The Ambiguity of Edvard Munch

AI Generated Art Versus the Inner Pictures of the Soul

Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895 by Edvard Munch

I remember standing in front of Munch's Man in the Cabbage Field, baffled that I felt anything at all. A cabbage field? Really? But there it was, a quiet violence. As if dusk had conspired with the soil to confess something no human should hear.

In an age of infinite, synthetic AI generated images, what can we still learn from the slow, difficult work of a human hand that trembled as it painted? Standing before a Munch, one feels an answer.

There is a moment when the ordinary lurches into the sublime, and it vanishes before you can name it. Munch grasped this dislocation intimately. The cabbage field becomes something quieter, more private, like a path behind the house you forgot was there. There is a longing in this painting of the cabbage field, a longing to disappear and become one with the world. Munch once wrote,

“Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.”

That insight is a framework. A way of seeing that unsettles as much as it reveals. The cabbage field aches because it contains both earth and spirit. It is resignation, an ache rendered in green and orange.

Munch's early work followed a familiar trajectory, the studies of a dutiful student: realism, flirtations with Impressionism. Then came The Sick Child. A painting that shatters the vocabulary of sentimentality. It is not merely about mourning; it is about the impossibility of mourning, the way grief refuses form, refuses time. Once Munch let that rupture in, he never fully closed it again.

This rupture has biographical roots. Munch lost his mother at five, his sister at thirteen. His father died when Munch was twenty-five. His brother followed seven years later. The house, once full, fell quiet. It's tempting to turn this cascade of loss into a cipher for his entire oeuvre, to treat every brushstroke as a eulogy. But that would flatten the art. Pain may have opened the door, but it was not the only voice in the room.

To say that Munch painted grief is too simple. He painted the aftermath of grief, its calcification. A childhood of mourning did not make him a prophet of sorrow. It made him cautious. He seemed to protect himself by avoiding deep attachments altogether. A tragic arithmetic: what you do not love cannot be lost. What, then, do you paint? What you refuse to bury.

And yet to explain the paintings biographically is to circumscribe them. Take The Scream, or rather, the scream Munch sensed passing through nature. He described it this way:

“I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

That infinite scream has metastasized into icon. We see the meme, not the moment, a fate that now makes it raw material for algorithms that cannot sense the anxiety from which it was born. But peel back the varnish of reproduction, and the painting still twitches. That lurid sky, those hollowed eyes, they whisper louder than the scream itself.

But The Scream is one painting. Munch made more than 1,700. His career was not a sequence but a pressure front, erratic, circling, thick with weather that never quite broke. He painted dead siblings and empty chairs, solitary trees and sick rooms, repeatedly, compulsively. There was no linear progression, no “mature style.” There was only the loop, of memory, of loss, of insistence.

He never settled.

Painting was not a vocation. It was a compulsion.

He was, above all, prolific. Not merely in volume, but in velocity and tenacity. Over six decades, Munch produced more than 1,700 paintings, 4,500 drawings, and roughly 15,000 prints, along with photographs, sculptures, and a dense archive of writings, diaries, notes, manifestos.

He was an unusually prolific and introspective writer among painters. His writings, ranging from private notebooks and journals to public statements and poetic prose, reveal a restless, searching mind that sought not just to paint but to explain, excavate, and survive through painting. He often wrote directly about his own artworks, imbuing them with narrative, memory, and psychological commentary.

On one of his lithographs of the iconic Madonna, he wrote:

“She came to me in the hour of midnight – and she gazed into my eyes. I felt a kiss – a real kiss – and my blood froze in my veins.”

Munch did not treat text as explanatory, it was atmospheric, emotional, and in many cases, essential. The Alpha and Omega series stands out as his most deliberate fusion of image and narrative, prefiguring later multimedia works in modern art. These integrations form a kind of proto-intermedia practice, where image and word don’t illustrate each other but generate a third thing: an atmosphere of psychic reality.

Munchian

He never held a job, never married, lived increasingly alone, surrounded by his canvases. He was excessive. Even his repetitions, which could seem cynical, offer something raw: a refusal to let a subject rest.

I think of that first encounter with the cabbage field again. The field, indifferent and unassuming, did not reach out. And yet something within me rearranged itself under its gaze. That’s the strange thing about Munch, he doesn’t impose. He waits. He leaves a space open wide enough for you to walk into, and by the time you realize you have, the room has already changed.

What, then, of the later work, the bright murals, the naked bathers, the mythic horses? It would be easy to dismiss them as concessions or distractions. But that would be to mistake quiet for retreat. In Elm Forest in Spring, Munch paints without metaphor. The trees do not “mean” anything. They are not symbols of masculinity, nor allegories of time. They are trees. The act of seeing has become the subject. No scream. No collapse. Just presence. A radical simplicity.

This too is not peace. If the early works vibrate with fear of loss, the later ones hum with the fatigue of survival. To live alone into your 80th year is to watch even your sorrows die of old age. Munch, who painted death so often, outlived so much.

Style offers no stable refuge either. What we call “Munchian”, the ghostly faces, the stark contours, the unnatural palette, was but one of his masks. He copied the realists, dallied with Impressionism, returned to portraits with almost academic precision. Then, again, cabbages. He never settled. Or perhaps he never wanted to.

Meaning

He was neither modernist nor romantic. He was something older and more volatile: an artist whose fidelity was not to style or school, but to recurrence. How do we see? How do we remember? How do we lose? These are the questions he asked again and again. Even in abstraction, he never let go of the figure. Even in distance, he never let go of the past.

“In my art,” Munch wrote, “I have tried to explain to myself life and its meaning.

I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.”

That aspiration, almost modest in tone, is colossal in consequence. What endures in Munch is not style but insistence, the compulsion to face the raw material of being and make it just clear enough to live with.

When he repainted his brother Andreas in 1936, decades after his death, he did not refine. He stripped. The folds of the suit became color fields. The contours of the room faded into gesture. But the shadow over the eyes remained, darker now, like a bruise. The portrait is not of a person. It is of absence. And that absence is unbearable.

This is the axis around which Munch's work turns: not horror, not even grief, but the eerie space between presence and absence. A gap that paint cannot bridge, only trace. The brush is a crude tool for memory. Memory, in turn, becomes a last resistance to disappearance.

Munch did not wish to depict the world. He wished to endure within it. Not to be seen, but to remain. His canvases do not offer answers. They ask us to look longer, to feel the discomfort of the unfinished, the unresolved. In a culture that prizes legibility, Munch remained defiantly ambiguous. And in that ambiguity, he left something truer than truth: something that lingers.

He didn’t scream. He left the window open. The rest is ours to decide.

AI Meme’s

Today, when the infinite scream becomes a meme and Munch’s unease is mined by AI image-generation algorithms faster than we can think, it’s worth remembering what he asked of us: to feel slowly. To stay. To sit with the echo rather than chase the climax.

AI-generated art might dazzle, its symmetry, its speed, its fluency with visual tricks, but it rarely stumbles into the soul. What Munch offered wasn’t spectacle but residue. His images don't perform; they remain. And now, as machines conjure infinite variations of The Scream without understanding the hand that trembled behind the original, we face an ethical silence too: reproduction without permission, simulation without memory.

If his work offers anything to an age of synthetic clarity, it is this: a model of looking that isn’t extractive, that doesn’t flatten. A kind of slowness that asks not what art shows, but what it makes us carry.

Munch didn’t scream for effect. He painted so we’d notice when silence gets loud, something unnameable that still demands to be felt.

Stay curious

Colin