Three Faces of Eve

"She is the woman of dreams, the woman of lust and woman the nun," Edvard Munch once confided. The Norwegian fin de siecle painter was explaining one of his favorite compositions, which showed three women standing together--one in black, one in white, one nude. He used this trio in several different canvases, known collectively as "the Sphinx" cycle. They epitomized, as no other subject could, the shy, alcoholic bachelor's agonized obsession with that half of the human race which he never was able to understand.

Yet the Sphinx series is far from Munch's finest work. The pictures are too busy, too fussy, too blatantly overloaded with message. Possibly because they meant so much to the artist, they lured him into abandoning his cardinal principles of art. Munch developed his spare "symbolistic" style about 1892. It was based on the elimination of modeling and minor details, on emphasizing rhythmic contours and outlines. Above all, it meant subjugating technique to subject, then crystalizing subject itself into a single unforgettable image.

Humble Form. Given this predilection, it was only natural that Munch should ultimately turn to the simplest, most stylized artistic medium then in use --graphics. In the 1890s, lithographs were undergoing an artistic revival in Paris under the gifted impetus of Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec, while Gauguin was experimenting with the woodcut. Munch, in his turn, became almost as influential as they.

An exhibition of 74 Munch prints, currently at the Los Angeles County Museum, illustrates why Munch's finest pictures were executed in this humble medium. At the Auguste Clot print shop in Paris, where Munch perfected his technique, he had to draw on lithographic stones, which were generally smaller than the canvases he used. Moreover, the presses of the day were only equipped to reproduce three or four elementary (and usually plain garish) col ors. Thus Munch had to stay with simple, intimate compositions--in which his natural gifts for boldness and symbolism were dramatized.

Nowhere perhaps is this more vividly seen than in his 1896 version of The Sick Child (see color pages), a marvelously sensitive evocation of his elder sister Sophie, who died of tuberculosis when Munch was 14. In fact, the lithograph of The Sick Child is essentially a detail from a larger oil that Munch had painted some ten years before. The painting showed the child upright against a pillow, with her aunt, head bowed, next to her, but the lithograph zeroes in on "the trembling lips, the transparent skin, the tired eyes" that had inspired him in the first place.

Untouched by Guilt. In graphics, Munch was almost compelled to concentrate on one or at the most two aspects of his obsessive Eve. As a result, he often gained a depth totally lacking in larger group portraits of the three women. His sensuous 1895 Madonna captures a strangely melancholy bacchante, in the throes of some primeval ecstasy, clearly his "woman of lust." In Ashes (1889), she appears again, a wanton totally untouched by the guilt that overwhelms her partner--yet at the same time electrified by some outside, elemental force.

Munch's woodcut, Women on the Beach, displays one of his technical innovations: it was made by carving the picture onto one block of wood, then cutting it up into separate blocks and inking them with different colors. But the picture is memorable in another sense. In it, Munch portrayed the "woman of dreams" and "woman the nun," but omitted their lustful sister. In so doing, he discovered in them a poignant wistfulness closely akin to his own.

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