration of the problems in his right.

The dark spots, like small flocks of crows, often appear high up when I look up at the sky – It is conceivable that it is the residue of blood that has collected around the periphery of the damaged spherical area – which becomes scattered when submitted to a sudden movement or the impact of intense light.

As the spot diminished, Munch began to integrate it into the drawings he was making of his surroundings. The organic structure of the eye was at this point able to form a circular shape surrounding a menacing bird.

His diseased eye interested him as a source of perceptual effects that a physiological healthy eye would never have been able to capture.

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If we were not aware of the existence of this code, caused by the diseased eye, the shape could be interpreted as a reference to an external natural object, and not as the expression of an internal distortion of the eye. in another watercolour, Munch has turned his weakened gaze on a group of moving people (no. 125).

….it is interesting to note that Munch anticipated by seventeen years the methods of the Swiss doctor Marc Amler, in the diagnosis of Macular disorder, although the doctor was not aware of the artist’s in-depth observations.

In Munch’s case, however, a clinical objective interest in the subject was coupled with a subjective artistic study, and linked to self-representation marked by anxiety and death. ‘Painting is what the brain perceives through the filter of the eye.’…

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“We see what we see – because our eyes that are made constituted in such a way – What are we – [other than] a concentration of energy in motion…Had we had different, stronger eyes we would be able, like X-rays – to reveal… the skeleton – had we had different eyes – we would be able to see our external astral casing- and we would have different shapes.”

Arne Eggum noted that the method of self-discipline that Munch adopted in order to study his ocular disease had also served as a foundation for the artwork that had initially made him famous, The Sick Child (1886; see versions from 1907 and 1925 (nos. 12, 13). Munch later explained that the painterly expression on the focus he applied to the child’s head, while the other parts of the picture were painted in peripheral vision. He also revealed that he had fluttered his eyelashes in order to obtain a diffuse perception, giving the impression that the depiction of the sick young girl was seen through tears.  This radical experimentation stretched the limits of the naturalist method in which Munch had been trained. Eggum also supports his suggestion with a note from August Strindberg, written for his essay Deranged Sensations, published in 1894. The playwright described a similar sensory experience, marked by ‘tears with their corrosive salts that have affected my corneas so that it has been granted me to see my own blood vessels projected as if by a magic lantern’. Munch’s radical visual experiments unquestionably served as a foundation for Strindberg’s experimental approach.

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Munch had the greatest respect for scientific knowledge but he valued his own experiences just as much, and considered his visual observations equally valid…Munch often said that he was ten years ahead of scientific discoveries and, in the 1930s, he compared radio lectures and popular science articles on physical and biological phenomena with his own visionary theories.

Munch learned to use each eye alternately according to its respective abilities, both with and without glasses.

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Munch cannot be considered an intellectually schooled artist, but rather as a receptive and exceptionally sensitive interpreter of the ideas of his time. As an artist, on the other hand, he was impartial in his investigations and as an experimentally driven craftsman he was unsurpassed. It is through the probing exploration of his own sensory experiences that he was able to arrive at radical visual innovations in his artistic production. Munch’s consistent work with his ocular disease as subject matter represents a relatively isolated body of work, yet it allows us to get right to the heart of his artistic creativity.

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The Entopic Vision of Edvard Munch

By Philippe Lanthony

Entopic vision is the visual phenomenon that consists in observing the structures that belong to our own eye. It would be incorrect to refer to as ‘optical illusion’ here, because these entopic images have a genuine anatomical cause, and although their visual expression is subjective, their determinism is completely objective. Entopic phenomena have been known about for centuries, and were studied in detail by physiologists such as Johannes Evangelista Purkinje (1787-1896) and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894).

They usually pass unnoticed in everyday life due to their permanence, but they become noticeable when they are secondary to eye conditions because their occurrence is shocking and worrying for the patient. A common example if the appearance of floaters’, small dark spots that move around at will within the field of vision, particularly when the eyes move. If the patient is an artist, he can readily represent these through drawing.

The scientific illustrator Lee Allen (1910-2006) observed and drew the haemorrhages caused by the degeneration of his retina. At the start of his study he said: ‘When I first noticed the spots in my vision… I knew immediately that it was my responsibility to record them. They were, however strictly internal images that could not be photographed, so I started to make free-hand drawings of what I, but no one else, could see.’ Munch undoubtedly followed the same reasoning, but he went beyond the simple ophthalmological semiology, and the representation of his entopic images led him to study the fundamental phenomena of the representation of space in painting.

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Munch’s Entopic Imagery

 

The illustration here is much more telling; the observed patch has the shape of a large bird occupying the lower part of the painting, with a small, rounded, ring-shaped head and a long, thin beak. The appearance of this ring is well known to ophthalmologists, who see it daily in their clinical practice. It is that which is observed when the vitreous body becomes detached (see no. 117).

The Spatial Location of the Entopic Image.

The representation of space in painting was of particular interest to Munch, as is shown by his studies of perspective, motivated by his fondness for photography. He would not have failed to wonder ‘How is it that I can see a bird in my field of vision, at a certain distance in front of me, when the physical cause, the haemorrhage, is inside my eye?’ In everyday life, we have the impression that objects are visually positioned in the physical surroundings to which they belong. However, when the physical object causing the entopic image is located within the eye itself, we do not position the entopic image inside the eye (that would make little sense) but at a certain distance within the surrounding space. Where exactly? In order to answer this question, Munch added visual indications and began to paint the subjective bird located in the objective environment.

Evolution over Time

It follows that his entopic study was also carried out over a certain period, showing the changes in appearance of the images as time went on. The most obvious was the change in appearance of the bird’s body, which was firstly a huge, wide and dark patch, but then slowly broke up and crumbled, unlike the rounded head, which changed little and remained almost on its own at the end of the bird’s evolution. These changes in appearance can be logically attributed to the gradual reduction of the ocular haemorrhage.