Tom Hunter, Woman Reading a Possession Order, 1997. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I don’t think I’ve written about a photograph before (correct me if I’m wrong), but this one is rather beautiful, and featured in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition Reframed: The Woman in the Window to which I will be returning this Monday, 29 September to finish my talk from a few weeks back. It turned out that there is just too much there to talk about in one session. The exhibition is a rich and endlessly rewarding investigation of a ubiquitous motif, and this week I will be focussing on the photographic and ‘modern’ works which are on display. The following week I will start my four-part series Almost All of Michelangelo – as ever, each part will be an independent talk, so you don’t have to sign up for all four! You can find details on the diary page, together with information about two in-person talks for Art History Abroad at the National Gallery on 23 September and 20 October. And for anyone who missed my series on sculpture, I am condensing it into two 90-minute online talks for the Watts Gallery at 11am on 5 and 12 September – again, details are in the diary. But today, a photograph from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum which I have seen not only in the current exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery but previously at the National Gallery and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden: you’ll see why very quickly. I did talk about it briefly in Part 1 of Women Seeing… but I’ve learnt a lot more about it since.

A woman stands in a shabby room looking down at a piece of folded paper held between her hands. In front of her is a dirty sash window, which sheds light on her, and on a baby lying on a blue cloth on a table in the foreground of the photograph. This table would block our access to her if we were physically present. Under the blue cloth is what appears to be a rug, rucked up like the broad folds of the blue cloth. The baby, wearing blue trousers and a red top with matching socks, lies on its back with its arms spread out. The top of its head is brilliantly illuminated, the light also catching its right cheek, which tells us that its gaze is turned, deliberately or by chance, towards the woman, who is, by implication, its mother. The walls of the room are painted off-white at the bottom, and a dull orangey-yellow above. The join is at the level of the cross-bar of the sash window. If the woman were to lift her head from the paper, it would be at her eye-level. Two brackets support a simple shelf, which is attached to the back wall with three undefined objects resting on it, two at the left, and one, almost ‘off screen’, at the right. There appear to be nails in the wall, and something, possible a picture, hanging to the far right.

I find the quality of the light really beautiful – it creates an atmosphere of profound calm. A surprising number of people used to doubt photography’s status as art, and perhaps some still do, their attitude based on the misunderstanding that it is ‘merely reproduction’ and that ‘anyone can do it’. But then anyone can paint with oils on canvas. However, in this case, I think the way in which the model has been posed to catch a very specific fall of light is just one of the aspects of the work which reveal Tom Hunter’s artistry. Notice how the light falls directly onto the model’s face and hands, which, as a result, are the brightest elements here, meaning that we focus on them. It falls tangentially across the paper, ensuring that the paper stsand out, but does not pull focus from the hands and face. The dull green top also catches direct light, though interrupted in places by the window frame, and models the form from a light, olive green on the left to deep shadow, almost black, on the right, where it is crisply defined against the off-white wall. I find the model’s expression indefinable. She is deep in thought, undoubtedly, but whether this is good news or bad does not yet appear to have sunk in. Having said that, we are told by the title of the photograph: Woman Reading a Possession Order. This is how the work is currently exhibited in the Dulwich Picture Gallery:

To the far left is a post card by Oscar Kokoschka entitled Woman at a Window, made for the Wiener Werkstätte in 1908. Like our photograph it is on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. On the far right is Gerrit Dou’s A Woman Playing a Clavichord, from about 1665, in Dulwich’s own collection. Each has a white label, whereas our piece has three additional elements associated with it: a white label, which also has an image on it; a grey panel (‘Another Perspective’ on the work, written by a perceptive student from a local school); and a mounted and framed piece of paper. This is the last of these:

It would appear to be the very possession order of the title, the paper which the woman is holding in the photograph. However, there are no visible folds. Initially I thought that it must have been ironed, but I went back to Dulwich yesterday to catch the exhibition one last time – and get some better photographs of some of the works for Monday’s talk – which meant I could check the label: this turns out to be a photocopy of the original. Nevertheless, it reveals that what we are looking at in the photograph is not a fiction. The paper is inscribed in (photocopied) pen at the top ‘ORIGINAL SUMMONS’ and bears three official stamps, one of which is dated 17 JAN 1997. The text starts,

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE

THE QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION

IN THE MATTER OF LAND AND PREMISES KNOWN AS 8, LONDON LANE, LONDON E8 AND IN THE MATTER OF 0. 113 RSC

BETWEEN:

THE MAYOR AND BURGESSES OF
THE LONDON BOROUGH OF HACKNEY

and

PERSONS UNKNOWN

There is more, of course, but I’ll leave it there, as we have got to the title of a series of photographs Tom Hunter took in 1997: Persons Unknown. Curiously, as I headed out to Dulwich yesterday there was a man outside my local pub, which, since I arrived here twenty years ago has closed three times and only re-opened twice. For the last three of four years it has been a squat. The man was affixing an equivalent possession order to the door of the pub, similarly addressed to ‘Persons Unknown’.  At the time Tom Hunter took his photograph he was in his last year at the Royal College of Art, and living in a squat in Hackney – 8, London Lane, as specified above – when he, together with the other squatters, were sent a summons for a hearing at which the Mayor and Burgesses would put forward their claim for re-possession of the premises. They were being evicted, and Hunter made this event the subject of his work, using his fellow squatters as his models. I don’t know what your experience of, or feelings about squatting are, but there is a rather lovely video on the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s website with a discussion between Hunter and his model, dancer Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, about their memories of the squat, what they thought they were giving to the community, and of the photo shoot. You can find it via this link on YouTube. She was 27 at the time, and 25 years later she still has the same poise and beauty. And, of course, her daughter Saskia is now more-or-less the age that she was when this photo was taken. From the whole sequence of portraits, both of individuals and groups, this particular image won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait award in 1998, and has been widely exhibited since. But why has it been shown in the galleries I mentioned? If you haven’t recognised it already, the answer is given by the image on the white label next to this work in the exhibition, which you can see (just about) in the photo above.

This is Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657-9), from the collection of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. This particular version is the one that Hunter and Pereira would have known in 1997. He gave her a book of Vermeer’s paintings to choose which one they would interpret, and this was the one she went for. He was then incredibly rigorous, insisting that they get the exact pose – the tilt of the head, the precise level of the hands – and so on. In the original, the table which blocks our access has a rumpled carpet, but no baby, although there is a bowl of fruit: a different symbol of fertility. For Vermeer there is a curtain, but no real change in colour on the walls – although there does appear to be a darker patch above and behind the woman’s head, at the level of her eye line. Vermeer’s window is open, Pereira’s closed. Both are assessing the news, with Pereira deciding what to do next. For this reason, perhaps, there is a greater focus on the figure, with less space given over to the blank wall. However, let’s look back to the exhibition in Dulwich.

Even on this small scale, you may notice that the Vermeer as illustrated does not appear to be the same as the reproduction I have shown you. An X-ray of the painting taken in 1979 showed that the dark patch on the wall was covering another image. It was believed back then that Vermeer himself had painted over it. However, when they started to clean the Vermeer just four or five years ago, the conservator involved soon noticed that the paint in this dark patch was responding very differently to that on the rest of the surface. A tiny sample of the paint (which you would only ever take from a part of the painting that was already cracked, in case you were worried) was examined in cross-section. This revealed that the painting had been varnished, and a substantial layer of dirt had built up on top of the varnish, before the image was then painted over. This implies that Vermeer himself had not done it. Indeed, it was probably done after the original painting had got quite dirty: the colour of the wall for the overpainting was matched to the dirty paint of the original section of the wall. When it was subsequently cleaned, the original colour would have been revealed on the original bit of wall, but not on the overpaint, hence the dark patch. An international conference of Vermeer experts and conservators then made the incredibly brave decision to remove the overpaint (the original varnish was acting as a safety net!), and this is what they found:

As they knew from the 1979 X-ray, an entire painting of Cupid had been covered over. It’s not entirely clear when this was done, but probably in the first half of the 18^th Century, just before the painting was acquired for the Dresden collection. The presence of the little god of love suggests that the woman is reading a love letter. Her lover is in all probability far away – in the ‘outside world’, hence the open window. It is this restored version that is illustrated on the label, and comes with a suggestion in the catalogue that the baby in the photograph is effectively the result of Cupid’s action. This is not inaccurate, even if it is not what Hunter or Pereira would have known or been influenced by.

The photograph of the Vermeer above shows how the painting is currently exhibited – I am very grateful to Mark Haimann for tracking it down for me. The bottom of the curtain hangs just above the picture frame, suggesting it is not meant to be in the room with the woman, but hanging in front of the painting itself – a trompe l’oeil game implying that Vermeer was good enough to trick us into pulling it back further to see more of the hidden image. I am also interested in what the painting looks like without the frame.

Look at the very bottom right corner of the painting: a rounded shape tells us that there was originally going to be a large Dutch glass, known as a roemer, standing on a shelf in the foreground, out of proportion with everything in the painting. You might just be able to see the ghostly outline of the rest of the glass through the curtain above the base. The implication would have been that the roemer was in our space, on a shelf in front of the painting, which might originally have been set into a perspective box. Vermeer changed his mind, though, and replaced it with the curtain. In the 17^th Century paintings in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) were often protected by curtains like this, hanging, it would seem, from rails attached to the frame (just like this one pretends to be). When painted, as well as showing us Vermeer’s skill, it also tells us how learned he was: it is a reference to a story Pliny told about a competition between two artists. Parrhasius, who won the competition, painted a curtain which his rival Zeuxis tried to pull back to reveal a painting – not realising that the curtain was the painting. Having tricked a fellow painter, Parrhasius must surely have been the better artist. All this is coincidental when considering Hunter and Pereira’s beautiful – and, I think, meaningful – collaboration. But it is because Vermeer was such a great artist, who showed an interest in the life of his community, that Hunter chose him – and that Pereira chose this particular image – to be reinterpreted. And, of course, it is precisely because I get easily side-tracked like this that I am giving a second talk, Women Looking 2… on Monday!

Glyn Philpot, A Student with a Book, 1920. Ömer Koç Collection.

Glyn Philpot is one of those artists who should never have been forgotten. There’s a long discussion in ‘The History of Art’ which asks who the last ‘Old Master’ was – but of course it’s a question which has no answer. There is also a long discussion about whether the term ‘Old Master’ really has any validity nowadays. However, you could just conceivably argue that one answer to the first question would actually be ‘Glyn Philpot’. There is certainly no doubt that for the two thirds of his career he was consciously working in the tradition of the Old Masters. Not only did he have the most brilliant technique, but he also had a superb understanding of their work – as today’s painting demonstrates. The current exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester – the first retrospective of his work in 38 years – is a brilliant introduction to the artist and his career, and I’m looking forward to talking about it this Monday, 8 August at 6pm, as part of my series Looking in Different Ways, in a talk entitled Looking at Men. Two weeks later, and still part of that series, there will be an introduction to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s comprehensive exhibition Barbara Hepworth, which fits into my subseries Negative Spaces. I thought talks for the summer would end there, but there was so much material in the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition Reframed: The Woman in the Window, I ran out of time last week, and decided to do a cut-price sequel, Women Looking 2 – which will be on Monday 29 August at 6pm. All of these exhibitions are accompanied by superb books, rather than a ‘traditional’ catalogue. Chichester has published a monograph on Glyn Philpot – the first in 71 years – written by the curator of the exhibition, Simon Martin, who is also the director of the Pallant House Gallery – none of which is a coincidence. I can recommend it very highly – although it came out after I’d published a list of The best recent exhibition catalogues with Shepherd, a new book sales website, which might interest you.

Today’s painting was exhibited in 1920 under the title A Student with a Book next to another, The Rice Family. The student looks similar in appearance and dress to Mr and Mrs Rice’s son Bernard, and so it has long been assumed that he was the model for this work. The family had recently arrived in England from Austria: Bernard was born in 1900 in Innsbruck, and had studied drawing, painting and wood engraving even before arriving in London. The family had been interned in Austria during the First World War, and, according to the exhibition label for this painting, ‘Philpot found them accommodation in London and helped Rice to secure a place at Westminster School of Art’. Bernard went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools, but didn’t hang around: in 1922 he left for Yugoslavia, and continued to travel for much of his life, not dying until 1998.

Rice sits on a plain wooden table with a large book held open on his lap between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Visible on the right hand page – the one which has more visual prominence when leafing through – is a monochrome image, presumably a black and white engraving. But then the painting as a whole is more-or-less monochrome, moving through a palette of ivory, creams and browns to black, with nothing quite as bright as high white, or even as dark as the deepest black. It is the palette you would associate with the late works of Leonardo, Rembrandt or Caravaggio, although the clarity of depiction is closer to the earlier, but mature phase, of the third of these. The sitter looks over his left shoulder, creating a strong twist through the body, given that his legs are angled to our left, and his head to our right. He doesn’t appear to be looking at anything, though, but remains deep in thought, maybe contemplating what he had been looking at in the book, or planning something, or maybe even musing on the past – we are not told: this, I think, is part of the allure of the work for me.

At the back right corner of the table is a still life arrangement of rectangular objects: a cuboid box with a lid and a book with a pale cover on which rests a thin, cream-coloured booklet. There is a pencil just in front of the objects, and a piece of paper tucked under the book – together with the book Rice is holding, these can be seen as some of the tools of a student artist. Formally they are also an abstraction of Rice himself – the box is equivalent to his torso, while the booklet resting on the pale book is not unlike the larger open book resting on the student’s lap. As well as echoing Rice’s form, these details also close off the composition, making sure that our eyes don’t follow his gaze. By placing the sitter’s head in the centre of the painting Philpot creates a strong pyramidal composition – a typical construction of the Renaissance and Baroque.

Philpot was a keen observer of fashion, and interested in details of clothing of any sort. The attention he pays to the turned-back left cuff of Rice’s shirt is typical, as is the precise delineation of the folds of the thin cotton of the sleeves. You should see Siegfried Sassoon’s collar in another portrait! The artist was also keenly aware of human anatomy – particularly male anatomy – but apart from his own personal interest in the subject, this was also something he’d learnt from another artist. If you look at the very specific inflection of the right wrist, which is maybe slightly exaggerated, you may recognise the major influence on this painting. But then, if you can work out what the illustration in the book represents, the inspiration is made explicit.

It’s one of Michelangelo’s Ignudi, the naked men who sit atop the imagined continuation of the walls of the Sistine Chapel and frame the outer edges of the ceiling. As nudes they must be in a state of grace (Adam and Eve only started wearing clothes after the fall), and I’ve always assumed they are Michelangelo’s representation of angels. Philpot – and the student Bernard Rice – would both have been interested in the work of the great Renaissance master, but maybe, as curator Simon Martin suggests on the exhibition label, it was also ‘a covert expression of [Philpot’s] interest in the male nude’. Even if this is the case, does that say anything about Bernard Rice? To be honest, it doesn’t really have to, given that this is not a portrait, but a character study, and doesn’t seem to have left Philpot’s possession during his lifetime. However, as Martin points out in the book, this particular ignudo also appears in the background of the Portrait of Montague Rendall, Headmaster of Winchester College – admittedly in an incredibly shadowy form.

The painting to our left of Rendall is far clearer – the prophet Daniel, also from the Sistine, who just happens to be seated above the head of our ignudo, if on the other side of the chapel (which is not far…). Given that Rendall was, presumably, a far more ‘public’ figure than Rice, it seems surprising to me that Philpot might risk expressing his own personal interests in the male form – strictly illegal if acted upon, of course – in this portrait. This in itself might explain why the representation of the ignudo is so unclear. But why choose it in the first place? There are plenty of bold, female figures to choose from: the five Sybils who alternate with the prophets, for example. It would help to know more about Rendall – or Rice, for that matter – and I’m afraid I’m still writing these posts on an extremely ad hoc basis, gradually building up endless possibilities for future research. However, I have tracked down what I believe to be an entry from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which was included on a web entry of imprecise nature. Here are just a few details. Having been awarded a first class degree in Classics at Cambridge in 1887, two years later Rendall ‘…made the first of many journeys abroad to study the masterpieces of continental art, and laid the foundations of his lifelong enthusiasm for medieval and Renaissance Italian painting. In the same year he was appointed to the staff of Winchester College.’ This could, of course, explain everything. A ‘lifelong enthusiasm for… Renaissance Italian painting’ would more than justify the inclusion of two details from the Sistine Chapel. However, the biography also makes reference to ‘his sensitive taste’, and states that he was ‘Almost resolutely unmarried’. I could be wrong to focus in on these phrases, but, as far as I’m aware, sensitivity was not a quality greatly prized in men outside of the 18^th and 21^st centuries, and for many years, when sexual acts between men were illegal (and for a couple of decades after they weren’t) the term ‘confirmed bachelor’ in obituaries would have been interpreted by anyone even slightly in the know as a euphemism for ‘homosexual’. It’s not as if Philpot’s own tastes were unknown. He was a member of the Official War Artists Scheme during the First World War, when he asked if could paint soldiers bathing – as Michelangelo had intended to – but his request was denied. ‘I will bet anything that Philpot suggested it because it gave him the opportunity of painting the nude,’ according to one official. There are other references in Rendall’s biography which I find intriguing, but my reasons for choosing them could all too easily be misinterpreted by the ill-disposed. Of course, I could be imagining things. It could simply be a love of the work of Michelangelo that Philpot shared with Rendall… but why include the ignudo in the first place, and then go on to disguise it? And why choose Daniel, rather than any other prophet or sybil? I’m not sure there’s any way of answering the latter question. All I know about Daniel (without re-reading the book) is that he was protected by God, and good at languages. The first could possibly be said of Rendall, and the second was certainly true. In later life he was a trustee of the BBC, and devised its motto ‘Nation shall speak peace unto Nation’, for example. Daniel was also a just judge, which would be perfect for applying discipline in a school. As the biography states, ‘In college Rendall upheld high moral standards but softened any severity by his natural sympathy for boys.’  It was Daniel who cleared Susannah of the accusations of the elders, after they had spied on her while she was bathing naked. But we must be wary of drawing too many conclusions about someone who condemned looking on naked women: we could so easily be led up the wrong garden path.

Whatever the reasons for including Daniel, or this particular ignudo, Philpot really did understand Michelangelo’s work. I remain entirely convinced that I recognise the pose of Bernard Rice. Indeed, I’ve been trying to pin it down, to see if it has an exact source, but as far as I can see it doesn’t.

Overall it is remarkably similar to the Delphic Sibyl, who also has her knees to our left, whilst looking over her left shoulder to our right. The arms are in a different position, perhaps, but if you were to lift her right arm and lower the left, they wouldn’t be far off.

I suspect I might have recognised the inflection of Rice’s right wrist from Adam’s – or Rice’s right arm as a whole from Adam’s left, stretched out towards God the Father. But then, it’s not that different from the left arm of the ignudo above, either. There is no exact source for this pose (although I am increasingly convinced that the Delphic Sibyl is a good fit), but the position of the body as a whole and the articulation of every single joint speaks of a thorough understanding of Michelangelo’s work, which has been seen, studied, appreciated, absorbed, digested, and then remade in a new way. The only real difference is in the palette – nothing like the lucid and luminous colouring of Michelangelo. But even here Philpot is being remarkably sophisticated, and subtle, I think. Michelangelo is represented in Rice’s book by a black and white engraving. Modelled on elements derived from similar reproductions, the student appears to us in all his full, three-dimensional, monochrome splendour, every bit a sculptural as a Michelangelo painting, but with the tones of the print. This is Michelangelo remade for the neo-classicism of the 1920s, a trend which has been widely ignored, unless espoused by an acknowledged master such as Picasso – until recently, that is, and with Pallant House at the forefront of its rehabilitation. However, a decade after Bernard Rice was painted, Philpot would have his own ‘Picasso’ moment. He changed direction completely, and started to embrace modernism in his own, remarkable, idiosyncratic way. But to learn more about that you would need to see the exhibition, read the book, or come to my talk on Monday! Keep looking for those sources…

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895. Private Collection.

If you think I’m being rude – or insensitive – I should point out that the title of today’s post is simply a translation into English of words that Edvard Munch himself wrote on the first (or second) version of The Scream. An infrared photo of the offending text is at the very bottom of the post, if you want to check it for yourself… There are several versions of this image – two in paint, two in pastel, and a lithograph which survives in a number of different versions, some coloured, some not. I am looking at them today as an introduction to the talk I will be giving on Monday 4 July, Seeing and Feeling: Edvard Munch. This is the first of my ‘scattered’ series, Looking in Different Ways, which will include artists who have found news ways of looking at the world, or which are introductions to exhibitions which look at art in ways that you might not have expected. There are details of the talks I have planned so far on the diary page, and via the links to Tixoom you can find there.

The Scream is one of those images which needs no introduction, so familiar are we with it, and with all the versions, mainly satirical, that it has spawned. Let’s face it, it’s the only painting I can think of that has inspired an emoji 😱, and the film franchise, Scream, uses the face for the mask worn by the killer. Like the many pastiches of Munch’s masterpiece, this franchise is a ‘comedy’ hommage (French pronunciation) to the slasher genre it apes. I’m sure the irreverent approach is just a means to undermine the darker implications of the painting. It is so familiar, perhaps, that we no longer look at it properly. We think that we know what is there, and we just stop looking: familiarity breeds disregard. So let’s look again. I’m going to focus on Munch’s third version of the subject, the pastel painted in 1895, but will consider the development of the series (briefly) below.

When you look at this image (and try to look at it as if you’ve never seen it before), what is the first thing that you notice? My first response, when I started thinking about this post, was surprise at the brilliance of the colour. The colour is why I’ve chosen this particular version to focus on – the others have faded, or were, in any case, duller. The sky is an intense vermillion, the bold, wavy lines interspersed with buttercup yellow and a couple of bands of pale blue. It takes up just under a third of the height of the painting, with a clear horizontal line in a darker blue marking, as the adjective suggests, the horizon. The lowest band of the sky appears to be made up of undulations of this darker blue – although reference to other versions imply that these ‘undulations’ are based on distant hills, blue as a result of atmospheric perspective. The majority of the land and sea is formed from a mid-toned blue, although small amounts of the reds and yellows creep in, in the same way that there is some blue in the sky. Overall, therefore, we have warm colours in the sky and cold down on earth. This lower section is almost square in shape, cut across diagonally by a straight path, with a fence or railing running alongside it. The path is formed of a series of straight lines, individual strokes of the crayon, and the railing consists of three parallel bars. The lines of the path and the bars of the railing conform to a strict, if exaggerated, perspective, converging at a vanishing point on the horizon at the far left of the image. The depiction of the land and sea is all curves, contrasting with the rigid, linear depiction of the path – we are looking at geometric forms and abstract values, particularly contrasts: warm and cool colours, straight and curved lines, squares and triangles, horizontals and diagonals. These abstract values are given meaning by what is represented. The path is presumably a jetty, and we see the sea with a curving coastline forming a bay, and, judging by the greens interspersed on the right, some vegetation. There is an androgynous figure, just to the right of centre, cut off by the bottom of the image. Its mouth and eyes are wide open and its hands are clasped on either side of its face. Further away on the jetty two more figures – men, as they wear top hats and this is 1895 – are sketched out full length. There is a boat on the sea, and buildings on the land, just visible on the horizon.

Looking closer at the figure at the bottom we can see its alarm more clearly, although the precise nature of the expression of this skull-like face is not easy to define. What is the wraith-like figure actually doing? The body seems almost immaterial: it is wavy, rather than solidly vertical, and is made of strokes more like the sky than the earth, all of which gives it a sense of insecurity. Is this person screaming, or does the open mouth speak of surprise, shock or horror? And do the hands express surprise as well, or are they clasped over the ears to shut out sound? There seems to be an unbearable pressure here, either coming from within, or closing in from the outside. As suggested above, the perspective of the jetty is distorted. It seems to recede too quickly, or, rather than receding, it could be seen as rushing towards us, giving the impression that we are zooming in, focussing on a close-up of the protagonist in a moment of high drama. Even the vegetation pushes in, the curved lines echoing the bend of the inflected wrist, pressing claustrophobically on the fragile figure.

Compared to the heightened drama of the protagonist, the two characters in the background seem relaxed, nonchalant even. One walks away, another stops to lean on the railing. If there is an audible sound – a scream – they do not seem to hear it: they certainly do not appear to be reacting to it. The boat just off the shore is a common feature in Munch’s work, and may imply the possibility of escape – but this is a possibility that is all too distant.

The sky is searing, with rich and brilliant colours, although oddly only the yellows are reflected in the water. The railing along the jetty, and even some of the planks of the path do take on some of the reds, but the intense colour is really the preserve of the sky, and is its defining feature. However, the nonchalance of the two figures could suggest that there is nothing unusual about it. Or maybe it is simply that they do not see it – or, that they do not see it like this. But then, the character in the foreground is not looking at the sky: he (is it ‘he’?) may have turned away.

I think that everything I have said so far is visible in the painting, although I can’t help wondering that so much of what I ‘see’ is coloured (deliberate choice of word) by what I have always known. It seems like ‘always’, anyway. I can’t remember when I first became aware of Edvard Munch, let alone The Scream. However, although there are unanswered questions in the interpretation of the image, we do know what Munch himself thought about the painting, as he wrote about it on more than one occasion. His first account was written a year before he made the first image. In a diary entry dated 22 January 1891, he said,

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun went down – I felt a gust of melancholy – suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death – as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends went on – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I felt a vast infinite scream through nature.

This makes considerable sense of the image: it is Munch and two friends. They have moved on, but he remains, ‘trembling with anxiety’. Maybe this explains the wavy forms of the torso, even if he is not now leaning against the railing. The sky is ‘bloody red’ and we get a sense of the ‘blue-black fjord and city’ even if the colour chosen is not quite as dark as that might imply. What is key here is the last phrase, ‘I felt a vast infinite scream through nature’. He is not screaming (it is ‘he’), but there is a scream, a scream that maybe he is trying to block out with his hands. However, this is problematic, as he doesn’t hear the scream, so he can’t silence it – he feels it. What is truly ground-breaking about this image is that it isn’t a picture of something seen, but of something felt – hence the title of Monday’s talk: Seeing and Feeling. We are at the very beginnings of Expressionism.

The year after Munch had this experience he tried to capture it visually twice, once in pastel – which may have been the first version, it’s not entirely clear – and once in paint, using both oil and tempera, with pastels as well. These two are both in Oslo, and are owned by the Munch Museum and the National Gallery respectively. The reason for thinking that the pastel is the earlier of the two is that, although the basic ideas are sketched out, the details are absent – no boats, and no buildings – features which do appear in what is, presumably, the later version.

There were two more versions in 1895 – the pastel which I have discussed (the only one in which one of the ‘friends’ leans on the railing), and a lithograph. We don’t know how many prints were drawn from the original stone, but about 30 survive, some of which were hand coloured by Munch himself. They were published in Berlin, and bear the title Geshrei, i.e. ‘The Scream’ in German, although the literal translation of this would be ‘Screaming’ or ‘Shouting’, apparently (‘The Scream’ would be Der Shrei in German, or, in Norwegian, Skrik). There is also a phrase at the bottom right, ‘Ich fühlte das grosse Geschrei durch die Natur‘ (‘I felt the great scream through nature’). Often the image has been trimmed down, effectively cutting it out of the original ‘page’, meaning that the words do not appear – even if they were clearly important to Munch. This particular version, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was signed by the artist in 1896.

A final version was painted in tempera in 1910. This, too, is in the Munch Museum in Oslo, and, like the others (with the exception of the lithographs), is on cardboard. The first version in paint (1893) is the one which bears the inscription, ‘Could only have been painted by a madman!’ It is written in pencil on top of the paint, and recent analysis has confirmed that it is in Munch’s handwriting. It was probably his reaction – presumably ironic – to the public response to the painting when it was first exhibited in 1895. Typical of this was the comment of critic Henrik Grosch, who wrote that the painting was proof that you could not “consider Munch a serious man with a normal brain.”  The implications of this statement would have been more profound for the artist than Grosch would have realised – probably. I don’t know how aware he was of Munch’s family background. Born in 1863, Edvard was the second of five children. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, as did his elder sister when he was fourteen. He was a sickly child, and was often kept out of school, which created an enduring sense of isolation. One of his younger sisters was diagnosed with a mental health disorder at an early age, and by the time The Scream was exhibited, she was cared for in a local institution. For the rest of his life the artist was haunted by the possibility that he had inherited the same condition.

Somehow, through all of this, he seems to have captured the essence of what could be described as one of the defining features of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries: angst. A quick internet search defines this as ‘a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general’. The painting would have been perfectly at home in Vienna at the time of Sigmund Freud, and appears to visualise the Existentialists’ post-war fear of ‘the Void’: if there is no God, what is the point? Or for that matter, an expression of man’s inhumanity to man, as seen in the holocaust, or again, the cold war fear of nuclear annihilation. It speaks of the inner horror of so many of Francis Bacon’s subjects – even if it isn’t one of the usually acknowledged sources – and, oddly perhaps, it seems to demand to be owned. Both paintings have been stolen – the 1893 version in 1994, and the later one ten years later. And in 2012 the 1895 pastel – the one we have looked at – was sold for $119,922,600 to a private buyer. That’s very nearly 120 million dollars, which at the time was the most ever paid for a single painting.

‘Could only have been painted by a madman!’? It was as much the fear of the implications of this phrase – even before he had written it – that must have inspired his initial experience, and the images that flow from it. This total honesty is what people have found hard to face, and yet, at the same time, it is so totally compelling. What else can have made it an early modernist Mona Lisa, ubiquitous and instantly understood? As we shall see on Monday, things were not always bad for Munch – indeed, the exhibition at the Courtauld, to which the talk is an introduction, ends on a note of positivity. Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that his perceptive work can undoubtedly be a key to our understanding of the human psyche.