IN our text about that other painting by de Veyra titled Bacchus and Ariadne, we mentioned the difference between a history, or historia, painting and a historical one, and how de Veyra’s painting became a combination of the two sorts of subgenre. This combine also happens in this other painting de Veyra titled O My God! (or, Somebody Squealed on Przybyszewski and Madonna). This latter painting also has a bunch of history as well as speculative narration in it.

    But first let us say this. Vincent van Gogh had an animated film on him, or on a part of his life, titled Loving Vincent. De Veyra is in fact trying to do the same treatment here, in this painting, but this time on a facet of Edvard Munch’s life. This, then, is de Veyra’s Loving Munch, creating a tribute history-cum-historical painting.

    Let us elucidate:

    The most famous Munch painting is The Scream, isn’t it? It’s been described as the 20th century Mona Lisa, as a portrait of modern man’s anxiety. We can’t be certain of that, really, but it was indeed a personal painting for Munch—nothing more, nothing less. In fact, a lot of expressionist painters painted personal paintings, especially the Northern ones.

    Now, the next most famous Munch painting is arguably Madonna. And de Veyra believes that it is more of a Decadent Movement painting than an expressionist one.

    Many don’t know that these two paintings are among those that Munch kept on painting versions of, as if they were photographs of most memorable moments in the painter’s life, moments that he just had to visit again and again.

    Now, between the versions of The Scream and Madonna, the difference is negligible. Contrast that fact with his versions for, say, Jealousy, the difference between which is not negligible; each version is set in a different location, with a different set of characters, a different angle, and so on. This is not so with the versions of The Scream and Madonna. And de Veyra’s theory is that these two paintings are connected.

    That is the very reason why we say it is his Loving Munch, because, like Loving Vincent, it tells of a lover. You see, Munch’s model for Madonna was Dagny Juel, who was at that time Munch’s lover. Or rather, Munch was her lover, among a few other lovers, the playwright, novelist and painter August Strindberg among them.

    Now, it seems that the situation regarding Juel’s other liaisons did not prompt Munch to paint his first Jealousy painting. After all, this was the period of the Decadent Movement, which was essentially similar to the hippie days or the days of the 1970s-‘80s London punk scene. De Veyra suspects that BDSM sex was operative during that period, along with group sex, lover swapping, open marriages, and so on, even Satanism or pseudo-Satanism (Baudelaire) and virtue in suicide (Hans Jæger). Munch seemed to have been a part of all this for a while.

    No wonder, then, that his Madonna was contemporaneously read as a demonic-looking Madonna (or Virgin Mary), with a red beret for a halo and in a pose that looked like something from bondage sex. Moreover, the movement of colors around the figure also looked somewhat like the lips and mouth of a vaginal opening. No wonder people, especially critics in Germany, initially disapproved of his oeuvres, even when collectors started to buy Munchs a little later and viewers came pouring into his exhibitions intrigued.

    Munch painted The Scream and started on his journey of pessimism towards love when Juel married the Satanist novelist Stanislaw Przybyszewski. After noting this, de Veyra was inspired to repaint the two Munch paintings side by side, to connect them in what seems in the picture like a single setting (there are two posts, made from some of the elements in some of Munch’s versions).

    Again, de Veyra re-painted these two works as a form of homage, i.e., as a process of trying to have a taste or feel of how it was for Munch to go through the painting of them, the way devotees would lift a heavy wooden cross during Holy Week to have a bit of taste of, or feel for, Christ’s struggle.

    Now, it is de Veyra’s belief that those two Munch works, if indeed they are connected, would not be scenes as haunting to Munch if Juel had not been murdered. And that is the reason why de Veyra went through the process of re-painting them, the process also being a sympathetic gesture toward Munch’s melancholic attitude toward his former girlfriend who married a Satanist and went on to go through an open marriage, an open marriage wherein Przybyszewski would even introduce her to the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, allegedly so the latter could give the former a grant from the Polish Academy of Talent. And then, in this open marriage, Juel went on to die of murder or homicide under the hands of another lover introduced by Przybyszewski.

    It may be true that Przybeszewski, who later left Juel for the wife of his friend-poet Jan Kasprowicz, arranged for her murder with the son of a miner named Władysław Emeryk, who, incidentally, was also one of Juel’s lovers in the open marriage. However, it is also possible that the murder in a hotel room was not a murder at all but an accident from a hoplophilic act. But, anyway, Przybyszewski was previously a suspect in the murder of his former common-law wife whom he left for Juel, putting people’s belief in Przybyszewski’s direct hand in Juel’s murder.

    Incidentally, Emeryk tried to shoot himself the next day of the murder or homicide.

    Now, de Veyra colored his Madonna’s hair red to transfer the redness of the beret-cum-Madonna-halo in the original painting to a larger area, to further evoke blood thus, and also to get rid of the black hair with a red halo which, in combination, de Veyra thinks was responsible for the association with Satanism. To further the blood context, he had the waters of the fjord in the Scream part of his painting in red as well.

    But here is one added feature; there is actually a story that says one of the factors that made Munch stop at the scene in The Scream was the animal shrieks from a nearby slaughterhouse at this fjord near Oslo during this period. So de Veyra imagined some of the blood from the slaughterhouse thrown or leaking toward the fjord’s waters. That is also the reason why he painted the other figures on the bridge, or bay walk, green, as an environmentalist trope, yes, but primarily to refer to little green men or aliens, to say how we are aliens to our own planet’s environment.

    And why is the screamer in yellow? Well, he/she is a squealer, is he/she not? That is, the bringer of bad news, like the news about Juel’s marriage and then death. (Remember, there were four versions of The Scream from the one in 1893, Juel’s year of marriage to Przybyszewski, to beyond Juel’s death in 1901. One version was a lithograph that had several editions.) The squealer is also in yellow because yellow is the color of the Pope (read: religion’s morality calls), but is also the color of Judas Iscariot (read: the call of betrayal).