Munch: His Life and Work

by Reinhold Heller

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226326446
• ISBN13: 9780226326443
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Munch and the German Connection

Reinhold Heller's book, coming in 1984, follows the two other groundbreaking books in English, Stang, 1979, and Eggum, 1983. Working for some twenty years in American universities (Indiana, Pittsbugh, and Chicago), doing research in both German and Norwegian, Heller's book offers the first "critical" and historically researched account to give an interpretation of Munch's work founded on a psychological profile of the artist. From the convent of Port-Royale, Pascal's "Pensees" (1623-62) stated " Le Moi est haissable" ( The self is contemptible.) That frame remained unbroken in art until the late 19th Century when artists such as Munch demanded to be heard. The entire Modernist movement that followed was in a sense an establishment of the monographic era of the artist, by use of the self. This may be the book that has caused others to acclaim as "too much ink split" on psychological dimensions of the artist in preference to other approaches to the work. David Lomas has written on Frida Kahlo that the biographical perspective on her work unfortunately obscures the actual work the artist was engaged in, which was self-representation.The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance The need of such a profile has remained indispensible to speaking about Munch, especially because it remains unstable, unresolved. The primary question of what was the work in which the artist was engaged, remains undefinitively answered. Currently there is an onslaught of newer dimensions of criticism, all with their self-serving objectives, post-modern, linguistic, feminist. Certainly at the end of the Modernist period, we are going to see Modernism pay its debts to previous French Culture more and more. All the more importance of this German based work. Others who have written on Munch cannot have afforded not to have read this book, but obviously seem to have ignored important elements of its contents. Recently we have even seen the reversion to Warburg Institute style analysis in an attempt to dethrone Munch from a monographic pedestal: Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (Art Institute of Chicago). Along the lines of Thomas Crow's squib about Gericault: "[The singularity of an artist's work] is itself a quality that must be put together from bits and pieces of already existing models. And the more one knows about the ambitious young artists who came immediately before him, the less idiosyncratic [the artist's] impulses seem." Nineteenth Century Art The extent to which comparable original research affect the products of following authors has been and will be profound, and it has become incumbent upon anyone who would write on Munch to come back from Norway and Germany with something of additional value. Heller's writing is particularly strong in illuminating Munch's relationship with his German patrons and their position in German cultural society. The clarification of his behavior toward Die Brucke is a case in poi