Munch\'s Le Baiser an Analysis

Munch's Le Baiser

An Analysis of Munch's Kiss

The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's Le Baiser (1897), or The Kiss, is, like all of his work, a study of life and passion in conflict with an atmosphere of depression, melancholy, and overwhelming gloom. The Scream (1893) is Munch's most famous and most-reproduced work, but while it represents humanity's cry of protest against an encroaching gloom it fails to represent what The Kiss depicts so well -- that secret, hidden joy of human connectedness, removed from the world's eye and soldered to a dark corner for fear of being trampled upon. Munch, however, takes that secret connectedness and restores it to its proper public setting but not without removing it from the context in which he realizes its existence. This paper will analyze Munch's Kiss and show how it is a representation of late 19th century Romanticism/Realism, emphasizing a kind of dread in the clinging manner of the lovers, who appear to be holding onto one another for dear life as the world closes in around them.

Munch was a man who worried incessantly, of course. As Paul Johnson notes, "Munch was hovering on the verge of sanity all his life, aggravated by incipient alcoholism and what he believed to be nicotine poisoning."

Indeed, Munch placed himself in a mental asylum to escape the mounting depression that seemingly overwhelmed him. From 1916 to the end of his life in 1944, he removed himself from all society and lived alone in his Oslo estate -- painting, as was made apparent after his death, when thousands upon thousands of similarly themed paintings and drawings were discovered. His manner was Expressionistic, but there was in it a clash of ideologies -- a Romantic view (ala Goethe) fighting against a Realistic view (as expressed thematically in some of Van Gogh's work), and no doubt this battle accounted for the depression which absorbed him, neither vision seeming to win out in the end.

Munch's paintings were described by some as "degenerate" in the 1930s and 40s, according to Arne Eggum.

But a better way of expressing his works may be that he depicted degeneracy in modern times. The Kiss does this in a particularly striking way, through the use of color, shape, and space. The oil on canvas depicts a man in woman draped in dark clothing, interlocked to such an extent that his face appears to disappear and conjoin into hers (which is turned upward to receive his kiss). Her right hand circles his neck and draws him down to her and her left hand rests assuredly on his shoulder, while his left arm wraps around her neck and his right hand nestles into the hollow of her back. They are propped on their left by a window that is draped in blueish-violet cloth, slightly pulled aside by their embrace to reveal a brighter outside world that somehow seems to forbid their love, which is being displayed in the dark of the room: their right side as well as the lower left portion (beneath the window) is hardly discernible for Munch's use of shadow.

In all, Munch's use of dark color in more than two-thirds of the composition evokes an overwhelming sense of forbidden love. Yet the fully-clothed demonstration of love suggests nothing illicit -- only something oddly forbidden by the outside modern world (strangely bright, yet seemingly condemning of true affection). The affection witnessed in the limbs of the lovers appears almost desperate in its determination to survive the encroaching eye of the outside world. But the world is only given a small sliver -- a slight portion of the canvas -- so that through the use of space, Munch seems to suggest that there is hope for the lovers (even if their days are numbered). The overall shape of the composition brings us to sympathize and empathize with the subjects of The Kiss, for it almost draws us into the embrace with the way the shadow curves and bends about the lovers.