1916 marked a watershed year for Edvard Munch, who solidified his reentry into the Norwegian art scene with his largest exhibition yet, held in February in the city of Bergen. Painted in 1916, Stående kvinneakt relates to many of the works displayed in the exhibition and exemplifies the groundbreaking new direction the artist pursued from this year, witnessing the incorporation of bold, warm colors and emphasis on interior settings. Of the period, critics wrote: “Munch’s work has indeed changed… His uncommon color language… resonates as never before” (quoted in Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (exhibition catalogue), New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2006, p. 72).
A lyrical and light-infused encapsulation of the artist’s new direction, Stående kvinneakt reveals a look inward, both metaphorically and substantively. The interior scene presents a graceful and quiet portrayal of a nude woman in warm tones of sienna and umber interspersed with gentle swathes of blue and green. As in the Death of Marat II, in which the protagonist stands seemingly aloof (despite the loaded title of the work), the woman in the present painting seems transfixed in a moment all her own (see fig. 1). The curls of her upswept hair, her downward gaze and curves of her belly invoke a rhythm which carries the eye throughout the work to the richly patterned bedspread at her right. While the theme of nudes in interiors begun in his earlier career, the magnificent coloration and interior setting of the present work begins in earnest in 1916 with works like Seated Nude on the Edge of the Bed and evolved into later works like Model by the Wicker Chair of 1919-21, in which similar furnishings appear (see figs. 2 & 3).
The Intimate World of Edvard Munch’s Nude
(right) Fig. 3 Edvard Munch, Model by the Wicker Chair, oil on canvas, 1919-21, Munchmuseet, Oslo © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
While Munch’s earlier years in Germany had associated the artist with the Expressionist circles in the country, the artist’s homecoming in 1910 began a period of increased focus on his personal practice. His purchase of the property at Ekely in early 1916 afforded the artist ample t.mes and space to devote himself once again to painting after interludes of focused writing; Munch would live and work at the estate outside of Oslo until his death nearly three decades later.
The enhanced palettes and luminosity of the ensuing canvases appealed to the nationalistic notions of a new Norwegian school of painting, which placed primacy on color, while also satisfying the Francophilic fervor in the market at the t.mes . Though Munch’s bold brushwork and stark colors in the 1910s resonated with the Fauve tendencies promulgated by artists like Matisse, Derain and Braque (see fig. 4), he avowed a practice that was largely insular and inspired by personal discovery and experimentation.
In response to an exhibition in the fall of 1916, contemporary critic and friend of Munch’s, Jappe Nilssen wrote of his latest work: “[Munch] always seems new to us. He is never the same from one year to the next. He possesses an ability for self-renewal that is most welcome in Germanic and Scandinavian painting…[Munch] is not attached to any school or any direction because he himself is one of those who advances and creates his own school and forges his own direction” (quoted in ibid., p. 73).
In this context, Stående kvinneakt can be seen as reconsideration of one of his most famed motifs, the artist’s resplendent Madonna of the mid-1890s (see fig. 5). Painted at the height of the women’s movement, Madonna reflects the contemporary trope of the Madonna-Magdalene dichotomy, with the artist himself stating: “I lived during a transitory period/ right in the middle of female emancipation/ Then, it was the woman/ who seduced and captured and cheater the man/ - the t.mes of Carmen/ During this transitory period/ the man became the weaker sex” (quoted in Munch Revisted: Edvard Munch and the Art of Today (exhibition catalogue), Dortmund, Museum am Ostwall, 2005, p. 26). Whereas Munch’s Madonna confronts the viewer with a languid, desirous nude in a dusky nebulous arena, the present work, painted two decades later shows an evolution of the artist and captures a similarly quiet moment within a lighter, terrestrial realm.
The subject matter, fluid brushwork and enlivened palette of the present work also recalls that of contemporary artists like Alice Neel, whose expressive portraiture captures her subjects with an acute psychological resonance similar to Munch’s as well as Eric Fischl who has eloquently spoken about the importance of Munch, captured in the video below. It is in the paintings and drawings of artists such as Neel and Fischl that Munch's magical nude figures take on an even greater depth of meaning through the lens of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The very boldness of Munch's figuration, paint handling and subject matter is perfectly captured in Stående kvinneakt.
