In ‘Trembling Earth’ at the Clark, Munch’s prescient view of nature in peril

Munch himself had something similar in mind. On a walk with friends, he had seen an apocalyptic sunset in the Norweigian skies near home, coursing with “clouds like blood and tongues of fire” hanging over Oslo, he later wrote. “I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.”

Munch was deeply attuned to the natural world, something the overwhelming, overly broad presence of “The Scream” all but obscures in the public imagination. “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth,” an exhibition of more than 70 of his landscapes and nature scenes at the Clark Art Institute, opens the door wide to the particular anxieties of an artist wound tight by the growing presence of a rapidly industrializing world.

Yes, “The Scream” is here, an 1895 lithograph; it’s tucked in a corner two-thirds of the way through. The show sidesteps its fame to offer a fresh, focused view into Munch’s connection to a landscape changing literally before his eyes.

Modernity was in full bloom in Munch’s early years. By the time he was born in 1863, in Löten, Norway, the industrial revolution had instigated mass migrations to cities, as rural laborers sought work in the burgeoning factory systems. Its effect on countrysides all over Europe and North America — depopulation, and then rough transformation in the face of mass-scale logging and agricultural enterprise — brought a harried uncertainty to daily life.

Munch had been through a litany of familial trauma early. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5; at 14, it would claim his sister. Nature offered solace, but threat loomed. He worried for the environment’s well-being, but also, presciently, what might happen if humanity caused too much damage, too quickly.

The show’s introductory chapter, “The Forest,” offers no idyll. “The Yellow Log,” from 1912, fixes jaundiced felled trees at its heart, surrounded by thick purple-trunked pines in the bloom of health. He painted “From Thüringerwald,” 1912, at a nature retreat, hoping it would ease his alcoholic angst; it depicts a fleshy pink path cut through a glade like a cleaver through raw meat. “The Magic Forest,” 1919-25, loose and haphazard, puts an upbeat title to a thoroughly sinister scene: A raggedly-sketched mother and child hold hands in the foreground, set to enter a denuded stand of trees alive with menace under a seething sky.

No one would ever accuse Munch of optimism. “[S]ickness, anxiety and death were the dark angels that guarded my cradle,” he once wrote. His struggles with family disaster and mental illness darkened his mood early on; addiction shaded it to black.

At the same time, his painterly life could be rich with color, never more so than when suffused with the natural world. In a telling episode of the exhibition, “The Cultivated Landscape,” Munch’s paeans to rural life portray a softness for the world that feel uncharacteristically sunny.

That sentiment struck me as hewing close to the Barbizon School in France, which preceded the exuberance of Impressionism with soft brushwork and a dun palette that paid homage to rural workers. Those works, by artists like Corot and Millet were elegy, not celebration — a somber look at a way of life fading away.

For Munch, agrarian scenes could offer an opportunity for rare exultant pleasure: The bold, vigorous strokes that coalesce into “Spring Ploughing,” 1916, portray a pair of horses, one in fiery golden hues, the other in deep purple and blue, plying fields of pink, lavender, and orange; in “The Haymaker,” 1917, a worker scythes a glittering stand of grass under a sky bursting with lavender clouds. The richness of a late work, “Woman with Pumpkin,” 1942, enveloped in a verdant canopy of greens quivering with life, verges dangerously close to joy.

Despite the respite, Munch was still Munch; nature sustained and nurtured as it threatened to consume. “The Storm” is a close cousin of “The Scream,” made the same year. Its group of women hold the same pose — heads clasped in hands, frozen in terror — under a bleakly luminous sky. Nearby, “Starry Night,” 1922-24, holds none of the jubilant wonder of its more famous namesake by Vincent Van Gogh. A winter nocturne, the frigid scene shows Munch’s own shadow thrown onto the snow under a night sky ablaze with stiff, jagged swipes of icy blue-green paint — the artist crystallizing the frigid eeriness of the northern lights.

Munch wasn’t the first to use landscape as a mirror to the soul. But has anyone done it so vividly, and with such conviction? In “Separation,” 1896 — a thinly painted masterwork with the texture of the canvas plainly visible through the lightness of the the artist’s hand — a man clutches his heart, literally bleeding, as a shimmering wraith of a woman glides toward a shore. His blood feeds the plant at his feet; as he withers, it thrives.

Mutability and transformation, rot, decay, new growth from the old — the mechanisms by which life goes on — all figure into Munch’s absorbing take on the natural world. As a body of work, it has dizzying range: The serenity of his many coastal scenes, like the limpid glow of the moon over tranquil waters in “Moonlight,” 1905, chafe with works like “Beach,” 1904, a rocky shore that looks like an array of disembodied organs left to bake in the sun.

With its thickly applied paint and fleshy tones, I thought of no one so much as Philip Guston, who knew a thing or two about bodies and how they break. I don’t know for sure whether there was a direct influence, but Munch and Guston are kindred souls in their tortured view of a world in constant tumult, their hearts wide open to feel all of it.

Munch experienced nature in extremes, both its consuming perils and ebullient joys. The eruptive pleasure of “The Sun,” 1905, radiating hard shafts of light every which way over mountain and sea, has overtones of rapturous spirituality; right beside it, “Death and Crystallization,” 1909, depicts skeletal remains swallowed underground.

Rarely, it seems, did Munch revel in the simple pleasures; even so, “Trembling Earth” gives it a go. We land, finally, in “Chosen Places,” where Munch found as much comfort as he ever might (a 1908 self-portrait, one of several in the show, is by far the most placid and flattering, the artist framed by shimmering blue sky). “Waves,” 1908, with its breezy undulating bands of soft green, blue, and purple, is almost abstract; three paintings of men nude by the seaside are loose with spontaneous innovation. (For “Young Man on Beach,” 1908, Munch mixed sand into his paint, adding textural depth to the richly colored surface.)

Even when most at ease, something simmered in Munch. Three paintings of an identical scene of women on the same bridge transform it over time: In 1902, the scene is bright and bursting with lively color; in 1903, it fades to pale-toned and ethereal; and by 1904, Munch had rendered it heavy and turgid, stifling skies pressing down on a group of girls layered thick with paint.

It connects: Munch spent his life watching nervously as the world changed. He left little doubt which direction he thought it would take.

EDVARD MUNCH: TREMBLING EARTH

Through Oct. 15, Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown. 413-458-2303, www.clarkart.edu

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheMurrayWhyte.