| Artist: | Munch, Edvard |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Evening on Karl Johans Gate | |
| Date of Work: | 1892 | |
| Nationality: | Norwegian | |
| Context: | The Turn of the Century | |
| Movement: | Symbolism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Proto - expressionism, Symbolism Munch: "pictures from the reverse side of the eye" Subject: city street scene; no longer open air painting in sunlight (Impressionism); Munch turns to the night. Figures turn their backs on nature to stare straight ahead like zombies. Faces become like masks. One figure stands off to the side, sometimes identified as the artist himself. Expression of alienation from the crowd. Big city anonymity; the herd. Shrubbery in background looks like a dark, looming phallus; the eroticizing of nature. Motifs from the life of a modern soul, act III: anxiety. Style: anti-naturalism, stylized, painted from "the reverse side of the eye." An inner vision. Anticipates Expressionism in its use of space to express alienation and a highly charged, emotional setting that is more a mindscape than a landscape. Context: turn of the century anxiety showing Munch's shift from the social to the psychological; when he turns his back on nature he is headed on the expressionist path to the interior. Landscape as the projection of the inner psyche. Age of Freud and the discovery of the unconscious. Munch's images come from "that reverse side of the eye," which points to the shadowy realm of dreams and the unconscious. | ||
