First of all, perhaps, because we all have experience of drawing. Tubes of oil paint and printing ink are the province of artists, while pencils and crayons are something all of us relate to personally. A quickly sketched drawing also has its own special appeal to the imagination; we have to fill in more ourselves, participate in the creative process in a different way than with a meticulously detailed painting. And because we ourselves must complete the picture over and over again before our inner eye, the experience differs each time, as our mood dictates.

Even for the anti-academic young artists in Kristiania during the 1880s, drawing continued to be the building block of art – as it had been since the Renaissance, and as it would continue to be at least far into the twentieth century. Studies of heads, anatomy drawings, landscape sketches, and exercises in perspective – all of this, they diligently filled their sketchbooks and drawing pads with. They knew that they had to master the pencil, pen and charcoal stick before they could work magic with the brush.

Edvard Munch is part of this continuous tradition. Drawing is the very foundation of his art; and he drew incessantly and almost anywhere; on journeys, in cafés, at the music hall, out-of-doors, at home and – of course – in his studio. He drew absolutely everything; animals, nature, architecture, but – like the Renaissance artists – primarily people. Family and friends, children and workers, burghers and Bohemians, mermaids and madonnas.

There are so many things one can draw with

The large repertoire of drawing materials and instruments provides great scope for varied technique. The thin, precise strokes of the pencil (Ashes, MM.T.00348) make a completely different impression from charcoal’s rough thick ones (Consolation, MM.T.02458). Yet both provide scope for values and planes in which the stroke almost vanishes. Their traces on the paper can also easily be removed, completely or partially, if one is dissatisfied with the result. The pen, by contrast, is uncompromising. Once it has touched the paper, the stroke remains there like an exclamation mark (The Scream, MM.T.00255). Black or Indian ink on white paper produces maximum contrast between medium and material, and thus the most characteristic graphic expression. Then there are crayon and coloured pencil, which add yet another dimension to the drawing, yet without the colour casting any doubt on the fact that this is drawing (Self-portrait with Fat Woman, MM.T.01350). Pastel, meanwhile, sometimes approaches painting in expression (Interior with Family Members Sleeping, MM.T.02299-recto) and is also occasionally catalogued as painting. What of the brush? Are watercolours or gouaches drawing or painting? There is no doubt a case for both. That the brush can be used as a drawing implement is obvious; it provides scope for a pronounced stroke of varying thickness (The Kiss, MM.T.00421). But it can also be used “painterly”, to cover large areas with colour (Mystical Shore, MM.T.02387). Yet a characteristic of most drawings is their linear nature; the stroke defines the shape and to a great extent carries the expression.

There is so much one can draw

There are almost no limits to the number of categories and subcategories drawings can be divided and subdivided into, if one wishes to go into great detail. For simplicity’s sake, we will confine ourselves here to three main categories: sketches, studies and independent works of art. It is self-evident that there are gliding transitions between all these.

Sketches are rapid notations to capture a motif or an idea. They can be “snapshots”, before the camera became common property – or after, for those who want more personal souvenirs of journeys than are offered by the lens. The artist sees a detail or a motif that interests him, without necessarily planning a completed work of art. Just as actors observe the people around them, on the lookout for gestures they can use, the fine artist stores up a supply of motifs and visual ideas. Ideas can also suddenly pop up before the inner eye. On such occasions what counts is to capture the essential on paper with simple, rapid strokes, before the idea vanishes.

Sketchbooks, Henri Focillon writes, are “the diary of the human hand”.¹ The Munch Museum has about 170 of Munch’s sketchbooks. Particularly as a young artist, he eagerly filled these books with unpretentious drawings of passing moments from his many journeys – particular landscapes and buildings, occasional animals, endless people in various activities; at the billiard table, sitting in cafés, conversing, hiking (On the Steamboat Deck, MM.T.00125-33-recto). The sketchbooks enable us to look at the artist’s cards, to participate as it were in the creative process itself. It is fascinating to see how the original impulse for an idea for a picture first manifests itself, is developed, influenced by other ideas, finally pointing clearly towards what we know as the “finished” result. Or – and this can be just as interesting – the process can come to a halt, become bogged down, end up in a blind alley.

Studies have a different purpose from sketches; here, the artist concentrates on special details or limited motifs and draws them, often repeatedly, in order to get to know them, “get them into the hand”. Nude studies are a good example; representing the human body has been important for most artists, and through the studies the artist perfects his skills, as well as laying up a store of drawings that may come in useful later. Hundreds of nude drawings show that, to the very last, Munch was eager to increase his artistic mastery of the human body. Standing Nude with Stick, MM.T.01170, drawn when he was studying under Léon Bonnat, is a typical study.

Sketches and studies can be independent works or can be related to completed works of art. They are then regarded as preparatory works for the latter, the artist trying out compositional ideas, moving elements around. Should the person turn his or her head to the right or the left? Is that tree necessary, or is it in the way? MM.T.00126-37-verso is a preparatory study for the painting The Woman of 1894 (Woll M 362). The light and the dark woman have found their form, whereas the naked woman in the middle is tentatively portrayed seated. The male figure on the right is also unresolved. In MM.T.02762 he is getting closer to the final composition; here he has “raised up” the woman in the middle and found the correct expression for the man. But he portrays the dark woman holding a man’s severed head, a detail he retained in one of the graphic versions of this motif but left out of the painting.

The “independent work of art” is a problematical concept where drawings are concerned. True, there are artists who have chosen drawing as their favoured means of expression, who exhibit drawings as others do paintings or prints. But what about painters and printmakers? How many completed works of art are there among the Munch Museum’s approx. 7,500 drawings? According to Johan H. Langaard and Reidar Revold, Munch did not ascribe any great artistic value to his drawings in their own right.² This is a debatable assertion, but the question is also whether the artist’s intention is the only criterion for whether a work or art is completed or not. Munch hardly considered Horse on Construction Site (MM.T.02426) as “completed”; it was intended as a preparatory work for the Oslo City Hall decorations for which he hoped to receive the commission. However, this was not how events turned out. And when there is no “end result”, is the term “preparatory work” appropriate? Horse on Construction Site is de facto the final link in an artistic process, it is a thoroughly prepared drawing with high artistic merit in its own right. Is that not enough to qualify it as an “independent work of art”?

Edvard Munch allowed few people into his life. After he moved to Ekely in 1916, even friends and relatives were seldom guests in his home. Posterity has nevertheless been given the opportunity to become better acquainted with him than is the case with many other names in the history of art. In his bequest to the city of Oslo, besides paintings and prints, we also find texts – some 10,000 typewritten pages in transcript – and some 7,500 drawings. The texts consist of diary notes, letters, autobiographical fragments and views on life and art, which give us valuable insight into Munch as an individual. The drawings in the Munch Museum’s collection, as well as the more than six hundred in other collections, form an important contribution to our picture of Munch the artist.

“You see, I never use the wastepaper basket. I have used my suitcases –”, wrote Munch to his friend Christian Gierløff. Although many drawings did find their way into the wastepaper basket or the wood-burning stove or were otherwise lost, he does not appear to have exerted any kind of self-censorship. He kept everything from the merest doodles to the most accomplished drawings. And there was an ulterior motive in his leaving everything to posterity; as he said to Gierløff:

“It will only become really interesting … when the whole lot can be seen in context. And compared – all the studies and all the sketches with the finished stuff.”³

And this was not a realisation that came to him late on in his career; already at his first large exhibition, his solo exhibition in Kristiania in 1889, Munch showed 46 drawings in addition to the paintings. It may be assumed that a major part of these were, specifically, preparatory works for the paintings, so that the public would be able to follow the process and see that the paintings were the end product of systematic work. Many of his subsequent exhibitions also had a significant element of drawings.

Though diverse, most of the drawings have one thing in common; they are informal, impulsive, relaxed. If it is really true that Munch never regarded the drawings as completed, independent works of art, this meant that he could to a much greater extent be himself in the drawings. They were not intended to be presented to a critical public; he did not need to prove anything. And it was Munch’s strength that he managed to retain the impulsive, the “unfinished” quality in his paintings too, a strength that was actually seen as a major defect by his contemporaries. Even today, one can catch oneself thinking that Munch was the genius who, in the heated inspiration of the moment, launched himself onto the canvas and completed the picture then and there. The drawings show with the utmost clarity that that was not the case. This certainly does not mean that he was uninvolved emotionally in the actual process of painting or printmaking. There is ample confirmation that he was. Yet by that stage his work had already been thoroughly prepared in advance, in head, heart and hand.

Magne Bruteig

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Notes

1 Henri Focillon: Vie des formes, Paris 1936.

2 Johan H. Langaard and Reidar Revold: Edvard Munch som tegner, Kunsten i dag, Oslo 1958.

The authors suggest here that after the 1890s Munch very seldom exhibited drawings. Yet we know that after 1900 he took part in at least twenty exhibitions of sometimes extensive selections of drawings, probably more. This practice does not square well with the artist’s alleged disdain for their artistic quality.

3 Christian Gierløff: Edvard Munch selv. Gyldendal, Oslo 1953, p. 268.