PHILOSOPHIC AND ART ANALYSIS OF PICTORIAL WORKS BY E. MUNCH: MELANCHOLY, SEPARATION, THE DANCE OF LIFE

Abstract

The oeuvre of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was influenced by the major tenets of Symbolism of the end of the XIX century and German Expressionism of the beginning of the XX century, which allowed the painter to express the depths of meaning of life through visual signs. The objective of our research is to determine the artistic concept of the paintings “Melancholy”, “Separation”, “The Dance of Life” by Edvard Munch as representants of his major cycle of works “The Frieze of Life”. The methodology of the research includes theoretic investigation of historiographic facts of the creative career of the painter, and description of the selected works, based on the methodic analysis of visual signs in their material, index and symbolic statuses. Methodic analysis of the pictorial works by Edvard Munch allowed us to formulate the artistic concept of each of the works under analysis. The existential emotion of melancholy is represented by means of sign-symbolic forms of the artistic image of a man, who is sitting on the edge of the shoreline, immersed in his thought. We found that this emotion is connected with self-analysis and the person’s trying to understand the development of his spiritual life. The artistic image of the painting “Separation” by Edvard Munch represents the spiritual understanding by a person of the basics of the sensual world (love, birth, death), leading to the inevitable separation as the vital stage of transition to the new level of development. The painting “The Dance of Life” completes the cycle “The Frieze of Life”, its artistic image generalizes the conceptual program of the whole cycle: life of a person, like nature, is, on the whole, influenced by the rhythm of its cyclic development with its necessary stages of youth, maturity, old age and death.