Edvard Munch, Mann med hest/Mann mit Pferd (Man with horse) 1918, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, gift of Geoff Ainsworth AM 2024 Photo: NGA
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a Norwegian expressionist painter and printmaker who had a huge impact on European art. His 1893 work, The Scream (that exists in a number of versions), is an iconic image in Western art and is well known and frequently parodied in popular culture.
The painting Man with horse, 1918, donated to the National Gallery of Australia by Geoff Ainsworth AM, is a relatively late work in Munch’s career. Although we associate Munch with extreme expressionist works of the wrist-slitting with a rusty razor variety, over half of his very prolific oeuvre consists of landscapes and rural imagery.
While Munch famously wrote, “Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all of my life”, he was a very successful artist who had a considerable following.
In 1916, in part to escape his heavy drinking in the city and a decline in his health, Munch bought the property of Ekely, at Skøyen, on the outskirts of Oslo in Norway, where he lived in relative isolation and embraced the rural setting. In the moods of nature, he saw reflections of his own moods and frequently the skies in his paintings convey his inner torment.
At Ekely, Munch attracted a constant stream of female models who appeared in his paintings and with some of whom he formed brief sexual relationships. However, his most reliable model was his horse, Rousseau, who features in the new painting in Canberra. It is a majestic grey that stands in the foreground, grazing, while a peasant stands next to him. In the green middle distance, peasants are working in the fields with a magnificent red sun in the centre of the sky. The brushwork is bold and energetic – on this rather large canvas that is about a metre-and-a-half across – and the colours are vivid and applied freely.
Munch subscribed to the idea of authenticity as a precious quality in art, where the viewer would tap into the emotional frenzy in which the artist created his work. He wrote: “For in these paintings the artist gives the most priceless thing he has – he gives his soul – he gives his sorrow – he gives his joy – his life’s blood. He gives the man and not the object. These paintings shall – they must – move people – first a few, then more – and in the end, everyone.”
The appeal to unbridled emotionalism and empathy for the artist’s goals by the viewer certainly attracted a sympathetic audience amongst Munch’s contemporaries. He was the champion of what some people later termed ‘heart-felt’ art, where the viewer would embrace the artist’s spiritual intensity.
The National Gallery already holds a handful of Munch’s graphics, including the wonderful lithograph On the waves of love, 1896, that belongs to the artist’s early classical imagery. The newly acquired Man with horse is a fabulous addition to the collection and a coup for the National Gallery. Munch has become one of those artists whose auction prices take his work out of the range of most Australian galleries. The generosity of this donor has enabled this painting to take its place on the walls of the gallery, opposite Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.
Edvard Munch, Mann med hest/Mann mit Pferd (Man with horse) 1918, installation view, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, gift of Geoff Ainsworth AM 2024 Photo: NGA
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