Proof, if it were needed, that art is
far more than the sum of a couple of
columns in a ledger, can be found in the
National Gallery, where a collection of Edvard
Munch prints is on exhibition until December.
Like almost every other lay person, your
correspondent had no previous knowledge
of the Norwegian artist’s work bar his iconic
‘The Scream’, a painting that resounds down
through the work of Frances Bacon, Franz Kafka,
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, Wes Craven and pretty much
anything recorded by Nirvana. “For several years I
was almost mad,” the painter said. “You know my
picture, ‘The Scream’? I was stretched to the limit
– nature was screaming in my blood. After that I
gave up hope ever of being able to love again.”
But it’s far from his most striking work. Take
a look at darkly sensual works such as ‘Death
& The Woman’, ‘Madonna’ and ‘The Vampire’
(after Baudelaire’s poem). Or the many aching
depictions of estranged lovers becalmed by sea
shores. Even his portraits of bohemian life are
shot through with undercurrents of jealousy and
angst. PC police often accuse him of being Afraid
of Women (and yes, his girl with red hair and
green eyes is certainly an unearthly creature),
but this writer would assert that he was afraid
of the intensity of his own feelings for them. For
all their sorrow, these works are charged with an
extraordinary energy.
Alongside Kafka, Munch was one of the chief
the architects of 20th century western anxiety in
art. Looking at his work in the dim, hushed and
almost chapel-like rooms of the Gallery, you don’t
need to be a cultural historian to realise that Fritz
Lang and FW Murnau didn’t lick Expressionism
off the stones. Like Poe (who he closely resembles
in his unflinching self portrait, and whose stories
his father read to him as a boy) Munch lived a
life plagued by the vapours and a fair amount of
personal loss – his mother died when he was four,
his sister Sophie when he was 14.
Sophie’s death inspired perhaps his greatest and
most harrowing work, ‘The Sick Child’, a portrait
of a badly ailing young girl with wispy, thinning
hair, eyes underscored by horrible shadows,
close to death, but luminous with grace and
acceptance.
The casual stroller can walk into the Munch
exhibition a neophyte and emerge 45 minutes
later feeling like they’ve had an intimate
conversation with an extraordinary – albeit
tormented – character, a man who penetrated the
mysteries of sex, obsession and death as deeply as
any one artist can. In his own words: “From my
rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them
and that is eternity.” These prints are the petals
of those flowers, pressed and preserved for the
benefit of generations.