I never think of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch as having produced anything other than The Scream. In fact, I never think much of Munch. However, during an early morning FB scroll, Arte Moderna’s post displayed Munch’s On the Bridge.
I was curious. What else had Munch painted? I stumbled on The Sick Child, and I was drawn.
The Sick Child is a group of six paintings completed by the Edvard Munch that record a moment before the death of his older sister, Sophie, from tuberculosis at 15.
In the works, Sophie is typically shown on her deathbed accompanied by a dark-haired, grieving woman sitting by the child’s bedside, holding her hand. Their hands are positioned in the exact center. Some critics have observed that the older woman is more distressed than the child.
In all the painted versions Sophie is sitting in a chair, obviously suffering from pain, propped by a large white pillow, looking towards an ominous curtain. In 1930, Munch wrote to the director of Oslo’s National Gallery: “As for The Sick Child, it was the period I think of as the Age of the Pillow.”
‘It was a breakthrough in my art,’ he later wrote. “Most of what I have done since had its birth in this picture.”
Munch was only 26 when he completed the 1885–86 painting. The first version took over a year to complete; the canvas was worked and reworked almost obsessively. Between 1885 and 1886 Munch painted, scrubbed out, and repainted the image before finally arriving at a product he was satisfied with. I could relate. He later wrote that the first painting was such a difficult struggle that its completion marked a major breakthrough in his art: “I started as an Impressionist, but Impressionism gave me insufficient expression . . . The first break with Impressionism was The Sick Child—I was looking for Expressionism.”
Munch became obsessive with the image. He returned to this deeply traumatic event repeatedly in his art, over six completed oil paintings and many studies in various media, over a period of more than 40 years—a means to record both his feelings of despair and guilt that he had been the one to survive and to confront his feelings of loss for his late sister.
When the 1885–86 original version was first exhibited at the 1886 Autumn Exhibition in Oslo, it was jeered by spectators and drew “a veritable storm of protest and indignation” from critics dismayed at his use of impressionistic techniques, his seeming abandonment of line, and the fact that the painting seemed to be unfinished. Art critic Andreas Aubert wrote: “There is genius in Munch. But there is also the danger that it will go to the dogs . . . For this reason, for Munch’s own sake, I would wish that his Sick Child had been refused . . . In its present form this ‘study'(!) is merely a discarded half-rubbed-out sketch.”
An 1896 lithograph in black, yellow and red was sold in
2001 at Sotheby’s for $250,000.
The Nazis deemed Munch’s paintings “degenerate art” and removed them from German museums, including the 1907 version of The Sick Child. Norwegian art dealer Harald Holst Halvorsen acquired several at auction, including The Sick Child, with the goal of returning them to Norway. In gratitude to Britain for taking him in when he fled the Nazis, the 1907 painting was purchased by Norwegian shipping magnate Thomas Fredrik Olsen in 1939 and donated to the Tate Gallery.
More Munch:
“Without fear and illness,
I could never have accomplished all I have.”
