Munch, a Red that Came from Within

One

The sky is red.

Too red to be called evening light.
Closer to blood.

The red lies in bands.
Several layers, long and horizontal.

Between them a yellow band is mixed in.

Below it is blue and black.
It is water. A fjord.

In front there is a bridge.
The rail runs at a slant and goes out of the surface.

That line is abrupt.
It does not go straight; it cuts the surface.

On the bridge there is a person.

The face is not a person's face.
It looks like bone only, and it looks flayed.

Two hands are held to the cheeks.

The mouth is open.
No sound is heard.

Far off two people are standing.
Black shapes. They show their backs.

They are not looking this way.

Every line on the surface flows.

The bands of sky flow, the lines of the water flow, the body of the person flows.
Only the rail of the bridge is straight.

One straight thing and everything flowing collide.

Look at the color.

The red is thin.
Unlike the last two chapters.

Tamayo stacked color and O'Keeffe set color down as planes.
Here the color has been made to flow.

It looks smeared rather than painted.

Two

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in Norway.

His father was a doctor.
It was a house of strict faith.

At five he lost his mother.
It was tuberculosis.

At thirteen he lost his sister.
The same illness.

Illness was in the house a long time.

From childhood he saw illness.
The one lying down and the one sitting and watching.

After he began painting he painted that room many times.

A bed and a window and a person sitting.

He painted the same scene again all his life.

He travelled and stayed in many countries.

He spent time in Paris and Berlin.
There he saw new painting and stood at the center of argument.

For a period his body and mind gave way.
He took treatment.

After that he returned to Norway and lived there a long time.

He had a house near Oslo.

Here one thing is startling.

He put his paintings outside.

He stood them in the yard and let the rain fall on them.
Snow as well.

He did it on purpose.

He called it the rough cure.

The canvas was damaged and the paint came away.
He continued anyway.

He held that once a painting had endured the weather, something in it was different.

This story cannot be passed over in this book.

It is a case of fūdo touching a painting directly.
Not a figure of speech. Rain actually fell on the surface.

But what became different.

The surface became different.
The paint was damaged and a grain appeared.

The color did not become different.

Fūdo touched his surface but did not beget his color.

This is the heart of the chapter.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

Munch's color did not come from the land.

The winter of Norway is long.
The sun is low and the day is short.

The light of that land leans toward gray and blue.

And his surface is red.

It is not that there was no red in that land.
Evening light is everywhere.

There is something to know here.

There is a hypothesis about the red sky of The Scream.

In 1883 a great volcano erupted in Indonesia.
Its ash circled the atmosphere and made the world's sunsets red for several years.

There are records that the skies of Europe were in fact strangely red then.

The hypothesis is that Munch may have seen that sky.

It is an interesting story.
And it is a story favorable to the proposition of this book.

Because it would mean that fūdo begot the color.

But care is needed.

A hypothesis is a hypothesis.
It is not settled.

And there is something more important.

Hundreds of thousands of people saw the same sky.
Not many painted it.

He alone painted it that way.

In the writing he left he did not speak of that sky as weather.

He wrote that he stopped while walking, that the sky turned red, that he heard a sound passing through nature.

It is not a record of weather.
It is a record of the body.

So even if the red came from outside, it was made again inside.

The direction is reversed.

The two painters before him received color from the land.

Tamayo received the red of soil.
O'Keeffe received the blue of dry air.

Munch pushed color out from within.

Two things follow.

First, color does not follow form.

O'Keeffe's color was attached to form.
Bone is white and sky is blue.

Munch's color leaves form.

There is no reason within the surface for the sky to be red.
There is no explanation.

Color becomes the name of a state rather than the property of a thing.

Second, color makes a sound.

In The Scream sound cannot be painted.
And yet the surface is loud.

The red stands in for sound.

Color has moved the seat of a sense.
It made one hear with the eyes.

This is a large invention.

And it is not something fūdo taught.

Here the distinction made in the Prologue has to be brought back.

Fūdo is what many undergo together.

The wind strikes every islander.
A war is passed through by a generation together.

So a common form comes out of it.

Munch's loss belonged to one household.

Losing a mother and a sister was the affair of him and his siblings.
It was not the affair of all Norwegians.

Therefore it is not fūdo.
It is biography.

Fūdo and biography are not the same.

This distinction protects this book.

Here is why Munch is a witness for the other side.

His color came out of biography.
It did not come out of the land.

And that is not a defect.

It is testimony that there is also a road on which color comes from within.
On that road he went very far.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

Both men painted loss.

But the size of the loss differs.

Munch's loss belongs to one house.
A mother and a sister.

The loss on Byun Shi-Ji's surface belongs to an island.

Those who did not return.
The island once lost many people.

That event is called 4·3.

The painter spoke of those years in the oral history.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, pp. 241–243)

The old man's bowed head is the respect owed to those who did not return.

This is interpretation.
Only that standing long before the painting, it reads that way.

One is a private loss and the other a shared one.

So the form differs.

Private loss goes outward.
It cries out.

Shared loss goes inward.
It reduces speech.

When many lose the same thing there is no need to explain.
Everyone already knows.

Not speaking becomes the rite of respect.

Color is the same.

Munch's red makes a sound.
Byun Shi-Ji's color of dried grass lowers the sound.

One cried out in color and the other kept silent in color.

The posture of the figure is also reversed.

The person in The Scream faces front.
He looks at us.

Byun Shi-Ji's old man lowers his head.
He does not look at us.

And yet neither figure has a face.

Munch's figure has a face, but it is not a person's face.
Byun Shi-Ji's old man's face is not visible.

One removed it by erasing. The other removed it by hiding.

Both ceased to be any particular person.

So both surfaces stand in for us.

Now it must be said without hierarchy.

Munch's direction is not wrong.

A painting whose color came from within holds its own truth.
That truth reaches people regardless of land.

That is why The Scream is read across the world.
Because it is no land's story, it can be read in any land.

Byun Shi-Ji's painting is the reverse.

It is one island's story.
So knowing that island lets it be read more deeply.

Painting is whole only when both exist.

Color that came from the land and color that came from within.

This book follows the first without saying the second is not there.

One thing remains at the end.

Munch put his paintings outside and let the weather strike them.
Byun Shi-Ji painted his indoors.

But he let the wind into the surface.

One put the painting out into fūdo. The other brought fūdo into the painting.

The direction is reversed.

And both met fūdo.

That there are several ways of meeting is the finding of this book.

Five

The red is still in the sky.

The fjord is dark and the bridge is empty.
Far off the two people still show their backs.

No sound is heard.

On the surface of a distant island an old man lowers his head.
There too no sound is heard.

One cries out and the other holds it in.

To us both are quiet.

Where does color come from.

It comes from the land, and it comes from within.

The first gate closes this way.
It closes without making the answer one.