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M U N C H

Puberty, 1894-95
Oil on canvas
59 5/8x43 3/8 inches (151.5x110 cm)
National Gallery, Oslo

This picture repeats a composition of the mid-1880s lost through fire. To what extent it remains faithful to the original can only be guessed, but the style has a good deal in common with the realism of the previous decade. The pose could have been suggested by a Felicien Rops illustration, published in 1886, for Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques. A nude adolescent girl, sitting on her bed in a bare room dimly lit from the left, suddenly becomes aware of the approach of womanhood. Her frontality and centrality give her the quality of an emblem. She deflects her tightly closed legs away from the light, as if to protect them from its probing. Her broad face with its huge almond eyes seems to express a mixture of eagerness, fear and bewilderment; the projecting ears exaggerate the width of the face, making it seem to bulge with expanding cognition. While the top of her head is rounded, the outline of the lower jaw and chin is a little more pointed, and this configuration is amplified and exaggerated in the curve of the shoulders and the arms pointing downward and crossed over the genital area, at once both indicating and concealing. Thus mind and sex appear joined. Behind her rises a large amorphous shadow that seems to emanate from her private region. Such shadows were sometimes used by Munch to depict a kind of sinister alter ego, varying in shape and import with the needs of the subject. The source of the idea was probably Manet's Absinthe Drinker. In the case of Puberty the pear-shaped shadow may allude to the uterus, of whose function the girl has now become conscious.

For Munch Puberty was a step into new territory. In choosing such a subject he must have been influenced by the intense concern of Jaeger and his circle with sexual ethics. As in The Sick Child he achieves his effect by expressionistic modifications of naturalism. While main- taining a basically realistic structure he aims at 'internal' realism instead of ex- ternal. With the aid of his neurotic sensibility he intuitively understands the thoughts and feelings of those he depicts, and by taking liberties with color, form and atmosphere, allows them to qualify outer appearances. But whereas The Sick Child, for all its expressionism, conforms to the accepted iconography of realism, Puberty deals with a subject rarely before treated in art. Moreover it was, in its original version, his first truly symbolic subject, in the sense of representing something more abstract than what is shown. The Sick Child contains symbols of sickness but is not in itself symbolic; it is the sick child, not 'childhood sickness.'

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