CNN.com - Munch-mysterious: Haunting at MoMA

Ghostly, alien faces populate Edvard Munch's "Evening on Karl Johan Street." This detail is from Bergen Art Museum's 1892 oil on canvas.

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MoMA EXHIBITIONS

Here are some of the exhibitions on view and planned at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Through March 6

'In-Depth: The House of Spiritual Retreat by Emilio Ambasz'

Through March 21

'Take Two, Worlds and Views: Contemporary Art from the Collection'

Through May 8

'Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul'

February 26 through May 22

'Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking'

June 18 through September 11

'Dada'

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- You hear it all around you as you walk through the blond-wood-floored gallery on the Museum of Modern Art's sixth floor: "When did he 'turn?' When did the painting get strange?"

Stand at a relatively small, pretty work, Edvard Munch's "Karl Johan Street in Rain" from 1891. It's a canvas studded with jauntily angled umbrellas and reflective with slick streets, warm-hued buildings, a lush green parkland lining one side of the thoroughfare in the Norwegian capital.

Now look to the left. On a facing wall, just through a doorway, you can see into a display of Munch's "Frieze of Life" paintings. One year later, 1892. "Evening on Karl Johan Street." A much bigger canvas, more than 33 inches tall and 47 inches wide. Opposite direction: looking up, not down, the lane.

This time, a crowd of darkly dressed figures bears down on the viewer's perspective, their faces alien-gaunt, eyes hollow-socket staring. That green strip is now a looming, leaning mass. And a lone, dark figure, his back to the viewer, moves in a pained posture into the distance: This is thought to be Munch himself.

The first major American retrospective in some 30 years on the Norwegian master opened Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art as a devastating and yet beautiful study of a formidable intelligence documenting in a distinctive aesthetic his own relentless sadness, rejection and mental instability.

In addition to that inevitable "when did things go wrong?" issue, MoMA Chief Curator at Large Kynaston McShine has allowed Munch to answer questions about love lost and sisters mourned, and to present a stunning progression of images of himself.

A notably handsome 19-year-old Munch looks at you, a tad suspiciously but with a calm poise and noble jaw line in the self-portrait of 1881 and 1882. By 1916, a starkly worried visage greets you in "Self-Portrait in Bergen," the 53-year-old artist appearing to anticipate only the worst of whatever is in store.

And just two years before the end of his life, you find a ramrod-straight Munch standing "Between the Clock and the Bed," balding and seemingly defiant, his paintings behind him on the wall -- and a grandfather clock standing near with no hands to tell the time.

Munch poured what this exhibition reveals was a vast experience of painful, darkening depression into some of the most famously disturbing imagery of the last century. "Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul" lays out the tale in 87 paintings and some 50 works on paper drawn from Oslo's Munch Museum and other collections.

'The Dance of Life'

"Through his own personal complexity," McShine writes in the catalog for the new exhibition, "fraught with physical illness and emotional instability as well as traumatic family losses, (Munch) turns decisively from the customary appearance of reality to the depiction of psychological urgency."

This is a near-textbook description of the "expressionist" movement in modern art, the creation of work more bent on working the world into the artist's vision than mirroring an everyday look at life.

Born at the time of the U.S. Civil War, in 1863 near Kristiania, as Oslo was called then, Munch experienced tragedy quickly. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5. His sister Sophie died of the same illness when he was 14 -- and she was 15. His father died when Munch was 23. His brother Andreas died nine years later, when Munch was 32.

After a particularly traumatic breakup with a woman, he suffered a gunshot wound to a joint of a finger on his left hand, in 1902. By 1908, he was so deeply disturbed that he was given electroshock treatment.

Romantic happiness continued to elude him in later adulthood, and he lost another sister, Laura, in 1926. By 1930, an eye affliction was hobbling his work. In 1937 Germany, 82 of Munch's works were termed "degenerate," confiscated from museums and sold.

The son of a military doctor died at 80, considered a recluse, on his estate at Ekely. He left some 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, 4,500 drawings and six sculptures to the city of Oslo.

There seem to be few clues to happy moments that might have mitigated the bleak, even menacing view of life McShine has stated at the opening of the show: The first work you see is the turn-of-the-century "The Dance of Life" -- an almost macabre assembly of figures, the artist at the center dancing with a red-dressed temptress as a ghostly innocent woman and a black-dressed deathly one look on.

In this as in so many paintings, you see the moon reflected on the water at Asgardstrand, a bright shaft of golden light under an orb impossibly distant, hopelessly out of reach.

From the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MoMA has borrowed a huge wall panel that once hung in collector Axel Heiberg's home. It depicts a mermaid fully as scary as alluring in that shallow, moon-stabbed water near the forest at Borre.

Another key image here is a large work, almost five feet in height and width, titled "Death in the Sick Room." The 1893 oil glimpses Munch's lost sister Sophie in a chair, tended by the artist, his sister Inger and others. But everyone in the painting is 16 years older than they were at the time of Sophie's death. The scene hasn't moved in their hearts, he seems to be saying; the same heartbreak seems to have inspired another work, 1896's "The Sick Child."

"The Scream" is seen in this show in two woodcut prints, the signature skies roiling and that minimalist-terror figure mouthing its silent shock.

(A bold daylight robbery in August 2004 resulted in the theft of Munch's key painting of "The Scream," and of "Madonna." Suspects in the case have pled not guilty in ongoing court sessions in Norway. The case is still being tried.)

The most pronounced comment McShine and MoMA offer may lie in something more subtle. Munch, while clearly wrestling with insecurity, fear, dread and at times an unstable emotional construct, was keenly aware of himself.

The show ends in a powerful march of self-portraits, each another look in the black-smoked mirror of the artist's soul.

In "Summer Night's Dream (The Voice)" of 1893, a 30-year-old Munch defines an image of eerie isolation near moonlit waters.

As McShine points out, the 1895 "Self-Portrait with Cigarette" shows the mild arrogance of a smart dandy.

Just eight years later, there are no clothes to dress up the image: Munch shows himself stripped, spooked and burning in a "Self-Portrait in Hell" that uses van Gogh-like brushstrokes to fire up a background wall of flame and shadow.

In sum, the artist is seen to have been both driven and, perhaps at times fevered, but also conscious.

No mad outsider, Munch was very much an insider to his own personality distress.

"How difficult it is to determine," the artist wrote in 1929, "what is unauthentic, what is concealed deceit, self-deception, or the fear of showing myself in my true light."

As Reinhold Heller writes in the exhibition's catalog, Munch was cautioning against misinterpretation of his work as being the unwitting creativity of a tortured soul.

The artist did, after all, allow an inscription on "The Scream" to stand in Oslo, reading "Could only have been painted by a madman!"

But even if some of the pain he experienced could be turned deliberately to his work's and legacy's benefit, McShine's exhibition reveals a profundity of unhappiness likely beyond fabrication.

Still mysterious, the man remains forever out of reach and defying assured analysis. MoMA positions Edvard Munch as a complex proponent of his own work, at once eloquent and secretive.

"Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul" is accompanied by a catalog of the exhibition with commentary from McShine, Heller, Patricia Berman, Elizabeth Prelinger and Tina Yarborough.

Munch-mysterious: Haunting at MoMA

First major U.S. look back at the expressionist in 30 years

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'The Dance of Life'