Melancholy III

Melancholy III is the quintessential Munch image, powerfully and profoundly expressing a sentiment which haunted and inspired the artist throughout his life. The sitting figure with the head resting on one hand repeats the classical ‘thinker’ pose and calls to mind Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I of 1514, which perhaps for the first time explicitly connected this pose with the melancholic temperament. It is worth noting that both figures, Dürer’s allegorical figure and Munch’s young man, sit by the sea shore - another classical topos of forlornness and longing.

Munch’s present colour woodcut is - as his most evocative prints are - universal and personal at the same time. Elizabeth Prelinger perfectly summarises the scene and the events: ‘On the shore at Åsgårdstrand, a village on the Oslo Fjord where Munch had a house, sits a despondent man, whom Munch modelled on his friend Jappe Nilssen, the Danish art critic. In the distance, on the dock, are three figures. One is a man carrying oars, and with him are another man and a woman in a white dress who plan to row over to a small island to have a romantic tryst. In reality Nilssen was involved in a lovers’ triangle with the painter Christian Krohg and Oda Lasson, the woman who would become Krogh’s wife. The situation ended badly for Nilssen, and Munch took advantage of it to make a universal image about the pain caused by love.’ (Prelinger, pp. 193-194).

Jealousy and heartbreak were feelings Munch knew well. His relationships with women were always fraught and usually ended in anger and sorrow – emotions he frequently depicted in his printed oeuvre. Emotionally charged as many of his prints are, few of them – with the exception of some of his other great woodcuts such as Toward the Forest (Woll 112) or The Lonely Ones (Woll 157) - have the same visual clarity and depth of feeling as Melancholy III.

It is a deceptively simple image, yet Munch’s method is remarkably complex: it is printed from two woodblocks, the key block and the colour block, which Munch cut with the fretsaw into three separate pieces, allowing him to vary the colours and print them in a different order. As a result, no two impressions are alike, and some differ radically in effect and mood. While for example the impression in the Campbell Collection (Prelinger no. 46, p. 193) is printed in bright yellow in the sky, with the ground and the sea almost black, suggesting a sunset, the present impression benefits from a subtle layering of several colours. Shades of sea green and a warm rusty red shine through the sombre brown, while the little wooden house glows white in the distance as if lit by the midnight sun, evoking the glittering twilight of a Nordic summer night.