The art of repetition

An eyewitness described Edvard Munch supervising the print of a colour lithograph in 1896. He stood in front of the stones on which the head of a masterpiece was drawn. He then closed his eyes tightly, stabbed the air with his finger, and gave his instructions. ‘Print… grey, green, blue, brown.’ Then he opened his eyes and remarked, ‘Now it’s time for a glass of schnapps.’ The whole performance, including the air of melodrama and that shot of spirits, was highly characteristic.

The resulting colour lithograph, ‘The Sick Child’, is one of the artist’s masterpieces. It is on show in Edvard Munch: Love and Angst at the British Museum — an exhibition that attempts to do two jobs, and succeeds in doing one better than the other.

As an account of Munch’s life and work, it is — in common with every Munch exhibition I’ve seen — not entirely satisfactory. There are several reasons for this. Munch (1863–1944) was both a long-lived artist and an uneven one. Furthermore, he bequeathed the entire contents of his studio, some 25,000 items, to the city of Oslo. Consequently, if you want to see Munch moderately whole there is no alternative but to travel to Norway and visit the Munch Museum (by which many of the exhibits in the BM show have been loaned).

Munch has often struck me as a case study in how Van Gogh’s life might have played out if he hadn’t shot himself. The Norwegian artist also worked at tremendous pressure in his early days, suffered from recurrent mental problems, complicated by heavy drinking, and one gunshot wound (either inflicted by Munch himself or by an angry woman friend). Love and Angst has difficulty in encapsulating all this.

On the other hand, it succeeds triumphantly in making a virtue out of Munch’s repetitiousness.