Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirshner both hit their stride as visual artists during the rise of the Expressionist art movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were both working in Germany in the early 1900s, and they both did woodcuts and heavily inked prints. There is no end of similarities one could draw between their lives, their work and their natural affinity for Expressionism.
The connection that the Yale University Art Gallery wants to push in its extraordinary exhibit “ Munch and Kirshner: Anxiety and Expression ,” on display through June 23, is the artists’ mental health. They both struggled with depression, had substance abuse issues and were concerned with the nationalist movements in Europe that led to the two World Wars. They were emblematic of an age when psychoanalysis was just developing as a practice and art was expanding in previously unimagined new directions.
The brief description of the show states both Munch and Kirshner “experienced existential crises,” a term that certainly applies but was not in common use until several decades after they died. The works in this show are gloriously gloomy, brilliant expressions of deep disenchantment and distrust in modern society. There is a beauty to many of them, but it’s a warped, stark raving beauty.
Many of the artworks depict women, but they’re angular or prostrate or expressionless or diseased. Munch’s “The Scream,” one of the best-known images in the history of art, i.