Edvard Munch: The Dance of Life
This is an epic scene that ensues from memory: a mental imprint transferred onto canvas. There are several features that support this thesis. First, the green grassy surface lacks detail — such smudged representations usually echo from the dreamy, simplified and reduced to a few principal details reminiscences. Second, there is the focus on the orange dress and the central couple as one of those details that deserve the maximal attention; the rest dance in the background as a visual accompaniment, or a sort of a filler. Finally, the two women on the edges manifest possible emotional developments of the central female dancer. As it often occurs in dreams and memories, the mind clones the protagonist into several alter-actors; I believe that these two girls embody the orange dressed lady’s fears and hopes, one being of death or abandonment, expressed by mourning (the black dress), the other of matrimony and happiness (the white dress).
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Orange is known to be perceived as a sexually appealing color. In this case it reveals the girl’s mood of the here and now of passion, the placed in the center of the composition bright attire being an immediate temporal point of reference — if one prefers to view the other couples as the same one but in different points in time. This temporal interpretation makes sense not only because of a similar traditional Renaissance technique but also because of the strong symbolical overtones in the painting as a whole. The setup: the girl’s adult life begins from left to right, from a virginal white solitude towards encounters with men, ending with (possible) widowhood. The two closest female figures, the beginning and the end, constitute the “A” and “Z” points which need to be most visible, as the conceptual pillars of the paradigm. The other participants enclose the main couple, forming a semicircle the other half of which might be up to the viewer to complete.
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The female majority and other mentioned characteristics lead to the conclusion that women are the leitmotif of this piece, and probably of the artist’s thought when painting it as well. The main couple becomes the epicenter of the composition, while the whole scene rests upon a blueprint of a radial symmetry: each pair connects with the first one by imaginary threads-rays. Thus, to my mind, the monument in the background (the sun and its reflection) was raised to celebrate femininity and womanhood. It overlooks the happening and seems to inspire cautious optimism; its vivaciously wide open limbs oppose the black woman’s clasped hands, as if to signify that one weak link cannot disrupt the whole sequence, — and this is why the painting was named the “Dance of Life” rather than “of Death.” It’s as if Munch is saying that life may not always be a dance, but when it is — don’t hold back, and learn as many steps as you can.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Edvard Munch, Symbolism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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