Alma Mater, Standing Child 1914 - 1915

Edvard Munch made this painting, Alma Mater, Standing Child, with what looks like thinned oil paint or maybe gouache, giving it this light, airy feel. The colors are a bit off, a little strange, like when you’re trying to remember a dream. Look at how Munch lets the colors bleed into each other, those washes of pink, green, and yellow create a sense of fleetingness. It’s almost like he’s capturing a memory of a child, not the child herself. I love how the marks feel so provisional, like they could disappear any second. See the child’s leg? The way that red runs down, pooling at the bottom, it’s as if the figure is dissolving before our eyes. Munch and Klimt were doing similar things back then, thinking about the psychology of bodies in space. But Munch’s marks are much looser than Klimt’s, much more immediate. For Munch, painting was like capturing a feeling, an emotion, raw and unfiltered. And those feelings, they’re never fixed, are they?