Edvard Munch

What failed

He showed The Sick Child at the Christiania Autumn Exhibition in 1886, under the title Study. It was hung in a prominent position near the entrance and it was met with both outrage and acclaim: spectators jeered it and critics produced what one account calls a veritable storm of protest and indignation, while others argued that seen from a distance it was a great work of art. Gustav Wentzel and the other young realists encircled him and called him a madman. In December 1889 his father died and left the family destitute; Munch returned home and arranged a large loan from a wealthy Norwegian collector when wealthy relatives would not help, and carried the family from then on. In 1892 Adelsteen Normann invited him, on behalf of the Berlin artists' society, to mount its first one-man exhibition; in November a general meeting voted by a majority to close it and it came down after one week. Twenty-three members had demanded the show be terminated out of reverence for art, the vote was 120 to 105, and about eighty members walked out in protest at the treatment of an invited guest. (Sources give the society's name as both the Union and the Association of Berlin Artists.) In October 1895, after The Scream and the rest of the Blomqvist show were attacked, the Students' Association in Kristiania held a debate evening at which the medical student Johan Scharffenberg questioned his mental state. In the autumn of 1908 his anxiety, drinking and brawling became acute and he entered Daniel Jacobson's clinic in Copenhagen, returning to Norway in 1909. In 1911 the university jury accepted neither his designs for the Aula nor Emanuel Vigeland's, and the hall was hung with yellow silk wallpaper for the centenary instead.

What happened next

The Berlin closure worked in his favour: he sent the same exhibition on a profitable tour of seven other German venues. The press name for the scandal, the Munch Affair, stuck, and the Berlinische Galerie describes that week as the beginning of Modernism in Berlin. Norway had already started buying him: the National Gallery bought its first Munch, Night in Nice, out of the 1891 autumn exhibition, when he was twenty-seven. The whole Frieze of Life was shown together at the Berlin Secession in 1902. He was made a Knight of the Order of St Olav in 1908, the year he entered the clinic. In 1912 the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne gave him a room of his own, a distinction the Wallraf-Richartz Museum says went to no other living artist apart from Picasso and Signac. After lobbying and touring his rejected Aula drafts, he was given the commission in 1914 and the paintings were mounted in 1916; they are still there. He had a room permanently dedicated to his work at the National Gallery by 1924, and in 1927 the gallery was cleared completely to hold the biggest exhibition of his work yet, seen by more than thirty thousand people. In 1937 the Nazis seized eighty-two of his works from German collections as degenerate art. He died at Ekely in January 1944.

The point

The record shows recognition and rejection running alongside each other rather than one following the other. Norway's National Gallery bought a Munch in 1891, when he was twenty-seven, and had given him a permanently dedicated room by 1924, across the same decades in which a members' vote took a show off the wall in Berlin and a university jury preferred yellow silk wallpaper to his designs. The 1892 closure that reads as the worst moment is the one a Berlin museum now describes as the arrival of modern art in the city. The setbacks did not stop once the recognition began: he lost the Aula competition at forty-seven and had eighty-two pictures pulled out of German collections at seventy-three. Two things in the usual telling are thinner than they sound. The Munch Affair is told as the German art establishment banning him; the documented event is a society that had itself invited him splitting 120 to 105 over one exhibition, with about eighty members walking out in protest at the treatment of an invited guest. And the closure is often credited with producing the Berlin Secession: the Secession's own history says Munch's supporters in 1892 were not yet organised enough to leave the academy's exhibition system, and the break came in 1898, after the jury of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition rejected a landscape by Walter Leistikow. The 1886 reception was a split rather than a rout: the painting was hung in a prominent position near the entrance, and the National Museum records it as meeting both outrage and acclaim.