Twilight of despair

The Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is best known for ‘The Scream’, that unforgettable image of the tortured self in the grip of alienation, loss and fear. Munch is the great Symbolist and precursor of Expressionism, the artist as poetic visionary who valued imagination over knowledge, and the urge to self-expression beyond the need to enlighten or inform. He takes us into a twilight existence of gloom and psychosis. In a God-less universe, man was left to his own devices, and it’s not a pretty sight. Munch was manically overproductive, and on his death left more than 20,000 works to the city of Oslo, which took 20 years to establish the Munch Museet to house it all. From this vast collection the current exhibition of some 150 self-portraits has mostly been drawn — 150 self-portraits? I hear you gasp. Afraid so. Munch didn’t do things by halves.

An outsider by temperament, he is a classic case of the artist as victim, staggering from one emotional crisis to the next, relishing his pain. The inner world of Edvard Munch is all very fascinating to the artist himself, but does it carry to an audience? Only when the material is sufficiently transformed, when art overrules self. Munch was unhappy with women in his early alcoholic years, seeing them as threat and lure. The Academy’s exhibition opens with ‘Self-portrait beneath a Female Mask’ (c.1893), and quickly gets to the nub of the problem. On one side is a disembodied head peering into the abyss, beneath a swan representing humanity in Paradise, and on the other is ‘The Flower of Pain’, a reclining nude self-portrait with liberally bleeding heart. In the same first gallery is the later ‘Self-portrait in Hell’ (1903), painted after Munch had tried to resolve an unsatisfactory love affair by shooting himself in the hand.