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M U N C H

Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1892
Oil on canvas
331/4 X 47 5/8 inches (84.5x121 cm)
Rasmus Meyer Collection, Bergen

Depicting the same street a year or two later, looking in the opposite direction, and using a related pattern-and-perspective composition. Munch could hardly have produced a painting less like his Spring Day. He now paints in a style probably influenced by Gauguin and his followers, with simplified forms, positive lines and relatively flat areas of arbitrary color. The life of the street changes from happiness to horror. On the pavement a mass of middle-class people with dehumanized, zombie-like faces, reminiscent of the masks of the Belgian painter James Ensor, glide mechanically toward us. Although they are packed tightly, there is no communication among them; they are a lonely crowd. Out in the roadway a solitary man walks in the opposite direction, against the subhuman stream. Traditionally, and almost certainly correctly, he is identified as the artist himself. In addition to acrophobia, Munch suffered from agoraphobia; when walking he is said to have preferred to stay close to buildings. In the distance in front of him is the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, its windows lit up by ghostly lights like the eyes of some fearful presence. The scene appears to represent the horrible dilemma life presents to a sensi tive individual like Munch, doomed to choose between the terror of the crowd, in which humanity is crushed, and the terror of loneliness in open spaces. Whether the Storting is to be taken as the political emblem or legislative guardian of such alienating conditions is a moot point.

The composition recalls a big picture by Krohg, The Struggle for Existence. A preliminary sketch for Evening on Karl Johan Street is even closer to Krohg's picture. Painted in a style of objective realism, the latter shows a crowd of poor people in winter receiving food from a bakery used as a welfare center, while a well-fed official-looking man, possibly a policeman or a soldier, in any case a representative of the prosperous establishment, struts alone down the middle of the street. Munch has transformed this idea in a way revealing both his debt to and difference from his teacher. Whereas Krohg shows us the material deprivation of a proletarian crowd in opposition to its successful avoidance by an isolated individual of a different class, Munch gives us the spiritual deprivation of a middle-class crowd in opposition to an unsuccessful attempt to avoid it by an isolated individual of the same class.

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