Through the Eyes of the Young: Examining the Similarities Between Expressionist Artists Pina Bausch and Edvard Munch

Madeline Hanson

Artists Pina Bausch and Edvard Munch are linked in that they both reflect the impact of early childhood experiences and impressions on an artist, as both their early lives left a lifelong impression on their worldview, and contributed decisively to their Expressionistic aesthetic and outstanding ability to depict and explore their own emotional and psychological conditions. This concept is reflected in the similarities in their works and the themes they explore through their art.

Art is a subjective medium through which the creator has the freedom to depict and explore a subject matter in any way they see fit. However, it remains that artists are perpetually influenced by and inspired by their life experiences, perceptions, psychological and internal conditions, and cultural influences. Scientific evidence has documented and proven the existence of a visible relationship between childhood experience and creativity, specifically involving that of adversity. A study conducted by Marie Foregard suggests that “accounts of the challenges endured by creative individuals suggest that they may have been able to channel their negative experiences as sources of inspiration and motivation for their work. Increased creativity may therefore constitute a manifestation of posttraumatic growth, defined as retrospective perceptions of positive psychological changes that take place following experiences of highly challenging life circumstances” (Foregard 2013). Therefore, although it may not be explicit in a work of art what has contributed decisively to the artist’s aesthetic, it is clear that we can delve into this idea to uncover the artist’s perspective and worldview through the subject matter and form, and that objective reality greatly informs the reality created within works of art.

Philippine “Pina” Bausch was born in Germany in 1940 (Climenhaga 2013). She grew up dancing impromptu dances for customers in her father’s cafe, and went on to train at the Folkwang School in Essen, headed by Kurt Joos, who utilized the ideas of

Ausdruckstanz, the expressionist dance that flourished in pre-war Germany (Climenhaga 2013). She also trained at The Juilliard School with Anthony Tudor, and was a founding member of Jooss’s Folkwang Ballet. Bausch took over directorship of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet in 1973, and revamped it into a place to produce her own works of Tanztheater, dance theater, the company becoming Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. She worked there until her death in 2009 (Climenhaga 2013). Sculptor and installation artist, Cornelia Parker, said of Pina,” with her shyness, modesty and wraithlike physique, she seemed like somebody from an Edvard Munch painting” (Wiegand 2009).

Bausch was celebrated for her revolutionary work in her bringing together of dance, theater, and German Expressionism, specifically “Ausdruckstanz,” to create Tanztheater (‘dance theater’), which was a movement away from the stagnation of classical ballet and towards progress for the future of the art form. When Tanztheater originated in the 1970s, it was very much influenced by ballet and narratives under the direction of Kurt Joos. However, under the influence of Pina, Tanztheater became a controversial form that “challenged the conventional boundaries of dance and theater, forcing audiences to experience different levels of shock, surprise, laughter and anxiety” (Van Helden 2012). It was said that “Bausch’s work seriously questions the traditional understandings of dance, which destabilizes the historical reference points that previously provided a foundation for meaning and significance of bodily expression and movement,” a move away from classicism and towards an Expressionist aesthetic and point of view that Bausch utilized and embodied as an artist (Van Helden 2012).

Pina Bausch’s works are defined by common choreographic elements that work in tandem with her Tanztheater form, which define her work as Expressionist. In creating her dances, Bausch had a specific creative process in order to pull the emotionality out of her dancers and collaborators, in order to achieve an Expressionist essence (Climenhaga 2013). Improvisation and memory were incredibly important to Bausch, and she would ask her dancers questions about their experiences, childhood, feelings in situations, aspirations, etc. From there, Bausch would develop gestures, dialogues, movement patterns, and questions; the foundation on which to build a piece. These underlying ideas became evident in the physicality of the dancers, utilizing dramatic gestures and movement patterns that have come to define Bausch’s work. Her choreographic style is a tunnel through which she leads the viewer through severe emotional expression, ranging from hysteria to hysterically laughing, sensuality to tears, to anger and then confusion.

Specifically, Bausch is known for her use of repetition, which she uses to communicate how movement, dance, gesture and “socially constructed patterns of behaviour are essentially artifice and therefore performative” (Van Helden 2012). Another notable element of her choreographic style is that her dancers exhibit and express their exhaustion and their physical experience openly onstage. From this, the audience is able to witness the tearing away of façade and layering; as the dancers tire, there becomes an accessibility to the human vulnerability and nature being presented and experienced onstage, moving from the physical to the raw emotional. Notably, there is a complex relationship between expression and subjectivity in her work. Rather “than showing a fixed sequence perform the mechanics of logical narrative, Bausch ruptures the viewer’s expectations by using incongruent motifs” and creating a scene onstage that can go against rational explanation or expectation (Van Helden 2012). Using this, along with bringing the audience along on an intense emotional journey, Bausch gives her work an Expressionist viewpoint.

Bausch herself stated, “[her] work – like everything [she does], is about relationships, childhood, fear of death, and how much [people] all want to be loved” (Van Helden 2012). She weaved this intention derived out of pure human experience and emotionality with a physicality in her movement vocabulary, allowing her to explore psychological conditions in her work and give audiences a truly emotional, artful experience. French writer and photographer, Herve Guibert, said that “it is not Pina Bausch who wounds the heart; it was already hurt, but the wound had been forgotten, written off as foolish, romantic or narcissistic, and Pina Bausch, through the bodies of her dancers, reminds us of the reality and the vitality of that wound” (Staveaux 2012). Ultimately, Bausch’s influence today is the rawness of her work, and the willingness to explore a variation of forms to expose an internal emotional world through movement, promoting and encouraging an Expressionist aesthetic in dance.

Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863, and was a painter and printmaker who depicted psychological themes and emotional landscapes, and who greatly influenced German Expressionism in the early 20th century (“Edvard Munch Biography”). His childhood was beset by the premature deaths of his mother and sister, explained to him by his father as acts of divine punishment, and this negativism left a lifelong impression of emotionality, anxiety and vulnerability on him, and which he put into his paintings, making him into an Expressionist artist (“Edvard Munch Biography”). He melded his observations and his own emotional perceptions into beautiful works that have the power to express, and even alleviate, viewers’ emotional connections.

Munch’s paintings are characterized by specific compositional elements, such as his use of subjective perspectives and coloring, often distorting these for emotional effect to evoke specific moods and ideas concerning the internal experience. Through his use of contrasting lines, bright and bold coloring, blocking of color, somber tones, concise and exaggerated forms, semi-abstraction and the mysterious and suggestive, Munch created very harmonious, evocative and thought-provoking paintings focusing on the internal and emotional landscapes of humanity, as well as himself. He sought to find a balance between depicting the subjects of the work as observed in reality with his own emotional and psychological perceptions.

Many of these elements that defined Munch’s Expressionist aesthetic are found in his works that include Weeping Nude (1914), Woman in Three Stages (1895), Death in the Sickroom (1895), Vampire (1893-95), and The Kiss (1897). Specifically in The Dead Mother (1899), the impact of his childhood experiences can be seen. The painting depicts a young child covering his (or her) ears next to the bed of a frail, grey woman. The title alone tells of the subject matter of the work, but the rough brushstrokes, and melancholic tones and coloring suggest a very personal tribute to a pivotal experience. The themes of death, anxiety and loss are also very implicit in the composition, informing the audience of Munch’s psychological state at the time of this experience, making the painting emotionally explicit.

As discussed above, the adversity experienced in childhood is greatly informative on creativity and artistry, as it was for both Bausch and Munch. This will be further discussed through the specific analysis of Bausch’s Café Müller (1978) in comparison with the similarities found within the works of Munch, and it will become evident that Bausch and Munch are linked in that they both reflect the impact of early childhood experiences and impressions on an artist, as both their early lives left a lifelong impression on their worldview, and contributed decisively to their Expressionistic aesthetic and outstanding ability to depict and explore their own emotional and psychological conditions.

Cafe Muller is considered Bausch’s masterwork, and it was premiered in 1978 (Jennings 2008). It sees a series of characters seemingly sleepwalking in and out of a deserted cafe with many tables and chairs scattered around the space. In the piece, it seems these characters are trapped in an infinite loop, endlessly reprising their actions and interactions. There is a melancholy to the piece, accompanied by a feeling of familiarity. The work seems to reflect the experiences and Bausch’s personal impressions of the people and their relationships amidst the impact of war, those of which were formed as a child growing up in her father’s café. Bausch brings these perceptions and ghostly memories to life in Café Müller (Climenhaga 2013).

In Café Müller, the tables and chairs onstage are in constant rearrangement, constant movement. There is also no narrative or speech to guide the piece or give information about the plot or characters, nor if there is a specific beginning or end. “The dance is anonymous, yet in constant [emotional] flux,” just as the individual characters are (Van Helden 2012). In the piece, Bausch’s character hobbles with her eyes closed around the stage, from one area to the next. She is engaged internally, and seems disconnected from the café yet entirely connected to the emotionality of its landscape. It is important to note that her body is many times leaned against a wall, “emphasizing the silent struggle of her character” (Van Helden 2012).

Bausch expertly uses the elements of walking and repetition of movement phrases and gestures to define character, establish relationship, evoke conflict and elucidate the space, presenting “somber and austere images throughout Café Müller [that] display a sense of alienation, anonymity, and frustration that produces a complex emotional texture” (Van Helden 2012). One of these moments is when one of the female characters interacts with a male character, passionately hugging him while being manipulated by another male character. He moves her mouth to kiss him, his body to lift her, and walks away for him to drop her to the floor. This movement phrase is repeated multiple times, each time increasing in speed, desperation, passion, frustration and effort. It ends when the woman wraps her arms around the man, letting the stillness and silence around them contrast the tension that just filled the stage, letting it evaporate slowly. It is a particularly powerful image, with a cruelty, sadness and pathetic semblance being presented. As the audience, we do not know the reason the man is dropping the woman. Yet, as the cycle continues it becomes almost comical and very beautiful witnessing the effort in the relationship between the two individuals. This intense emotionality is characteristic of Café Müller, and of the balance between adversity and levity in the work as a whole, just as in both Munch and Bausch’s childhoods.

In viewing the work, there are some particular moments that bear similarity to Munch’s work in movement composition and form. Munch’s Death in the Sickroom (1895) depicts the mourning of a family for their dying child. The child sits in a chair facing diagonally to the back, mostly invisible to us as the audience. Instead, the work focuses around the mourners, each reacting differently from one another yet never interacting. Munch plays with coloring and facial expressions of the figures themselves to represent a solemn loneliness and sadness of death, and to portray the impact of the child’s suffering on those around. Noticeably, the painting plays with a unique perspective, very much in the Synthetist style, where the floorboards converge towards differing vanishing points on a horizontal axis, widening and flattening the room at the same time. This resembles Bausch’s use of perspective on the stage in Café Müller. She uses the tables and chairs to blend the foreground and background of the stage, and intermingles the characters and the movement throughout the space, throughout the work. She often uses a sharp verticality that focuses the eye to the moving dancer, distorting the perspective and our perception of foreground and background, and she uses perspective to drawn attention to specific details and characters, just as Munch does in Death in the Sickroom. In both these works, perspective is used to draw the audience’s eyes to important elements of the composition in order to help evoke a specific emotionality or thought about the essence of the work in the audience members.

Munch’s painting entitled Vampire (1893-95) shows a man in anguish, while a red-headed female wraps her arms around him, potentially comforting him. Her body looks as if she could be slumped over on the man, her head buried in his neck just as his head is buried in her arms. With the darkness surrounding the couple, and the man’s black clothing blending him into the dark surrounding, the woman’s red hair is incredibly prominent in the painting. This emotional embrace is reminiscent of the scene in Café Müller where the woman is passionately hugging the man and it becomes a cycle, increasing in speed, as discussed above. The way the woman’s hair drapes over the man’s body, and the closeness of the two figures mirrors the vivid emotionality and the landscape in Munch’s painting. Bausch also utilizes a very similar posture to that of the red-headed woman as one of her infamous movement motifs in Café Müller. Often, the characters in the café slump over onto the tables, as if passing out or giving up in a desperate and defeated sentiment. With one arm stretched out, and the other bent to a right angle, it is very similar to that of the woman in Vampire, and the darkness of the stage set, similar to the darkness surrounding the pair in Vampire, evoke the same tension and vulnerability in the works.

In Weeping Nude (1914) and Woman in Three Stages (1895), Munch paints young women with flowing hair, in very different emotional states. Weeping Nude beautifully captures a weakness, sadness, and fragility about the woman in the painting, with her joints bent at odd angles and her hair covering her face, hiding her identity. The coloring of the work is not ‘naturalistic,’ but Expressionist, instead using pinks and purples, reds, and blues and greens to suggest her emotional and psychological state. In movement, Bausch very much mimics the way the figure is slumped on the floor. Many times throughout the work, the dancers will drop to the floor and slump against the wall, like puppets without strings. The hopelessness and distress clearly depicted in this painting are inserted at different points throughout Café Müller, specifically after certain interactions with other characters, and as a way to define the experiences of the individual characters. For Bausch’s character specifically, she slumps against the wall in a manner very similar to this in order to portray the silent struggle of her character.

Woman in Three Stages depicts separate female figures in very different stages of life, from a young maiden to the sickly and dying. The color palette plays with light and dark, the light highlighting the youth and beauty of the young woman in a long, white dress with flowing hair. On the other side of the painting, Munch contrasts this youth with two figures clothed in black, almost invisible from the background with the exception of their ghost-like faces, representing death, decay and darkness. Many elements from this work are similar in Café Müller, the most obvious being the costuming of some of the female characters. Bausch’s character wears her hair down and flowing, in a soft and feminine white slip dress and bare feet, almost exactly like that in Munch’s painting. However, Munch’s painting also seems to mirror the character development and variety in Café Müller. Bausch presents a spectrum of characters in disposition, derived from the memories of people she was exposed to growing up in her father’s café. However, the range in light to dark is similar to the emotional range and journey the characters embark on and experience throughout the work. It seems as if Munch’s figures in Woman in Three Stages are similar to the stages of the women, among the other characters, in Café Müller.

Ultimately, it is not only Pina’s “shyness, modesty and wraith-like physique” that likens her to somebody from an Edvard Munch painting, that bears relationship to Munch. Elements of her works are very similar in theme and composition to that of Munch, as found and demonstrated in Café Müller.

Thus, after the in-depth examination of Pina Bausch’s masterwork, Café Müller, and the works of Edvard Munch, as well as the artists as a whole, it is clear that these artists are linked in that they both reflect the impact of early childhood experiences and impressions on an artist, as both their early lives left a lifelong impression on their worldview, and contributed decisively to their Expressionistic aesthetic and outstanding ability to depict and explore their own emotional and psychological conditions.

Works Cited

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Wiegand, Chris. "Pina Bausch tributes: 'She got the keys to your soul'" The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 03 July 2009. Web. 08 May 2017.