This evening Sue Prideaux was presented with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, the oldest literary prize in the UK and, indeed, the third oldest in the world. It is pre-dated only by the Nobel and the Prix Goncourt. The James Tait Black enjoys a peculiarly honourable place among literary prizes. It is second to none for academic integrity, being awarded by senior members of Edinburgh University after a rigorous selection process by graduate students in Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, the oldest Department of English Literature in the world.
Previous winners include such literary greats as D.H.Lawrence, E.M.Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene.
Two prizes are awarded annually, one for biography and one for fiction. The 2006 fiction prize was won by Ian McEwan for his novel Saturday.
The prizes were awarded by Ian Rankin, a former University of Edinburgh English Literature student.
“My colleague Roger Savage, who has judged the biography prize for several years, agrees with me that this year the submissions for both biography and novel have produced an impressive short list. By the same token, neither of us is in any doubt that for sheer excellence of organisation and delivery as well as sheer reading pleasure, Ian McEwan and Sue Prideaux fully justify their selection as winners,” said Professor Colin Nicholson, manager and novel judge of the awards.
The committee included Ian Rankin and the distinguished BBC journalist James Naughtie and Alexander McCall Smith, a Professor of Law at Edinburgh University.
The 2006 biography long list comprised some sixty books. The short list was:
Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography by Max Egremont.
Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce by Nigel Farndale.
The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson by Roger Knight.
Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom by Roger Pearson
Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream by Sue Prideaux.

In her acceptance speech, Sue Prideaux praised the spiritual generosity of the disinterested patrons of the arts whose long-ago benefactions bestowed recognition and encouragement on struggling artists.

Edvard Munch: the Modern Life of the Soul, the splendid  show that ran at MoMA, New York, between 19 Feb – 8 May 2006, was the best attended show in New York that year, according to statistics published in The Art Newspaper (March 2007).  A total of 419,563 visitors attended; 6,184 a day. Sue Prideaux gave a walk-through talk on the show in the gallery for CNN’s popular Sunday morning TV programme ‘Sunday.’

The same show came off well in terms of all art shows world-wide where, according to the same source, it attained 5th place overall. It came 3rd in the Impressionist and Modern top ten. With another world record price achieved in the auction rooms, it seems Munch’s time has come.

Sue Prideaux had the privilege of writing the introduction to Sotheby’s catalogue of the Olsen collection,  eight paintings by Munch sold by Fred Olsen at Sotheby’s in London at their Impressionist and Modern Art sale on February 7th 2006.   Selling for a total of 16.9 millions pounds,  they greatly exceeded their high estimate. A world record price of 6.2 million pounds was fetched by ‘Summer Day’, originally part of the Linde frieze. (See description of the paintings in the item below. ) The haunting ‘Self-portrait against two coloured ground’  wildly exceeded its estimate, selling for £3,600,000 with strong competition from six bidders.  International interest in the  sale was intense. It seems that among the younger  generation of collectors, Munch’s work is at last achieving its proper value within the context of the art of his time.

February 2006

The paintings are to be auctioned on February 7th and Sue Prideaux has written the introduction to Sotheby’s catalogue.

Eight important paintings and four graphic works from the private collection of Fred Olsen are being sold at Sotheby’s in London on February 7, 2006. The pictures can be seen on Sotheby’s website www.sothebys.com. It’s worth a look; they are not pictures you often see except in catalogues of past exhibitions to which they have been lent. The earliest is a sensitive ‘Head of an Old Woman’ 1883, executed in charcoal and watercolour in 1883 when Munch was only twenty. It supports his remark that Rembrandt was an early influence. It also demonstrates the young Munch’s own precocious insight into the human condition.
‘Self-portrait on two-coloured background’ c.1904 is probably the most glamorous of Munch’s many self-portraits. The figure is introspective and melancholy: the existential hero whose mystery is increased by using his deeply-shadowed eye sockets like a pair of dark glasses to hide his eyes and his thoughts. Portraits from this time are often loaded with tension by the simple means of placing the subject in relation to the point in space where two corners meet; this portrait simplifies the corner treatment, reducing it two colour fields of yellow and green.
A couple of gloriously colourful and optimistic canvases from Nedre Ramme, circa 1915, are painted in high summer and show that Munch’s interest in depicting blinding sunlight continued after he had painted the monumental ‘Sun’ for the Aula. In one of the canvases his young model Ingeborg sunbathes by the seashore, and the other, ‘Bathing Men’ is interesting to contrast with his earlier treatment of the subject painted in Warnemunde 1907-09. This later treatment is more lyrical, more painterly, and less Body Beautiful than the Warnemunde paintings; the bathing men no longer advance along the beach as naked conquerors, they are now very much in harmony with the elements of sun and sea. ‘The Waves’ and ‘Horses’ are two monumental canvases belonging to the period when he had moved to Ekely and was celebrating nature’s harmonies on large canvases. ‘Self-portrait with Spanish flu’ provides an interesting and seldom seen conclusion to the Spanish ‘flu series. The bright, light treatment speaks of his exhilaration at escaping death, while the sketchiness and minimal covering of the canvas hint at the physical weakness of the convalescent artist as he created the picture.
Finally, the enormous ‘Summer Day’ 1904-08 is a painting with a great deal of history. Originally part of the frieze commissioned for the room of the Linde children, Dr Linde’s commission specified “…no kissing or loving couples; the children as yet have no knowledge of such things.” Munch of course was unable to refrain and Linde had ample grounds for his subsequent rejection of the frieze. Curt Glaser bought ‘Summer Day’ which then found its way to the National Gallery of Berlin. The picture was de-accessioned as ‘Degenerate Art’ and Hermann Göring promptly appropriated it for his own collection until pressure from Hitler, who detested Munch’s art, forced him to give it up in 1939. A fuller article by Sue Prideaux can be found in  Sotheby’s catalogue ‘Important Works by Edvard Munch from the Olsen Collection’.