Edvard Munch / Tracey Emin / Marlene Dumas
I.
I have a highly intelligent and sensitive friend who loves the work of Norwegian sjelemaler Edvard Munch (1863-1944).
Essentially, that's because Munch was an artist who didn't attempt to objectively capture the world, so much as distort its reality in terms of his own inner turmoil via non-naturalistic colours and swirling, dramatic brush strokes. That's very much his cup of tea.
What's more, Munch gave visual form and expression to a variety of mostly negative emotions - anxiety, loneliness, sorrow, fear, etc. - and that also appeals to my friend as he is psychologically predisposed to exploring (and manipulating) such feelings as a self-confessed dark empath [1].
What irritates me about this particular friend, however, is not his focus on the more morbid, melancholic, and miserable aspects of the human experience - believing these things to be far more profound and poetic than simple happiness - but his refusal to see how Munch has had a (somewhat surprising) but crucial influence on several contemporary female artists, including two that I would like to briefly discuss here: Tracey Emin and Marlene Dumas.
II.
British artist, Tracey Emin, is probably the most obvious starting point for a post of this kind.
For Dame Tracey openly credits the uncompromising expressionist style of Munch as a formative influence from an early age. If she has adored Bowie for an even longer period of time - and perhaps with an even greater degree of passion - Munch nevertheless comes a close second, Emin confessing that she has been "totally, madly in love" with him and his work since she was seventeen [2].
This devotion culminated in 1998, when Emin created a haunting work titled Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children.
In this short Super 8 film, the artist lies naked in a foetal position on a jetty in Åsgårdstrand, Norway, close to Munch's former home and a location central to many of his paintings, thereby explicitly linking her own personal trauma - she had undergone two abortions in the early 1990s - directly to his artwork [3].
The piece featured in the Royal Academy exhibition Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul (18 May - 1 August 2021) [4].
The exhibition also included a significant number of Emin's paintings - some displayed for the first time - hung alongside a selection of Munch's oils and watercolours. When seen together, "the dark territories and raw emotions that both artists navigate" create a "moving exploration of grief, loss and longing" [5].
More recently, Emin curated the group exhibition Crossing Into Darkness (18 Jan - 12 April, 2026) at the Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate [6], which again featured works by Edvard Munch. Emin provides an excellent description of this exhibition:
"Crossing Into Darkness brings together a group of artists whose works confront the darkness inherent in human experience, not as something to be feared but as a necessary threshold toward renewal. In times marked by upheaval and uncertainty, this journey feels both universal and deeply personal." [7]
She continues (in clichéd quasi-religious language that I find problematic, to say the least, even if my friend mentioned earlier enthusiastically gobbles up this sort of guff):
"I feel that we have to cross into darkness to find light. I’d like this show to be very emotionally immersive and people to feel the strength and vibrations within the works. I want people to know that art isn't just something that you look at. That it has a deeper purpose and can penetrate all souls." [8]
One of the twenty or so artists contributing to this project is the South African born painter (now based in Amsterdam) Marlene Dumas ... [9]
III.
Dumas - whose work I have previously discussed on Torpedo the Ark [10] - is another artist who might be described as a daughter of Munch, although she's less of a daddy's girl than Emin.
In other words, her relationship with Munch isn't quite so intense and intimate and she enters into a more intellectual and technical dialogue with the latter, although, like Emin, she is known for her expressive, psychologically charged works exploring themes of human vulnerability and sexuality [11].
For Dumas, Munch is primarily a modern storyteller who used paint to convey emotion - including love and passion, not just angst - rather than merely represent forms. And like him, she also likes to think her canvases have a tale to tell, but, where Munch uses swirling, heavy oil paint, Dumas often employs a ghostly, ink-wash technique.
This can clearly be seen in her 2018-2019 exhibition, Moonrise: Marlene Dumas & Edvard Munch, at the Munch Museum, in Oslo. By placing her washed-out pictures alongside his more vibrant oils, she obliges us to see Munch as a direct ancestor to the way contemporary artists still struggle to capture the shame and desire of being human.
Interestingly, one of the things Dumas was keen to do in this show, was deconstruct some of the more dated (and arguably misogynistic) myths and stereotypes of womanhood that Munch reinforced in his works such as Vampire (1893) - a picture Dumas admits she found particularly problematic [12].
And that does make one wonder quite why it is so many female artists - not just Emin and Dumas, but also Louise Bourgeois and Maria Lassnig, for example - seem so attracted to Munch and ready to buy into his romantic mythos.
It's a question addressed by the art historian Patricia Berman ... [13]
IV.
Berman argues that despite being "one of modern art's foundational misogynists", Munch's willingness to reveal his more feminine side and paint his pain has ironically made him a spiritual mentor to "generations of women who explore the body and memory, and the body as memory, in their art".
Munch, it is said by his female champions, displays "a vulnerability rarely acknowledged by a man" and has an empathy with women that allows him to intuitively understand something of their inner life; Munch is seen as an ally or, as Emin once said, a friend in art.
Obviously, I smiled when reading this; doesn't Tracey know that not only must we find it within our hearts to love our enemies, but also learn how to hate our friends [14] - and that empathy comes in various shades, some of which - as we noted earlier - are very dark indeed?
Notes
[1] A dark empath is a term coined in a research paper published in 2021 by Nadja Heym and her colleagues to describe a more devious (and arguably more dangerous) form of narcissist; one who is highly attuned to another person's thoughts and feelings and uses this skill in order to manipulate and further their own goals.
The study concluded that being empathic doesn't necessarily make someone a good human being - especially when, beneath their charm and intelligence, they also harbour aggressive psychopathic tendencies.
See Nadja Heyem et al, 'The Dark Empath: Characterising dark traits in the presence of empathy', in the journal Personality and Individual Differences Vol. 169 (Feb 2021). It can be downloaded as a pdf from the Nottingham Trent University website click here.
[2] See the video posted on the Royal Academy YouTube channel (6 Dec 2020) in which Emin introduces a carefully considered selection of Munch's paintings alongside her own works in the exhibition Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul (18 May - 1 August 2021): click here.
[3] My favourite description of this work is by Patricia Berman (see note 13 below):
"The dreamy setting of water, sky and the artist's coiled naked body is abruptly shattered by a horrific scream that seems to go on forever. Although the film is only one minute long, the scream enters and shakes you to your very core, resonating like an afterimage. It calls forth Munch's most famous motif, The Scream, animating it and reinventing it."
[4] For details of the exhibition, an image gallery, further reading, and a virtual tour, please visit the RA website: click here.
[5] I'm quoting here from the press release for the Royal Academy exhibition, which can also be found on the website via the above link.
[6] For details of the exhibition, etc., please visit the Carl Freedman Gallery website: click here.
[7] Tracey Emin, quoted on the Carl Freedman Gallery website linked to above.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Dumas's inclusion in the exhibition is titled Utøya (2018-23); a medium-sized oil painting that deals with memory and tragedy, darkness and rebirth. This work can be viewed on the Frith Street Gallery website: click here.
[10] See the post titled 'Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas' (13 Nov 2024): click here.
[11] If perhaps less intimate and intense, Dumas's relationship with Munch is just as long-standing as Emin's. She first encountered the astonishing lithograph series presenting his version of the creation myth - Alfa og Omega (1908-09) - at the Munch Museum in 1981, for example; an experience she later documented in her book, Omega's Eyes: Marlene Dumas on Edvard Munch (2019).
For Dumas, the great thing about Munch's work is its honesty and directness - particularly when it comes to the portrayal of bodies; he was not just concerned with psychological states, but with the physical character of touch and physical sensation (of what it feels like to kiss or to cry).
[12] Munch was obsessed with the idea of the femme fatale and explored this theme throughout the 1890s, using the vampire archetype to depict women as dangerous and seductive creatures who would not only break hearts but drain men of their life-force (presumably he was projecting his own male anxieties and sexual fantasies).
See, for example, the iconic Symbolist painting Vampire (1893) - originally titled 'Love and Pain' [Kjærligkeit og Smerte] - which depicts a red-haired woman kissing (and/or biting) a man's neck: click here.
[13] See Patricia Berman, 'Munch's influence on women artists', RA Magazine (Autumn 2020) and available on the Royal Academy website (20 Oct 2020): click here. Berman is a Professor of Art at Wellesley College, Massachusetts and an expert in Scandinavian art. All quotes in section IV of this post are taken from this essay (as is the quote used in note 3 above).
[14] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Bestowing Virtue' (3).
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