Edvard Munch's Alpha and Omega

Exhibition
18 Aug – 7 Oct 1984

About

The Alpha and Omega portfolio contains eighteen main images, two introductory vignettes, a title page and a table of contents which were printed lithographically, and two sheets of text in Norwegian and French. The images were first drawn on paper with greasy crayon, then transferred to stone and printed in Copenhagen in 1908-09. The declared size of the first edition was fifty impressions, but it appears that subsequent editions and separate impressions were printed, so the total number of impressions is closer to 150.

Edvard Munch completed Alpha and Omega while recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1908-09. Alcoholism and personal problems had affected his mental stability and he sought prolonged treatment at a sanitorium in Copenhagen where his doctor friend encouraged his creative efforts.

The prints and the related story form a pessimistic parable of the world's first two human inhabitants. They return to the themes of sexual attraction, separation and death which Munch first formulated iconographically in his Frieze of Life paintings from the early 1890s and which continued to obsess him throughout his working life. He painted and exhibited the first of these works in 1893, conceiving them as a series in which the universal themes of love and death were interwoven within a narrative. Key works comprising the 1893 sequencewere The voice, The kiss, Vampire, Madonna, Melancholy and The scream, each of which contained important ideas and motifs that were endlessly reworked and rephrased in his subsequent paintings and prints.

The Alpha and Omega portfolio recalls several of the Frieze of Life motifs. The introductory vignette, sometimes known as the Poisonous flower, depicts three women’s heads rearing from a prickly plant and relates to his famous painting The three stages of woman of 1894. The young lovers in Moonrise gazing longingly across the sea at the dancing reflection of the phallic moon return to the idea of sexual awakening expressed in The voice, The solitary ones, 1895, and The dance of life, 1900.

Alpha’s despair reworks Munch’s famous motifs of anxiety and fear expressed in The scream. The earlier painting and the subsequent print of 1895 showed a screaming, shrinking figure in the foreground, a sharp vertiginous perspective and two silhouetted figures in the background beneath a sinuously striped sky. In Alpha's despair the screaming figure is naked and male, confronting the viewer directly with an expression of terror. He is suspended above an undulating shoreline which provides the perspectival viewpoint. Sky, sea and earth are drawn with the same nervous, wavy line which serves to unite the composition visually and to heighten its emotional expression. The prints in the Alpha and Omega suite are all drawn with an agitated sketchy line and the intensity of expression in Munch's earlier works is replaced here by a greater degree of freedom and openness in execution.

Munch satirized his former bohemian friends by portraying them as the mongrel progeny of Omega's promiscuous relationships with the animals. He was particularly pleased with their accuracy and noted mischievously to a friend, 'I couldn't help making portraits of my enemies in the various animal figures.' He regarded the Alpha and Omega portfolio as a major achievement, declaring 'This is my best work. I think it is the most complete I have done...’

Stephen Coppel
Department of International Prints and Illustrated Books
June 1984

We are particularly grateful to His Excellency, Mr Torleiv Anda, the Norwegian Ambassador, for arranging this loan.

The content on this page is sourced from: National Gallery of Australia. Edvard Munch's Alpha and Omega. Exhibition Booklet, 1984.

EDVARD MUNCH biography

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is Norway's most famous artist. He is best known for the powerful expression of personal emotions in his painting and printmaking, particularly his responses to love and death. Munch's expression of these subjective experiences is drawn partly from events in his own life and partly from the literary concerns of his contemporaries.

Munch was the son of a military doctor of stern puritanical outlook who ran his practice in the poor quarter of Oslo, the principal city of Norway then called Kristiania. Munch's childhood and youth were overshadowed by illness and death in the family. His mother died from tuberculosis after childbirth when Munch was five and his beloved eldest sister died during his early adolescence. Munch recollected in later life the grim years of childhood:

'I was born into this world dying... Illness, madness and death were the black angels who guarded my cradle and have since accompanied me throughout my life . . . At an early age I got to know the misery and dangers of this life on earth, and of life after death, of eternal torments in Hell that awaited the children of sin.’

With his decision in late adolescence to become an artist, Munch joined a small circle of artists and writers who formed Oslo's bohemian world. Here he encountered individuals who attacked the traditional pillars of the community, namely the state, religion and the family. Munch's experience of bohemian life with its hedonistic pursuit of free love and its advocacy of free thinking conflicted with his strict religious upbringing under his father's eye.

While Munch was in Paris studying on a state scholarship in 1889 his father died. Reflecting on his death at Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, Munch decided that henceforth emotions would become the subject of his art. As he recorded in his diary on New Year's Eve 1889:

'No longer would interiors, people who only read and knit, be painted. There should rather be living people breathing and feeling, suffering and loving. I feel I have to do this. It would be so simple. The flesh would take on form and the colours come to life.'

In vowing to give visual expression to subjective experiences Munch repudiated the dominant avant-garde styles of Impressionism and Realism which were concerned with the depiction of the observable external world. He sought his inspiration instead by turning his eye inwards and contemplating his past. 'I paint', he declared, 'not what I see, but what I saw.' His subject, in effect, became himself. As he confided in later life, 'My art has been a confession.'

Munch took a strong interest in the literary developments of his day, particularly the innovations in drama of his great Scandinavian compatriots, Ibsen and Strindberg, both of whom Munch knew personally and at times admired. His contact with them and the literary bohemian circle in Berlin of the 1890s provided him with sources for his work and encouraged his own writing. Ibsen and Strindberg, too, were preoccupied with probing the mysteries of love and death and analysing the relationships between men and women. The Polish writer and critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who edited the first book on Munch in 1894, published perceptive interpretations of his work and encouraged his expression of the unconscious impulses in human behaviour.

In addition to his revealing diaries and letters, Munch wrote many prose poems, a play and other pieces, most of which are still unpublished. He wrote the Alpha and Omega story to accompany the series of prints he made in 1908–1909. The story and the prints were begun at a time when Munch was filled with despair at his unhappy relationships with women and when his problems with alcohol had become self-destructive.

Alpha and Omega by Edvard Munch:
Alpha and Omega were the first human beings on the island. Alpha lay in the grass, asleep and dreaming, when Omega approached, caught sight of him, and grew inquisitive. Omega broke off the stem of a fern and tickled him, so that he woke up.
Alpha loved Omega; in the evenings they would sit, nestling close to each other, looking at the golden pillar of moonlight rocking and bobbing up and down in the waters around the island.
They walked into the forest, where there were many strange animals and plants. In the forest it was strangely dark, but there were also many beautiful little flowers. Once, when Omega was frightened, she threw her arms violently around Alpha. There were many days of unbroken sunshine on the island.
One day Omega was lying outside the forest in the sunshine; Alpha was sitting inside the forest in the shade. Then a huge cloud rose out of the sea, spreading across the sky and casting its shadow across the island.
Alpha called out to Omega, but Omega heard nothing. Alpha then discovered that Omega was holding the head of a serpent between her hands and was staring at its twinkling eyes. It was a large serpent which had crawled up between the ferns and along her body. But all of a sudden rain came pouring out of the sky and Alpha and Omega were frightened.
One day, when Alpha meets the serpent on the ground, he fights with it and kills it, while Omega looks on at a distance.
One day Omega met the bear. She trembled when she felt the bear's soft fur against her body. When she placed her arm about the bear's neck, it sank deep into the fur.
Omega comes across a hyena poet with a tousled coat. Her customary words of endearment fall on deaf ears; she plaits a laurel wreath with her soft little hands, and as she turns her sweet face up affectionately towards his bitter head, she crowns him.
The tiger drew its wild and terrible head towards Omega's pretty little face. Omega was not frightened; she let her little hand rest in the tiger's maw, caressing his teeth.
When the tiger meets the bear on his road, he smells Omega's scent, the scent of pale apple-blossom, which Omega loves most of all blossoms and which she kisses every morning when the sun rises. The tiger and the bear fought and tore each other to pieces.
Just as on a chessboard, which had not been invented in those days, the position of the pieces suddenly changes; Omega clings to Alpha. Inquisitively and uncomprehendingly the animals stretch out their necks and watch the game.
Omega's eyes would change; on ordinary days they were pale-blue, but when she looked at her lovers they became black with flecks of carmine and occasionally she covered her mouth with a flower.
Omega's mood would change; one day Alpha saw her sitting by the river, kissing a donkey which was lying in her lap. Then Alpha fetched the ostrich and snuggled up to its neck but Omega did not look up from her favourite preoccupation of kissing.
Omega was tired and sad because she was unable to possess all the animals on the island. She sat down in the grass and sobbed violently. Then she rose to her feet and ran frenziedly round the island until she met the pig. She kneels down and covers her body with her long black hair and she and the pig look at each other.
Omega was bored; one night, when the golden column of the moon was rocking on the water, she escaped on the back of a fallow-deer across the sea to the pale-green land lying beneath the moon. Alpha was again alone on the island.
One day her children came to him; a new generation had grown up on the island. They gathered round Alpha, whom they called their father. There were small pigs, small serpents, small monkeys, and small beasts of prey and other human mongrels. He despaired.
He ran along the seashore; the sky and the sea became coloured with blood. He heard screams in the air and put his hands to his ears. The earth, the sky and the sea trembled and he felt great fear.
One day the fallow-deer brought Omega back. Alpha sits on the shore and she comes towards him. Alpha felt the blood throbbing in his ears and his muscles swelling in his body and he struck Omega until she died. When he bent over her dead body and saw her face he was terrified at her expression. It was the same expression she had worn on the occasion in the forest when he loved her most.
While he was still looking at her Alpha was attacked from behind by all her children and the animals of the island, who tore him to pieces.
The new generation filled the island.

Alpha and Omega is translated from the original Norwegian with the kind help of Mrs Bente Angell-Hansen of the Norwegian Embassy, Canberra. Munch's changes of grammatical tense have generally been retained.

About

EDVARD MUNCH biography

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