Even if you don’t know much about art, at some point you’ve almost certainly seen Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” one of the most iconic artworks of the modern era: a strange, skeletal figure clutching its agonized face, its mouth an oval of horror, while the sky overhead is a mix of ominous red and orange.

Much as “The Scream” became a symbol of an age of anxiety and uncertainty, Munch, born in 1863, made his name as a painter whose work often chronicled human emotions and psychological states, with his own mental health struggles factoring into portraits of people who appeared to be in distress.

But a new exhibit at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown makes the case that Munch found inspiration for much of his work in the natural world, from forests to shorelines to cultivated landscapes such as farms.

“Trembling Earth” brings together 75 works – paintings, drawings, woodcut prints, illustrated letters and more – by Munch that showcase his deep attraction to nature, in part because he viewed the natural world through an anthropomorphic lens of sorts: intrinsically linked to the human race, with transformative powers that were part of the larger cycle of life.

“Nature comes to life in his paintings,” said Jay A. Clarke, a co-curator of the exhibit, who led a recent tour of the show. “His woodland scenes in particular can have a sense of mystery and even magic.”

Esther Bell, the Clark’s deputy director and chief curator, said the Munch exhibit had been in varying stages of planning and discussion for about a decade; it came together in recent years in collaboration with the Munch Museum (Munch Museet) in Oslo, Norway, and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.

The exhibit, which runs through Oct. 15 and will be the only North American showing of the work, comes just two years after the Clark featured the first North American display of work by Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup, a contemporary of sorts of Munch.

But Bell said it’s simply a “happy coincidence” that the two exhibits have been staged this close together: “We were working on (the Munch exhibit) for a long time.”

Clarke, a previous Clark Institute curator who today works with the Art Institute of Chicago, says it’s no secret that Munch had a troubled personal life. His mother and a beloved older sister died when he was growing up, his father was obsessively religious, and Munch himself was often ill as a boy and young teen.

As an adult, Munch struggled at times with mental health issues and heavy drinking, went through a number of unhappy love affairs, and never married (he died in 1944). As a consequence, said Clarke, his artwork has often been viewed as an extension of his mental state.

But, she added, “By looking at his landscape paintings through a different lens, we can see how important the natural world was to him as a subject.” In an age of growing industrialization, Clarke added, Munch was committed to capturing the beauty of nature and using that as a means for examining human psychology.

Forest, field, shore and more

“Trembling Earth” is divided into six sections, and the first, “Into the Forest,” showcases the artist’s depiction of Norway’s dense groves of pine and elm, as well as forests in Germany. His woodland paintings could be the settings for romantic encounters between couples, for children wandering into fairytale settings, or a lament about heavy logging.

For instance, “The Yellow Log,” from 1912, features a dark forest set against snow, with a large yellow log, culled from a felled tree that’s been stripped of its bark, at the painting’s center. The bright splash of color seems almost carnivalesque and distinctly out of place against the sober backdrop.

The expressionist “Children in the Forest,” from 1901-1902, presents five tiny figures approaching a line of towering pine trees, a number of which seem to have otherworldly dimensions, such as one that looks like a giant hooded figure and another that resembles a twisting body.

Clarke says Munch also spent considerable time along a fjord south of Oslo, finding a strong emotional connection to the places where water met land. “Shorelines were the loves of his life,” she said.

Indeed, in an exhibit section titled “On the Shore,” a number of paintings share a common motif, with the moon projecting a beam of light across an expanse of water, leading to a shore made up of layered horizontal lines of grass and trees, rocks and sand.

They’re beautiful images on their own, Clarke writes in an accompanying catalog, but much more than that: Works such as “Summer Night by the Beach,” she says, “evoke the shore and water as living, breathing entities.”

Yet these shoreline works, just as Munch’s paintings of forests, can also serve as the settings for human interactions, Clarke noted – sometimes bleak ones.

In “Separation,” from 1896, a young woman facing out to sea wears a long, flowing dress that becomes part of the shoreline, and her hair also flows backward to the chest of a young man who wears black; he clutches a bleeding hand over his heart, looking very much the downcast, jilted lover, yet he’s still connected to the woman.

Along similar lines, “Melancholy,” from 1891, depicts a man with his head resting in his hand sitting along a shoreline, staring moodily out to sea.

Still, other paintings simply celebrate the beauty and power of nature, and they place people within them in that context. “The Haymaker,” from 1917, centers on a farmer in a field raking hay – Munch admired traditional farming practices – and its color and tone suggest a warm connection between man and nature.

And “Girl Under the Apple Tree,” from 1904, offers a touch of Van Gogh with the swirling branches and foliage of the apple tree in question; the bucolic scene includes colorful greenery all around and a farmhouse, partly visible behind a woman standing in the painting’s foreground.

Trine Otte Bak Nielsen, a curator with the Munch Museum in Oslo, said Munch studied art in France and Germany in the late 19th century and was influenced by Van Gogh and his post-Impressionist work, using that and other sources to forge his own expressionist style.

Perhaps the most unusual section of “Trembling Earth” is called “Cycles of Nature,” a mix of paintings, drawings and lithographs that reflect Munch’s interests in philosophy, religion, and the natural sciences.

Neilsen pointed to his 1916 drawing “Metabolism,” in which plants with anthropomorphic features grow out of a skeleton below ground, while above that a pregnant woman stands amid plants and a tree; the sun shines on her body, seeming to nourish her baby and the flora.

Munch “sees nature and man as one,” said Nielsen.

In the end, the organizers of “Trembling Earth” suggest that the artist, in his own way, may have anticipated the problems that continued industrialization would bring to those vital cycles of nature.

As they write in the exhibit catalog, “The multi-layered, open-ended character of Munch’s visions makes his works highly pertinent at a time haunted by the instability of natural systems and deeply troubling scenarios of future climate change.”

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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