In our ninth season, in a topic suggested by you, our listeners, we’re uncovering the backstory behind some of the world’s most famed “cursed” objects in art, architecture, and archaeology. Today, we’re continuing with a deep dive into a tragic painting by a tortured artist: Edvard Munch’s The Dead Mother.

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ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.

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Links and further resources

Pallimed Arts and Humanities: Edvard Munch and Death

Smithsonian Magazine: Edvard Munch: Beyond The Scream

JAMA Network: Spring

Ohio State University: Study Reveals Why Eyes In Some Paintings Seem To Follow Viewers

Kunsthalle Bremen: Object page for The Dead Mother and her Child

Episode Transcript

Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. This season, season nine, is all about curses in fine art and archaeology, a topic that was suggested by you, our listeners. And today we’re continuing with a closer look at the Expressionist painter Edvard Munch, and a tragedy that would cast a pall over his whole life-- and potentially haunt others, too. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.

As with the Mona Lisa, I knew Edvard Munch famed painting, The Scream, long before I knew who Edvard Munch was, or had even seen a reproduction of the painting itself in a textbook, a museum store postcard, or a dorm room poster. I probably knew it first from Macaulay Culkin’s face on the posters for the 1990 movie, Home Alone, though it’s possible I had also seen it parodied on The Simpsons, in MAD Magazine, and later, as the inspiration for the iconic mask hiding the killer’s identity in Wes Craven’s Scream films, of which there are currently four, though, at the time of recording, there is a rumored fifth film in the works. And lots of people reference the painting daily--whether they know it or not--when they text someone a ‘screaming face” emoji. Munch’s The Scream has become the epitome of shorthand for fear, horror, and anxiety of all flavors-- and it’s ghoulish, skeletal central figure, that garish swirling sunsets, even the two shadowy figures that may or may not be stalking the screamer in the background all add up to something disturbing, and disturbingly relatable to someone from nearly every walk of life. No wonder it’s Munch’s most famous and celebrated motif--and I say motif here because there isn’t just one The Scream--there are several, completed in paint, in pastel, and in various printmaking experiments. Munch, you see, was obsessed with his getting this concept down onto paper and canvas. You might even say he was haunted by the idea--and that The Scream has thus haunted generations in many different forms. 

But what’s curious is that another one of Munch’s works is as haunting and anxiety-driven as The Scream-- and it might even be literally haunted, according to its previous owners. 

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Edvard Munch was one of the very first artists whose biography I learned practically in conjunction with his artwork. I was taught to understand his own mental and emotional struggles in tandem with the anxiety that is so often felt by viewers when we look at his vibrant Expressionist paintings.  He was born in Norway in 1863 to Christian Munch and his wife, Laura Catherine Bjølstad. As the family grew throughout the 1860s--Edvard was the couple’s second child, and they’d ultimately have five kids, their home--though not the wealthiest--was full of happiness and creativity. Papa Munch loved to encourage storytelling, often sharing the ghost stories of one of his favorite authors, Edgar Allen Poe, as well as highlighting other great works in literature and history. Laura Munch, his wife, was apparently artistically-inclined, though in what capacity, I’m not totally sure. But what is known is that she encouraged creativity in her young children, especially her two eldest, Edvard, and Edvard’s older sister, Sophie. Munch also had a relative on his father’s side, Jacob Munch, who was himself a painter, who worked as a portraitist in several European countries after studying in Paris under the tutelage of the Neoclassical master, Jacques-Louis David, and would even go on to found the  Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania, now modern-day Oslo-- so art does seem to be in his blood on both sides of his family. 

Like Andy Warhol half a century later, Edvard was a sickly child, weak and prone to illness, a feature which would blossom later in life into a fear that bordered on hypochondria. And also like Warhol, Munch passed the time when he was home sick from school by drawing. He learned to lean on art as a way to cope-- a mechanism that would serve him well throughout his life. But art could only do so much to assuage his illness and his anxieties-- and it couldn’t magically keep away the worst things from happening. And when Edvard was just five years old, tragedy struck the Munch family when his beloved mother died of tuberculosis. How awful for five young children--including Munch’s youngest sister who was just an infant--to have lost their mother. But from most accounts, it appears that Christian Munch, the father, may have suffered the most--and carried his children into his suffering too. After his wife’s passing, Christian Munch lost practically all the joy in his life and turned toward his Protestant religion for comfort--but it appears he took it to the extreme, focusing on every little thing that could jeopardize his, or his children’s, salvation. And this had a long-term effect on Edvard, who later wrote in his journal, quote, "My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.” Unquote. Even Edvard’s poor dead mother was dragged into the mix, summoned in their minds by their father as a grieving spirit looking down from Heaven and mourning her children’s impiety.  It was a lot for the young boy to witness, to experience, and so it’s of little surprise to know that not only was little Edvard prone to illness, but he also experienced severe nightmares and even made mention of “macabre visions.” Surely all of this wasn’t helped along by all those Poe ghost stories, but still: it’s not hard to draw a line from Munch’s childhood to The Scream. And it’s even easier to draw a line to his motif of “The Dead Mother.” But we’ll get to that in a moment. 

I wish I could tell you that things significantly improved for the Munch family at some point, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Edvard would later say that death and insanity seemed to stalk the family: his younger sister, Laura (named after their mother), was diagnosed as mentally ill while still a child; his brother, Peter Andreas died unexpectedly of pneumonia at age 30. But none of these tragedies hit quite as hard as the death of his eldest sister, Sophie, who died at just fifteen years old. Edvard adored her, and, only a year younger than his sister, it is obvious that he idolized her and considered her his favorite sibling, his partner-in-crime. And the fact that she succumbed to tuberculosis--the same awful disease that took their mother from them--just made it all worse. Though separated by nine years, these deaths would always be linked in Edvard’s minds: the two women he loved most, struck down by the same illness during Edvard’s vulnerable years. Tuberculosis wasn’t a quick death, either-- so Munch had the dubious opportunity to witness his mother and sister’s declines first-hand. They were experiences that would haunt Munch for the rest of his life.

Coming up next: The death of his mother and sister haunted Edvard Munch. But would they go on to haunt others, too?  Stay with us. 

Welcome back to ArtCurious.

Art continued to be the best way for Edvard Munch to exorcise any demons that haunted him, and when he was old enough, he opted to make a career out of it, thanks in no small part to his aunt, Karen, who assisted his father in the children’s rearing after their mother’s death. Like Munch’s mother, Karen realized Edvard’s artistic talent early on, and suggested that he leave the technical school suggested by his father in 1881 in favor of the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania, the very same art school his distant relative Jacob Munch helped to found. And though still dealing with bouts of illness and anxiety, it was at the Royal School of Art and Design that Munch began to thrive, quietly perfecting his art in the middle of rowdy Kristiania. He got sucked into a group of artists, thinkers, writers, and politicians known as the Kristiania Bohemians, through which Munch--and all of Kristiania, really-- learned about revolutionary ideas like anarchism and free love from the nihilistic writer, Hans Jaeger. Jaeger was a firebrand who advocated for violence and destruction, especially of anything aligned with the “bourgeoisie,” the much-maligned middle class of many European countries seen as the establishment that kept control of wealth and status. Though Edvard Munch wasn’t part of the Kristiania Bohemians per se, he was friendly with Jaeger, even painting a sympathetic portrait of the guy in 1889. But Jaeger’s presence in his life wasn’t 100% positive-- under his influence, Munch became more cynical, prone to fighting in bar brawls and drinking to excess. Such actions didn’t endear Munch or his lifestyle to his father, who was already rather disappointed in his son for abandoning his engineering studies at the technical school. The relationship between father and son thus grew even more strained. 

Throughout this period, Munch struggled to find “his” artistic style, often fluctuating back and forth to something akin to French Impressionism and something more naturalistic, but neither felt just right. Impressionism felt too experimental to him, with too much focus on light and the change of one moment to the next, which was hard when Munch was trying to get at the deeper meaning or the crux of a subject. And yet something realistic didn’t sit right either--because he couldn’t find a good way to illustrate his emotions or his mental state in a naturalistic way. He would eventually pioneer his own method of working that aligns him somewhat with the Post-Impressionists, like Van Gogh and Gauguin with their thick layers of bright, sometimes dissonant colors and distorted forms, and the Symbolists who conveyed a deep inner life and emotional complexity, covering topics like sex, love, death, and anxiety. And this expressive mix of styles would suit Edvard Munch to a T. 

It’s no coincidence that Munch’s first major artistic breakthrough occurred almost simultaneously with his interest in journaling and self-reflection. And it’s through the primary voice of Munch himself, in his surviving diaries, that we get so much amazing information about his life and his work. Sue Prideaux, in her incredible biography Munch: Behind the Scream, argues that the artist’s greater sense of perspective on himself directly led him to what he would refer to as his first, quote, “soul painting,” the work that would launch his career and set the tone for what lay ahead. That painting was his 1886 piece, The Sick Child. And spoiler alert: the Kristiania art community didn’t really dig it. Viewers thought it incomplete--just as Parisians had balked about the Impressionists a few years prior--and one critic even called it a, quote, “discarded half-rubbed-out sketch.” Luckily one journalist stood up for Munch, writing, quote, “He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the essential...For this reason Munch's pictures are as a rule "not complete", as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.” Unquote.

As he would later do with The Scream, Edvard Munch returned to the motif of the sick child--a scene clearly inspired by his sister’s illness and eventual death from tuberculosis-- again and again. Between 1886 and 1926, he would complete six different painted variations on the theme and explored the idea further in a bunch of prints in different working methods, like some done as lithographs, some as etchings, and others still in drypoint. That’s thirty years of coming back again and again to the awful loss of his sister. And thinking about his sister’s death most likely triggered thoughts, again, of his mother’s death--that first terrible, traumatic loss. 

From his recollections later in life, it appears that one of Munch’s earliest memories was of his mother fading away from her soon-to-be fatal illness. He remembered her sitting in a little chair at a window, sadly gazing outside at a little field right outside their house.  It makes sense that a child would have one of their earliest memories be of a parent, considering the point in which long-term memory crystalizes and that we spend so much of our earliest years, at least many of us do, with our families. But this memory also shows us that Munch’s earliest reminiscences were overshadowed by the death that was soon to come. And as he had done in contemplating--and depicting-- his sister’s death over and over again, so he did with his mother, too.  In various paintings and prints, Munch presents his mother sometimes alone on her deathbed, but more often accompanied by at least one person-- a child, typically a young girl. In various works called, confusingly, The Dead Mother, The Dead Mother and Her Child, and The Child and Death, we’re shown a rather colorless, sketchy image of a woman lying in profile on her deathbed, her eyes closed and her severely parted dark hair pulled back from her face. But our focus, really, is not on that barely-there mother, but on the child. She stares directly at us, the viewers, and its with her that we personally engage. Dressed in a little girl’s dress--sometimes red, sometimes white--and wearing tights and little boots, she’s the image of childhood innocence, but her face. Her face is full of fear, of disbelief. In The Dead Mother, her eyes are wide and round, eyebrows raised in confusion, and she covers her ears, blocking out any sounds that surround her. You can practically imagine that a family member is standing somewhere nearby, just out of the picture frame, saying, gently, “She’s gone,” but the little girl refuses to believe it. It’s heartbreaking. And it was probably a real-life experience for little Edvard Munch. Munch family legend held that after his mother Laura’s death, Edvard frantically searched his mother’s bedroom high and low, even crawling under her bed to look for her, as he couldn’t conceive of the fact that she was gone--taken away to be buried. And it was his sister Sophie, only six-years-old, only a year older than he-- who said that their mother was no longer here, but instead, she said, in Heaven.  The child in The Dead Mother is Edvard, then, but it’s also Sophie-- a small girl who surely felt that same profound grief, that same disbelief that her mother had died. Looking at her, we understand the scene and the real-life occurrence of death in all our lives through her emotive face. 

Other versions, especially the artist’s prints of the scene are, to my eyes, even more awful. Take his print from 1901-- it’s a similar composition narrowed down to only the two main lead figures, but the little girl’s face is lined with worry, cheeks shadowed with fury, perhaps. And her hands no longer appear to cover her ears, but scrape the sides of her cheeks or pull at her own hair. Her mouth is open, her teeth gritted; in the painted variation,  called The Dead Mother and her Child, created earlier and now in the Munch Museum in Oslo, the child’s mouth is a wide O, a howl of anger and shock at the suddenness of this loss. It is, in some ways, a twin to The Scream--a yelling figure, conceived in anxiety-inducing lines and colors, clawing at its own head. 

But The Dead Mother-- a later painting, cropped down to the essence of the scene, like the prints are, is stark and blunt. It’s that disbelief that gets me. That abject refusal to listen to reason, to understand the gravity of the situation. There’s something haunting in the little girl’s face, in its lack of stark emotion. If she’s screaming, she’s screaming on the inside, a wail kept hidden and secret, though her eyes telegraph a certain desperation even when the rest of her face doesn’t. And it’s surely because of that mask-like visage that rumors have spread that this version is indeed cursed. And that’s coming up right after this quick break-- Don’t go away.

Welcome back to ArtCurious.

When exactly the urban legend about the supposed hauntedness of The Dead Mother started, I can’t say. Google around and you’ll find a plethora of clickbait from paranormal websites and ghost tours claiming this as one of the “most haunted paintings in the world”--and notable, really, only because it is included as an example of the only work usually mentioned in those listicles created by a famous name. And all the online content regurgitates the same three traits: first, that the girl’s startlingly blue eyes, all wide and terrified, follow you as you move around in front of the painting. Second, some have claimed a rustling sound emanates from the painting--a sound, they proclaim, stemming from the blankets of the dead mother. What this is supposed to mean, I’m not totally sure--is the dead woman springing back to life and rustling her bedsheets? Is she a zombie, stirring on the bed? Is it the little girl’s dress as she vibrates in despair? And third-- previous owners, it has been claimed, have seen the little girl disappear from the frame entirely, leaving nothing but a shallow empty space… and the corpse of her mother.  Let’s back up here for a moment. While I can’t explain why or how a rustling sound would originate from a painting--perhaps a loose exhibition or gallery label on the canvas’s backside, rubbing against a wall? Just a trick of the imagination?--I can say for certain that the whole “eyes in a painting are following you” thing is actually a pretty normal--not supernatural-- element. A 2004 study from a professor in the psychology department at Ohio State University, Dr. James Todd, couches it as a crystal clear example of how our perspective changes, visually-speaking, when we look at a two-dimensional object versus a three-dimensional one. As Todd notes, quote, “No matter what angle you look at a painting from, the painting itself doesn’t change. You’re looking at a flat surface. The pattern of light and dark remains the same. We found that our visual perception of a picture also remains largely unchanged as we look at it from different vantage points. If a person in a painting is looking straight out, it will always appear that way, regardless of the angle at which it is viewed.” Unquote. This is different from how we look at objects and surfaces in the real world, when our eyes--and therefore our brains--understand how things change in depth in real time--so how close, or near something is is dependent on our own viewing direction and standpoint. So, Todd concludes, quote, “When we observe a picture on the wall, on the other hand, the visual information that defines near and far points is unaffected by viewing direction. Still, we interpret this perceptually as if it were a real object. That is why the eyes appear to follow you as you change your viewing direction.”  So: if a painting’s gaze is following you, it’s not haunted. It’s just how our brains process things. And then, there’s that last part: the “little girl disappearing from the frame” part. Only a few years after Edvard Munch painted The Dead Mother, the British writer M. R. James published Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, his 1904 collection of short stories that would go on to inspire generations of writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. I mention this because the story of the little girl disappearing in the work of art immediately reminds me of one of the most famous tales in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary--called “The Mezzotint.” In brief, though I can’t avoid spoilers here, the story centers around the recollection of an art collector who acquires works of art for a university, and one of the works is a print of a country house that mysteriously changes over time-- a door is suddenly seen as ajar, a grotesque figure crawls across the sprawling lawn to enter the manor house. So while this rather famous ghost story was published four or five years after Munch painted The Dead Mother, the story of the disappearing girl--a trope, now cliché, of a supernatural painting was already in the air in creative circles. It had even reached the big time with one of the most famous and most popular writers of the time-- Oscar Wilde, whose transforming portrait of Dorian Gray had set the tone for legions of legends to come with his 1890 literary masterwork. And those stories of the disappearing girl were said to have stemmed with the painting’s previous owners, but this painting, the one discussed on paranormal YouTube channels and a bunch of spooky websites? That work belongs to the Kunsthalle Bremen, in Germany. And from the  provenance information I’ve been able to glean from the Kunsthalle itself--I was in touch with their research staff to confirm details of provenance, which, as a reminder, is the history of ownership of a work of art-- it has been part of the Kunsthalle’s collection it was purchased at a gallery in Berlin in 1918 after being in a private collection in Mannheim, Germany, and in Vienna, Austria. Previous to that, one of the earliest bibliographic references to the painting, the work was titled Dead Mother and noted as being in the possession of the Fritz Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin. And if that surname sounds familiar, it’s because we discussed a member of the extended Gurlitt clan, Cornelius Gurlitt, all the way back in ArtCurious Episode 31, because the Gurlitts have a rather ignoble history: at least a couple of Gurlitt family members--Hildebrand and Wolfgang, who were cousins-- trafficked in stolen artworks for the Nazis during World War II.  And rather famously,  Hildebrand’s son, Cornelius, hid away a now-infamous treasure trove of over 1300 looted works of art in his apartment in Munich-- a trove, finally, discovered in 2012. So if this painting had been haunting anyone in the Gurlitt family prior to its arrival at the Kunsthalle Bremen, I haven’t been able to find a reference to it. If anything, we’re the ones who are haunted by the specter of war profiteers like the Gurlitts who took so many works away from their rightful owners during one of the worst wars of all time. And above everything else, the most haunted of all was Edvard Munch himself, haunted by the tragic death of his mother, a life-changing event that was unfathomable and terrifying to the young boy. He couldn’t escape his memories and the emotions associated with this loss; and maybe he didn’t want to-- maybe he wanted to repeat such scenes in paint and ink and pen because he needed to go over it, as we might discuss a trauma again and again with a therapist or a trusted friend. It seems, truly, that he needed to work out his memories in paint here, which makes sense, as Munch himself once wrote, quote, “In my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.” Unquote. 

COMING UP NEXT TIME, it’s our season finale, and we’ve been teasing it a little bit all season, because how can we not end by talking about one of the most cursed treasures of art of all time? And yes, archaeology and art do go hand-in-hand. So come back to us in two weeks because we’re going to Egypt--well, at least in an audio adventure. 

Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal, with additional writing and research by Jessica Wollschleger. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our podcast services are provided by our friends at Kaboonki. Subscribe now to their new show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, hosted by Josh Dasal, and visit subgenrepodcast.com for more details.   The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com. 

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Check back with us in two weeks as we explore the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in potentially cursed works and artifacts in art history.