Edvard Munch
Madonna

Master Munch liked to repeat himself in creating works. In doing so, he clearly draws from the various Monets of the Impressionist movement, dedicated to depicting the same subject/object in order to capture its fleeting and elusive changeability due to time, both chronological and meteorological.

Indeed, the Norwegian Edvard painted as many as five versions of the Madonna from 1894 to 1895, driven, however, by intentions quite different from those within the revolutionary minds of the Impressionists. Yes, because Munch must necessarily be counted among the leading exponents of the Expressionist movement, an artistic direction born and spread mostly in the Nordic/Germanic context. The word "Expressionism" provides in advance the basic elements of the aforementioned revolution of the arts: to Impression, conceived by the subject but based on the concreteness of a precise object visualized and represented in its sudden imperfection, Expression is opposed, produced by the subject who deprives it of any real and objective connotation. The expressionist canvas and sculpture are the perfect or nearly perfect materialization of subjective abstraction, passions, feelings, moments, all based on the single, unique, and unrepeatable individual.

The Madonna analyzed here by myself does not represent the most "famous" version of Munch's Marian depiction, yet it is among the "duplicates" produced by the artist, the one most imbued with "scabrousness," an element that allows me to add to a classic and overly academic bland artistic analysis a more "sociological" and general character analysis.

The observer who notices the mentioned canvas for the very first time visualizes a pale, imperfect, frail female figure, nude, depicted up to the waist, with dark, imprecise upper limbs, confused with her long, raven hair; next to it, a bizarre and tiny "being" humanoid, frightening and chilling, almost a squalid imitation of the contemporary "ghosts" drawn in comics. Finally, a light orange frame, containing strange curved lines within it, circumscribes the female figure and the repugnant little man, immersed in a dark blue-black background, obtained by broad wavy brushstrokes. Thus can be synthesized the primary "impression" of a hypothetical "ignorant" observer in front of the oil on canvas in question.

The underlying meaning of the work, in a few words the "Expression" provoked by the Artist's intellect at that particular temporal/emotive circumstance, is much more profound and complex: the depiction of a nude Madonna, abandoned to sexual depravity, symbolized by her "provocative" posture, the aborted fetus positioned next to her, the array of sperm within the frame, all these are elements attempting to elucidate the fundamental thesis, namely the demystification of Christianity, particularly of its character-icons, caused by an increasingly overwhelming process of secularization of mass society at the dawn of the 20th century. Munch tragically reflects the crisis of tradition, of the so-called eternal ascetic and spiritual beliefs of contemporary Man, having their peak in the faith in Christ. The subjects/objects of the canvas are the controversial opposite of Christian elements and dogmas: the traditional Madonna, virgin, chaste and pure, undergoes a violent metamorphosis into a squalid woman, a dirty and rough prostitute blinded by the most misleading sexual depravity, the fruit of her womb is represented by a curled, limp aborted fetus, already expressing a certain desolation and depression; the perverse picture is seasoned with the horde of seeds ready to fertilize Evil and the Damned, as well as the violence of the dark and cold tones of the wavy background.

The Norwegian Artist depicts in this way the already acclaimed decadence of the massified Human, permeated by the emerging bourgeois consumerism and technology that have sidelined spirituality and the abstract/ascetic tendencies of the same, imprisoned in a materialistic, opportunistic, egoistic and arrogant ethic/morality, the architect of God's expulsion from his conscience. The violence of the change inflicted on society by the new Man is paroxysmally depicted violently and scabrously on the canvas of the Madonna, conceived as the exact opposite of the canonical medieval/Renaissance Marian representations. In a few, crude words, a decided break with tradition and the past.

Northern Expressionism will not be the main artistic materializer of the Crisis of certainties and the discomfort of the early 20th-century and 20th-century Man: the Abstractists, Cubists, Fauves and Surrealists will bring the analysis of these themes to much more arduous philosophies, all dedicated to the disintegration of the canonical and the traditional.