The sale of Petter Olsen’s Scream by Sotheby’s carries a $80 million price tag. While the highest pre-sale estimate the auction house have ever put on a painting, this is nevertheless ludicrously low when you consider the top price paid for a painting, Cezanne’s Card Players, was  $250 million last year. Fifteen paintings have already broken the $80 million barrier.  I’ll bet on $300 million.

Reviews for

 

Strindberg: a Life – winner  of the 2012 Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction,  shortlisted for the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize for non fiction and for the 2012 Sheridan Morley Prize for theatre biography.

 

“What an absolutely extraordinary man August Strindberg was, and what a tormented, demented life he led. I haven’t read such a fascinating biography for ages… You can see how much fun [Sue Prideaux] is having with Strindberg. Anyone reading her marvellous book will have that much fun too.” Sam Leith, The Spectator.

“A rich and absorbing biography…writing the life of a frenzied, unstable genius like Strindberg is an enormous challenge, and Prideaux rises to it with fine authority.” John Carey, The Sunday Times.

“Sue Prideaux has written a lively, enlightening, and at times thrilling life of an extraordinary artist… Prideaux also writes very movingly of the playwright’s last years… she is persuasive in conveying Strindberg’s greatness and the novelty of his achievement.”  John Banville, The New York Review of Books.

“An absorbing new study…Prideaux is a deft guide to the absinthe-heavy bohemian underworlds of Berlin and Paris which Strindberg inhabited for much of the 1890s.”  Claudia FitzHerbert, Daily Telegraph.

“The best biography I’ve read in ages.” Matthew Sweet, Nightwaves, BBC radio 4.

“A deeply researched and engrossing biography…the copious selection of his elemental canvases and celestographs is one beauty of this outstandingly produced book…Prideaux opens her book with a bravura chapter on the origins of Miss Julie, excels in relating his characters to their living originals, and in showing how they were transformed by the process of post-naturalism.”  Irving Wardle, Literary Review.

“Fascinating and beautifully written.” Anthony Beevor, The Sunday Telegraph.

“In Prideaux’s hands, Strindberg, a vulnerable but also naively determined man with striking chaotic hair like a combed back walnut whip, comes vividly to life. Indeed the joy of her book is in the detail, from quoted letters and diaries and some stunning photography.” Tim Auld, The Sunday Telegraph.

“The Strindberg portrayed in this detailed, accessible biography, which coincides with the centenary of his death on 12 May 2012, reveals a man and a writer few in the English speaking world will have the notion of… Sue Prideaux’s lively account of a wilful, passionate, often deranged pilgrimage in search of truth, artistic honest and, finally God, will change  our narrow perspective on the astonishing polymath.” Robert Carver, The Tablet.

“An exhaustingly researched biography… and a deft piece of detective work.” David Stenhouse, Scotland on Sunday.

“This unstable genius is brought to book in this fine study.” Sunday Times Culture.

“very readable” The Art Newspaper.

 

Edvard Munch et L’Oeil modern at the Pompidou 

Centre Pompidou 22 September 2011 – 9 January 2012

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt  9 February – 13 May 2012

Tate Modern,  London 8 June – 12 October 2012.

 Edvard Munch: l’œil moderne sets out to shatter the myth of Munch the solitary genius preoccupied exclusively by his interior world.  About time.  Munch was keenly interested in new ideas and quick to incorporate them into his art. He read Einstein’s books on theoretical physics as they came out and absorbed them into his religious writings and paintings such as The Sun, which we see in this exhibition along with several Worker pictures inspired by contemporary politics as Communism swept Russia. Like Hockney, Munch loved new technology; he bought his first camera in 1902 and a cine camera in 1927.

The influence of early film and photography on paintings is a theme of several current exhibitions. We saw it at Degas and the Ballet (Royal Academy, London) and Snapshot: Painters and Photography 1888-1915 (van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, travelling to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC and the Indianapolis Museum) where almost as many early photographs and movies are displayed as paintings. Degas, Bonnard, Vuillard et al. used their cameras as notebooks and to increase their understanding of anatomy and movement. Munch used his camera to smash boundaries.

It was the age of apparitional hoax photography and Munch borrowed the Spiritualist technique of multiple exposures to explore the relationship between the artist and the artwork.  First he would photograph his own work, a single canvas or a carefully chosen group, and then he would place himself in front of the work and trigger the second exposure. The solid becomes ghostly, the speculation ontological. Does the transparent figure of the artist grow out of the blurry paintings – or them from him?    Sometimes he would move during the exposure like an apparition walking through the work (Munch designed sets for Ibsen’s Ghosts whose Norwegian title Gengangere means those who walk through or revisit). Sometimes he simply cast his shadow across his canvases. Sometimes he sketched on top of the photographs, usually jokey cartoon figures like himself ski-jumping across the sky or the devil popping up in a corner or a dog relieving itself against a tree, and yet he kept these pictures, they meant something to him. Private jokes? A further, and definitely  serious development of the identity jigsaw was to take up the poses of his important paintings such as The Death of Marat and photograph himself in the pose. Complex and peculiarly modern, Munch’s photographs were not designed for exhibition, but part of a private thought process.

In 1926 Oslo’s first cinema opened and Munch loved to go, taking   his dogs and keeping up a running commentary so the animals wouldn’t lose the plot.  The following year he purchased a cine camera and the exhibition runs some of his movies on a loop. Possibly related to Neue Sachlichkeit, the new objectivity, they might claim the title ‘father of video installation’, so random, unshaped and intriguing are they.

This major exhibition of 140 paintings, photographs and graphic works is organised into themed rooms relating to different modern developments of his time. Rooms called ‘The Cinema Lover’, ‘On Stage’, ‘Space’, ‘Compulsion’, and so on, can get a little laboured, not to say bossy, and if you start to wonder why Galloping Horse is in ‘Space’ rather than ‘The Outside World’ you are lost. It’s a bad idea to get hung up on what is where or you’ll miss the joy of a really tremendous show whose first two, and last two, rooms are a curatorial triumph.

The first room ‘Prologue’ shows six of the major paintings: Kiss, Vampire, Puberty, Sick Child, The Girls on the Bridge and The Lonely Ones. The second room ‘Reprise’ shows later versions of the same six.  It is a brilliant start to a show that encompasses the full spectrum of Munch’s rich talent. Ravishing landscapes include    Starry Night, Red Virginia Creeper and Murderer in the Avenue.   Political paintings include Workers in Snow and Workers on their Way Home. Women, naturally, are well represented and the desolate room of twelve versions of Weeping Woman contrasts with the light-hearted and lightly-painted Women in the Bath.  Children enchant in New Snow in the Avenue and Children in the Street. A fist-fight with a friend who had questioned Munch’s patriotism gives us the group of paintings on the theme of The Fight seldom seen outside Oslo. Making fun of war, which Munch hated, the mood is early-movie slapstick comedy while the composition mimics the scattering of devastated bodies in the war photography Munch saw in magazines.

Munch was a great innovator in the field of graphic art and this is underrepresented though happily it does include Kiss in the Fields, the astounding minimalist woodcut he was working on when he died. Also omitted are Scream and Madonna which is odd when you think how absolutely modern they were at the time, and remain. Elephants in the room, the absence of these paintings will not help attendance figures.

In 1930, aged 67, a haemorrhage in the vitreous humour of the right eye caused its total loss of sight, a mental and physical disaster for any artist. The penultimate room of the exhibition is devoted to the episode and it proves, if proof is still needed, that Munch’s interior conclusions fed upon outward events. Throughout this partial blindness he does not keep a self-pitying journal but he does keep a scientific record by covering his good eye with his hand and painting what he can see.  At first he sees only bright, abstract colour patterns which he records in quick watercolours.  Next soupy shadows that gradually come into focus as the weeks go by. At first a large blood clot shaped like a skull takes up about a third of his returning vision; eventually the skull shrinks into the shape of an ever-smaller bird. His eye specialist commented that this meticulous record would be invaluable for medical textbooks on the condition.

Munch made a good death aged 80, still experimenting and simplifying his work. Like Rembrandt, the late self-portraits are peculiarly redemptive and uplifting. Curators are crazy if they do not end any Munch exhibition with a run of them. Fortunately the curators of Edvard Munch: l’œil moderne are not frightened to finish on this cliché. The large crowd in the Pompidou became noticeably quieter in the last room as they faced up to death with Munch, their silence a testament to the universality of his vision.

‘We are all now used to reading literary biographies which painstakingly set out to prove that a writer’s life was identical with his oeuvre and that the books were wholly autobiographical. So it’s an interesting experience to see this well-worn literary technique applied to Edvard Munch, the one truly great painter produced by Norway and indeed by the four Scandinavian countries. Sue Prideaux is well equipped for the task: part Norwegian, fluent in the language, with a great-uncle, Thomas Olsen, who was one of Munch’s most loyal patrons. She grew up with his art if not with his life.

This first full biography written in English shows, with painful clarity, that his art is compulsively autobiographical. Every time Prideaux produces a nugget of information so bizarre that it seems not only over the top but thoroughly ben trovato there is a note giving the source in the vast Munch archives in Oslo, since he was also an exhaustive verbal recorder of his life.

Rarely in the canon of Western art has there been so much anxiety, fear and deep psychological pain in one artist. That he lived to be 80 and spent only one period in an asylum is a tribute not only to Munch’s physical stamina but to his iron will and his innate, robust psychological strength.

Munch was born in 1863, so sickly that he was immediately baptised in case he did not survive. His mother, 23 years younger than his father, produced five children but died, aged 30, of the TB rife in both 19th-century Norway and her family. The father, Christian, was nearly 50 when Edvard was born, He had graduated from serving on coffin ships to being an army doctor, despite being unable to stand the sight of blood. He was also a deeply Pietist Christian zealot and strict disciplinarian who, when beating his children for minor infractions, would invoke the image of their blessed mother who saw them from heaven and grieved over their misbehaviour. Christian used to read Dostoevsky and Poe to his small children, and was a hopeless economic provider, moving endlessly from one insalubrious flat to another and sending the children out to beg money from their richer relatives. His maternal grandfather had died insane, with spinal TB and Edvard feared for most of his life that he would die of the syphilis that was equally rife and also a precursor of insanity.

The trauma of the loss of his mother was compounded a year or so later by that of his beloved sister Sophie, the posthumous model for one of his greatest paintings, The Sick Child. All his life, he kept the chair in which she died. His brother died at 30 and his sister Laura had to be institutionalised with schizophrenia. Only one of his siblings survived him, his sister Inger, whom, with his maternal aunt Karen, he supported once he could make a living as a painter, with whom he corresponded constantly and lovingly, but whom he could not bring himself to visit.

His education was rudimentary as he entered the best schools but was expelled, not for moral turpitude, but because, being constantly ill, his attendance was so bad he couldn’t keep up. Yet his artistic gifts, largely untaught, manifested themselves at seven and, at 13, he was accepted at the Art Association, an artists’ club where he learnt by copying the works on display. Aged 16, he entered the Technical School because he was good at maths and physics but again left because of illness. It was only then that he decided to become an artist and already he hated the then obligatory varnishing of every oil surface. “No more brown sauce” were his words, echoing Goethe who used the same phrase in his exploration of colour theory in 1810.

Shortly after this, round about the time Ibsen published Ghosts in 1881, Munch entered the Bohemian circle of Kristiania (it did not become Oslo until 1925). His principal mentors were the rumbustious and highly successful painter Christian Krohg and the sinister, syphilitic Hans Jaeger, a stenographer in the Norwegian Parliament. The acknowledged leader of the group, Jaeger was an intellectual wild man, a nihilist who believed that he should drive both his enemies and his disciples to suicide. His effect on Munch happily did not involve suicide but Munch admitted in later life that Jaeger’s influence on him had been profound.

Munch lost his virginity to a well-connected army wife who made him feel guilty as an adulterer and deeply jealous as she simultaneously carried on with other men. Add to this the alcohol he consumed in heroic quantities, the time he spent in brothels and the temptations of a Bohemian crowd, and it’s a miracle that this handsome but frequently sickly youth survived at all, let alone lived to be 80.

Once he began to show his pictures, he always had a tiny group of supporters who enabled him to survive psychologically more or less intact even though he was always on the breadline. He sold an early work to the nascent Norwegian National Gallery and got two state scholarships, one of which stipulated that he had to learn to draw, which took him to Paris where he studied the work of others but took few lessons.

Paris was followed by Berlin and the heady days of The Black Piglet tavern with Strindberg and the beautiful femme fatale Dagny Juel. She ditched both Munch and Strindberg to marry the charismatic Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski and was later murdered by a fraudulent Polish lover. Munch’s relationship with Strindberg was extraordinary. There was intense mutual admiration but, in the end, paranoia induced fear and suspicion on both sides which caused a rift. Both loved and feared women. Strindberg actually married three of them but as Munch described it: “I have always put my art before everything else. Often I felt that Woman would stand in the way of my art. I decided at an early age never to marry.”

The Swede put the Norwegian into his books and plays in a thoroughly unflattering light. When Munch lithographed him he labelled him Stindberg, which means, in Norwegian, “mountain of hot air”. Yet each acknowledged his debt to the other and, given Munch’s fear of “Vampire women”, there are several paintings in the great Frieze of Life sequence which bear traces of Strindberg’s influence as well as the autobiographical elements of the recognisable women in Munch’s life. As with Strindberg, and all devoted paranoiacs, some of those who Munch believed had harmed him had indeed done so, notably Tulla Larsen who had made the first advances and who had, in stalker fashion, done everything possible to turn her lover into her husband. This included threats of breach of promise, fake suicide attempts and the catastrophic pistol episode – no one knows who fired the shot – when the bullet lodged in the middle finger of Munch’s left hand. This left the hand that held his palette and his etching plates permanently maimed, necessitating a glove for the rest of his life. (This event inspired the magnificent Death of Marat painting.) No wonder he declared that women had nutcracker muscles in their thighs and reduced men to soup.

Munch was, at least until he checked himself into Doctor Jacobsen’s psychological clinic in Copenhagen in 1908, a compulsive frequenter of brothels; he once spent an entire Christmas in one. It is a wonder that he escaped the syphilis he feared, but Jacobsen diagnosed only alcoholism as the primary cause of Munch’s temporary insanity. Munch ruefully accepted that he would have, in future, to confine himself to “tobacco-free cigars, alcohol-free drinks and poison-free women”. But, according to Prideaux, he resisted Jacobsen’s psychological probings and effected his own mental cure at the clinic. His stay coincided with a hugely successful show in Kristiania with 60,000 Kroner worth of sales. Munch paid for a celebratory dinner for his friends at his favourite Norwegian watering hole, the Grand Hotel, and kept an open telephone line to his Copenhagen bedside so that he could join in the fun.

Munch had great success in Germany via various avant garde Jewish dealers and enlightened rich patrons, but the post-First World War hyper-inflation ruined them and, despite his early enthusiasm, Goebbels, who wrote him an egregious fan letter on his 70th birthday – in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power – dropped him as soon as the Nazi policy of pillorying Entartete Kunst (Decadent Art) came in. The 80 or so Munchs in German collections were held to official ridicule and then sold on the international market, including Norway, to raise hard currency for National Socialism.

Despite that, the Quisling-led government in occupied Norway during the Second World War tried to make Munch the figurehead of its Honorary Board of Norwegian Artists. Munch refused and the Board was dropped. The government commandeered one of his major houses, failed to get to his hoard of paintings but, on his death, as the author puts it, “hijacked” his corpse and burial so that instead of a simple interment in the family plot, he was given a state funeral with gigantic Nazi insignia and flags.

The years of his success and wealth were lived frugally in a large house at Ekely, whose locked second floor contained his bequest to Norway of thousands of works of art. He had a succession of “poison-free women”, a series of beautiful models whom he painted with undiminished erotic joy and sexual tension.

Munch said that his paintings were his children, even though he gave many of them a somewhat Spartan upbringing, deliberately leaving them not only unvarnished but exposed to the elements in his vast outdoor studio or hung on walls, unframed and with nails through them. His vast heritage of great paintings and lithographs exists as both testament and record of his life. He once wrote: “Just as Leonardo studied the recesses of the human body and dissected cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is universal in the soul.”

Prideaux has written a life which goes a long way towards upholding his aim and anyone who wants to know how and why he painted as he did should read this book.

We are all now used to reading literary biographies which painstakingly set out to prove that a writer’s life was identical with his oeuvre and that the books were wholly autobiographical. So it’s an interesting experience to see this well-worn literary technique applied to Edvard Munch, the one truly great painter produced by Norway and indeed by the four Scandinavian countries. Sue Prideaux is well equipped for the task: part Norwegian, fluent in the language, with a great-uncle, Thomas Olsen, who was one of Munch’s most loyal patrons. She grew up with his art if not with his life.

This first full biography written in English shows, with painful clarity, that his art is compulsively autobiographical. Every time Prideaux produces a nugget of information so bizarre that it seems not only over the top but thoroughly ben trovato there is a note giving the source in the vast Munch archives in Oslo, since he was also an exhaustive verbal recorder of his life.

Rarely in the canon of Western art has there been so much anxiety, fear and deep psychological pain in one artist. That he lived to be 80 and spent only one period in an asylum is a tribute not only to Munch’s physical stamina but to his iron will and his innate, robust psychological strength.

Munch was born in 1863, so sickly that he was immediately baptised in case he did not survive. His mother, 23 years younger than his father, produced five children but died, aged 30, of the TB rife in both 19th-century Norway and her family. The father, Christian, was nearly 50 when Edvard was born, He had graduated from serving on coffin ships to being an army doctor, despite being unable to stand the sight of blood. He was also a deeply Pietist Christian zealot and strict disciplinarian who, when beating his children for minor infractions, would invoke the image of their blessed mother who saw them from heaven and grieved over their misbehaviour. Christian used to read Dostoevsky and Poe to his small children, and was a hopeless economic provider, moving endlessly from one insalubrious flat to another and sending the children out to beg money from their richer relatives. His maternal grandfather had died insane, with spinal TB and Edvard feared for most of his life that he would die of the syphilis that was equally rife and also a precursor of insanity.

The trauma of the loss of his mother was compounded a year or so later by that of his beloved sister Sophie, the posthumous model for one of his greatest paintings, The Sick Child. All his life, he kept the chair in which she died. His brother died at 30 and his sister Laura had to be institutionalised with schizophrenia. Only one of his siblings survived him, his sister Inger, whom, with his maternal aunt Karen, he supported once he could make a living as a painter, with whom he corresponded constantly and lovingly, but whom he could not bring himself to visit.

His education was rudimentary as he entered the best schools but was expelled, not for moral turpitude, but because, being constantly ill, his attendance was so bad he couldn’t keep up. Yet his artistic gifts, largely untaught, manifested themselves at seven and, at 13, he was accepted at the Art Association, an artists’ club where he learnt by copying the works on display. Aged 16, he entered the Technical School because he was good at maths and physics but again left because of illness. It was only then that he decided to become an artist and already he hated the then obligatory varnishing of every oil surface. “No more brown sauce” were his words, echoing Goethe who used the same phrase in his exploration of colour theory in 1810.

Shortly after this, round about the time Ibsen published Ghosts in 1881, Munch entered the Bohemian circle of Kristiania (it did not become Oslo until 1925). His principal mentors were the rumbustious and highly successful painter Christian Krohg and the sinister, syphilitic Hans Jaeger, a stenographer in the Norwegian Parliament. The acknowledged leader of the group, Jaeger was an intellectual wild man, a nihilist who believed that he should drive both his enemies and his disciples to suicide. His effect on Munch happily did not involve suicide but Munch admitted in later life that Jaeger’s influence on him had been profound.

Munch lost his virginity to a well-connected army wife who made him feel guilty as an adulterer and deeply jealous as she simultaneously carried on with other men. Add to this the alcohol he consumed in heroic quantities, the time he spent in brothels and the temptations of a Bohemian crowd, and it’s a miracle that this handsome but frequently sickly youth survived at all, let alone lived to be 80.

Once he began to show his pictures, he always had a tiny group of supporters who enabled him to survive psychologically more or less intact even though he was always on the breadline. He sold an early work to the nascent Norwegian National Gallery and got two state scholarships, one of which stipulated that he had to learn to draw, which took him to Paris where he studied the work of others but took few lessons.
Paris was followed by Berlin and the heady days of The Black Piglet tavern with Strindberg and the beautiful femme fatale Dagny Juel. She ditched both Munch and Strindberg to marry the charismatic Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski and was later murdered by a fraudulent Polish lover. Munch’s relationship with Strindberg was extraordinary. There was intense mutual admiration but, in the end, paranoia induced fear and suspicion on both sides which caused a rift. Both loved and feared women. Strindberg actually married three of them but as Munch described it: “I have always put my art before everything else. Often I felt that Woman would stand in the way of my art. I decided at an early age never to marry.”

The Swede put the Norwegian into his books and plays in a thoroughly unflattering light. When Munch lithographed him he labelled him Stindberg, which means, in Norwegian, “mountain of hot air”. Yet each acknowledged his debt to the other and, given Munch’s fear of “Vampire women”, there are several paintings in the great Frieze of Life sequence which bear traces of Strindberg’s influence as well as the autobiographical elements of the recognisable women in Munch’s life. As with Strindberg, and all devoted paranoiacs, some of those who Munch believed had harmed him had indeed done so, notably Tulla Larsen who had made the first advances and who had, in stalker fashion, done everything possible to turn her lover into her husband. This included threats of breach of promise, fake suicide attempts and the catastrophic pistol episode – no one knows who fired the shot – when the bullet lodged in the middle finger of Munch’s left hand. This left the hand that held his palette and his etching plates permanently maimed, necessitating a glove for the rest of his life. (This event inspired the magnificent Death of Marat painting.) No wonder he declared that women had nutcracker muscles in their thighs and reduced men to soup.

Munch was, at least until he checked himself into Doctor Jacobsen’s psychological clinic in Copenhagen in 1908, a compulsive frequenter of brothels; he once spent an entire Christmas in one. It is a wonder that he escaped the syphilis he feared, but Jacobsen diagnosed only alcoholism as the primary cause of Munch’s temporary insanity. Munch ruefully accepted that he would have, in future, to confine himself to “tobacco-free cigars, alcohol-free drinks and poison-free women”. But, according to Prideaux, he resisted Jacobsen’s psychological probings and effected his own mental cure at the clinic. His stay coincided with a hugely successful show in Kristiania with 60,000 Kroner worth of sales. Munch paid for a celebratory dinner for his friends at his favourite Norwegian watering hole, the Grand Hotel, and kept an open telephone line to his Copenhagen bedside so that he could join in the fun.

Munch had great success in Germany via various avant garde Jewish dealers and enlightened rich patrons, but the post-First World War hyper-inflation ruined them and, despite his early enthusiasm, Goebbels, who wrote him an egregious fan letter on his 70th birthday – in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power – dropped him as soon as the Nazi policy of pillorying Entartete Kunst (Decadent Art) came in. The 80 or so Munchs in German collections were held to official ridicule and then sold on the international market, including Norway, to raise hard currency for National Socialism.

Despite that, the Quisling-led government in occupied Norway during the Second World War tried to make Munch the figurehead of its Honorary Board of Norwegian Artists. Munch refused and the Board was dropped. The government commandeered one of his major houses, failed to get to his hoard of paintings but, on his death, as the author puts it, “hijacked” his corpse and burial so that instead of a simple interment in the family plot, he was given a state funeral with gigantic Nazi insignia and flags.

The years of his success and wealth were lived frugally in a large house at Ekely, whose locked second floor contained his bequest to Norway of thousands of works of art. He had a succession of “poison-free women”, a series of beautiful models whom he painted with undiminished erotic joy and sexual tension.

Munch said that his paintings were his children, even though he gave many of them a somewhat Spartan upbringing, deliberately leaving them not only unvarnished but exposed to the elements in his vast outdoor studio or hung on walls, unframed and with nails through them. His vast heritage of great paintings and lithographs exists as both testament and record of his life. He once wrote: “Just as Leonardo studied the recesses of the human body and dissected cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is universal in the soul.”

Prideaux has written a life which goes a long way towards upholding his aim and anyone who wants to know how and why he painted as he did should read this book.’

Tom Rosenthal, The Independent On Sunday
18 September 2005

In old age, Edvard Munch (1863-1944) had such a dread of silence that the radios in his house were never switched off. Often two played in one room, tuned to different stations. Best of all, he loved the noisy interference between stations when transmission ceased. What was it he no longer wanted to hear, he who had listened so intently to the private scream of the soul tormented by jealousy, grief, anger or fear of death and had portrayed it unforgettably in his art?

At the Munch Museum in Oslo you can buy a plastic inflatable version of the figure in The Scream. Repackaged by commerce, this icon of anxiety and despair becomes a humorous toy or gift. Munch would, I think, have been amused. Although convinced he was doom-laden, he leavened his autobiographical writings with comedy, and in his art he liked to play iconoclastic jokes. He inserted a naked women into the frame he drew around his portrait of Strindberg and called the playwright “Stindberg” (“mountain of hot air”). The sitter, when they next met, placed a revolver on the table. Both details, in subsequent printings, were duly altered.

Munch moved in an atmosphere of heightened drama. Those around him indulged in a fin-de-siécle cocktail of drugs, madness, suicide, sexual experimentation, nihilism, anarchism and spiritualism. Much can be deduced from his art, but the facts surrounding his life remain obscure to an English-speaking audience. Though he sought to portray communal emotions, he claimed that his work fitted together “like the pages of a diary” . A biography was, therefore, needed to uncover the turbulent experiences that tempered his art. Sue Prideaux now provides this, making use of a mass of hitherto unused material. The result is a magisterial portrait of a deeply troubled man. It is both humorous and tragic in its account of Munch’s abortive relationships with women, his dependence on drink, and his struggle for success and recognition. The conflicts within him are set in the context of late 19th-century Norway, with its emergent nationalism, its growing religious doubt and its contested move towards female emancipation. The breadth of Prideaux’s inquiry is impressive, as are her insights and understanding. An established novelist, she knows how to give us the resonant fact. We learn, for instance, that Christian Munch, Edvard’s father, opposed his son’s decision to study art and go to Paris, and that the longstanding conflict between them made painful the farewell outside the family flat. But on the steamship, Munch spotted his father watching his departure from a densely shaded space. There the incident might have ended, but one further detail is added: Christian had put on his best suit.

In his paternal role, Christian had infected the family with his religious anxiety. As a child, Edvard was made to believe that his dead mother watched everything he did. “I came frightened into this world and lived in perpetual fear of life and of people,” he said. Aged five at the time of his mother’s death from TB, he, too, nearly died of it seven years later. Shortly after his recovery, his favourite sister Sophie fell victim to the disease. As she had in effect replaced his mother, a desolate longing for her remained. He kept the chair in which she died (now in the Munch Museum) all his life.

The piety, poverty and puritanism that dogged his childhood eventually gave way to a more liberal and bohemian environment. He was much helped in this move by the polemicist Hans Jaeger whose logic, Munch said, “was as sharp as a scythe and as cold as an icy blast”. Meanwhile in his art, Munch rejected “twigs and fingernails”, by which he meant the love of detail and high polish employed by realist landscape and portrait painters. He began to simplify his forms. “One must paint from memory,” he insisted. “Nature is merely the means.” He never married, although one of his mistresses, Tulla Larsen, tried to blackmail him into doing so. “I’m so unsuited to be with anybody,” he prevaricated. When in old age his friends tried to remedy his unhappy situation, he ob jected: “My sufferings are part of my self and my art… their destruction would destroy my art.” By then a European reputation, wealth, honours and far-reaching influence could not distract from his dominant theme — the commonality of human loneliness.

Frances Spalding, The Sunday Times
September 25, 2005