“I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of Man’s urge to open his heart”
Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch’s ‘The Son’ is a work of great importance. It expresses what is at the heart of Munch’s art - a private symbolism rooted in his lived trauma. Removed from self pity, the artist divulges his emotional response through the work. He had a highly personal view on art and its function; he exhibited his work in order to present its intentions no matter the viewer’s critique.

‘The Son’ (1915) is a study for a woodcut of the same title that is near identical to the present drawing, but mirrored due to the printing process. They are part of a series of paintings, drawings and prints of families and individuals gathered around, often a child, sick in bed. The image of the Sickbed was not new to Munch and consumed his work for decades. In 1893 he finished the painting ‘Death in the Sickroom’, which was centred around the loss of his sister Sophie to tuberculosis in 1877. Years before, he painted ‘The Infirmary at Helgelandsmoen’ (1882), after having been exposed to the scene by his father who was a surgeon.

While images of a Sickbed were common at the time among Naturalist painters, for Munch it was more personal. He described how “I insist that there hardly was one of those painters who in such a way had lived through his subject to the last cry of pain as I did in my sick child. For it wasn’t just I who sat there, it was all my loved ones”. In The Son it is believed Munch re-lives the tragic death of his only brother Andreas who died of pneumonia in 1895. To the left is his father and the right are his sister and aunt. Munch identifies with each family member and in the form of their grief as well as his own. The two portraits hanging above the bed are likely to be those of deceased relatives, drawing notions of generational trauma and the passing down of past anguish. Munch had addressed this before in his 1904 painting ‘Four Stages of Life’ (Kode museum, Bergen).

In ‘The Son’ the family are simultaneously together yet isolated in their own grief. Although occupying the same space, no figure is touching, as they look out across different parts of the page. The bodies are depicted in the haunting willowy manner that is so associated with Munch’s style. One sees in their faces and curved swirling lines of their bodies similarities to the artist’s famed ‘The Scream’. His use of line is so distinctly modern, and creates a sense of physical unease within the scene through the rippling motion.

‘The Son’ has been included in number of important exhibitions on the artist’s work, including the seminal retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.