ART
Few painters stand out from
their times as fiercely as
Edvard Munch. Born in
Norway in 1863, he really was
a one-off. His most famous
painting, The Scream, with the
howling munchkin clasping
his hands to his head while
the world swirls around
him like the contents of a
Kenwood mixer, was painted
in 1893. It’s an astonishingly
progressive image.
To pluck a comparison
out of the air, 1893 was also
the year in which, here in
England, Edward Burne-Jones
was still working on The
Arming and Departure of the
Knights of the Round Table on
the Quest of the Holy Grail,
with Guinevere and King
Arthur on one side and Sir
Galahad on the other.
Munch’s art wasn’t just
responding to another
drumbeat. It was from
another planet.
A gripping, whispery,
haunting selection of his
paintings has arrived at the
Courtauld. It has been
borrowed from the Kode Art
Museum in Bergen, and
brings 18 important pictures
from Norway in a sudden and
stirring cascade. His paintings
are rare in Britain. The Tate
owns one. And that’s it.
The show makes several
things quickly obvious.
The first is his technical
progressiveness. Look
closely into any
picture here and
you will see paint
doing things that
no one had ever
previously asked of
it. A throbbing stack of
This show of the Norwegian artist’s
most personal work is a masterclass
in painting, desire and terror
A rare ray
of sunshine
from Munch
KODE BERGEN ART MUSEUM, THE RASMUS MEYER COLLECTIONyellows — a traffic light with
all its colours stuck on amber
— describes the moonlight
bouncing off some wet rocks
on a beach. A couple of
slashes, so quick they could
win a fencing gold at the
Olympics, evoke, perfectly,
a pier jutting into the ocean.
The shimmers and splodges
around a woman’s head
radiate out, out, out, like
homemade radar markings
that track her thoughts.
Just as tangible as the
extraordinary inventiveness
of his technique is the
profound misery of his
mindset. Munch’s art throbs
with Scandi pessimism,
especially on the subject of
women. It even infects the rest
of the Courtauld’s collection.
I swear the Renoirs looked
glummer when I came out
than they had when I went in.
One good thing about
seasonal affective disorder —
he was surely a SAD sufferer
— is that it makes you
appreciate the sun more
actively on the rare occasions
that you encounter it. The
earliest painting here,
Morning, was painted in 1884,
when Munch was just 20.
It shows a young woman
staring out of the window as
the sun pours in and bleaches
her bedroom. One of her feet
is bare. Her blouse is undone.
So some taking off or putting
on has been going on, and a
sly sexual storyline is being
sneaked into the picture, as
often happens with Munch.
But, overwhelmingly,
Morning remains an
emotional and eloquent
tribute to the power
of the sun.
From now on it’s
Nordic noir all the
way. In 1889 he
paints his sister
Inger on the beach.
It’s a summer night bythe fjord and the sun, in a
final wave to the landscape,
is doing spooky and silvery
things with the reflections.
Inger wears a white dress.
This time the ecstatically
glowing linen makes her
look ghostly.
Summer Night, Inger on
the Beach hovers beautifully
between Munch’s first style
and the wild and inventive
ways ahead. By the next
picture his paint has begun
snaking around the shapes in
that swirling, eerie, simplified
style we know from The
Scream. It’s a style that seems
to elide the act of painting
with the act of thinking.
Munch doesn’t just paint
scenes. He paints moods.
Glum ones.
Evening on Karl Johan,
from 1892, is a disquieting
Oslo street view featuring a
crowd of Scream-like skulls
marching towards us like
a parade of undertakers. A
line of TS Eliot forced itself
unbidden into my thoughts:
“So many, I had not thought
death had undone so many.”
At the Death Bed, from
1895, shows the corpse of
Munch’s elder sister Sophie,
surrounded by the family.
She had died of TB when
he was 13. Yet he waitedtill he was 32 before he
memorialised her passing in
this grim farewell.
The art here never stops
feeling intensely personal.
And its me, me, me moods
keep leading Munch to the
subject of women. Unable in
real life to maintain a
balanced relationship with the
ones who drifted in and out of
his studio, he viewed them in
his art with a tremulous mix
of desire and terror.
Woman in Three Stages,
from 1894, is a particularly
weird bit of Scandi symbolism
in which a young girl in
virginal white on the left
becomes a mature nude
in the middle and a white-
faced widow in black on the
right. Skulking in the shadows
is a peeping man. I wasadmiring the stream of dark
red paint descending from
the central nude on technical
grounds when I suddenly
recognised it as a stream
of blood. The first period
blood in art?
A pretty picture, from 1901,
Children Playing in the Street
in Asgardstrand, seems bright
and optimistic, until you focus
on the unsmiling little girl in
the foreground — dressed
again in symbolic Munch
white — and notice how the
little boys lying on the ground
on the left seem to be ogling
her. Is this really a picture
about the battle of the sexes
featuring a cast of ten-year-
olds? I’m afraid it is.
Much of this angsty Nordic
symbolism teeters on the^
edge of ridiculousness.
It’s saved from modern
disqualification by the
spectacular inventiveness
of the paintwork, and the
sense you get in most pictures
that Munch may be talking
about himself, but he’s
thinking about the rest of us.
He’s not the only one who’s
lost. We all are. cEdvard Munch: Masterpieces
from Bergen is at the
Courtauld Gallery, London
WC2, until Sep 4WALDEMAR
JANUSZCZAK
Light and shade Munch’s
1884 painting Morning is the
earliest work in the exhibitionTHE
CRITICSFor Munch,
it’s me me me
— and women
5 June 2022 11