Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream [Hardcover]

As a long time fan of Edvard Munch's art, this is the best of all the biographies I've read about the artist including his own private dairy. "The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth" by Munch and translated by J. Gill Holland (no relation to this reviewer) should also be checked out by Munch admirers. Sorry about that digression--back to this wonderful biography. Sue Prideaux's nearly four-hundred page history first caught my attention on the "New Releases" tables of at the Boston Antheaum. After leafing through the volume, I immediately ordered my own copy because I knew it was a book in which I'd want to dog-ear pages and scribble comments in the book's margins. The beginning of the book was difficult to read. Munch's father was a religious zealot who made his living as a physician. Unfortunately, even with his own family, he seemed more interested in saving a person's soul than sometimes saving their life or curing them of their ailments. His very fanaticism overwhelmed Young Edvard Munch and the rest of his family. Munch's mother and sister died of TB and he himself barely survived it in his youth. The author's description of life in the Munch household was so depressing that it almost made me stop reading. It was certainly not a good advertisement for practicing this brand of Christianity. It's little wonder that in adulthood Edvard Munch became addicted to acholol and drugs. He was afraid to give them up because he felt his inspiration was one of the results of the drunken fog that often enveloped him. Once he finally committed himself for treatment, he was forced to clean up his act and he discovered his inspiration wasn't coming from a bottle. This book is a wonderful portrait of Munch and the era in which he lived. Germany was the country that first recognized and rewarded his genius. Munch's many phobias make him a fascinating character to study. Considering his own personal demon's, his artworks are actually quite tame. Learn why when he begrudingly sold one of his paintings, he'd immediatley paint another version to replace that lost child at his dinner table. Even though the Nazi's ordered all his work to be destroyed, Hilter's chief aides praised and collected it for their personal collections. Throughout the book the reader can only be amazed that either Munch or his work actually managed to survive the chaos that surrounded him during his entire lifetime. He was certainly an eccentric by any definition of the term.

The power of the book is that it provides a map for the emotional trajectory of Munch's inner life; from hope and excitement to depression and mania. Throughout his life he painted only what was true for him, whether actual events or metaphorical motifs. Munch lived what we see in his paintings. However, Prideaux attempt to validate Munch's images leads to a simplification of details.

For instance quoting a letter to the head of the National Art Gallery in Norway, Jen Thiss, Munch writes: "The greatest color is black, the most essential color. It is the `tabala rasa' for pure expression. Nothing prostitutes it.' (Prideaux page 179). If Prideaux would have looked further she would have realized Munch was actually quoting Odilon Redon's from his book, To Myself. This particular quote was highlighted for the recent exhibition of works by Redon at the Oct. 2005-Jan. 2006 at the Museum of Modern Art; Seeing the Invisible (p.67 of MOMA catalogue).

More misrepresentation lies in chapter 13 concerning what most art historians feel was a turning point in his artistic achievement, The Scream. Prideaux first describes its pictorial development with a painting called Despair, she writes; "Despair was his first attempt at the scream. It is a side portrait of the himself set against the bay of Kristiania, the town that was the seat of all his misery. In her very next sentence however, she says, "The figure walking against the flow of the crowd in the middle of the street with is his back to us is Munch's".(Prideaux, p.134). Unless one was very familiar with Munch's paintings they would never know that she is no longer talking about Despair, but has jumped to Munch's painting of Evening on Karl Johan. This kind of careless description dims some of the brilliance we find elsewhere in the narrative.

Prideaux makes a bold attempt of trying to make sense of a life that did not make sense. Yet for Munch lovers her account of the specific fine points of his life is well worth the read. We are left feeling about the book the way Munch felt about his art: "the important thing was not the finished work or preserving it as such, but instead only that something assumed perfect artistic form...then it would become a part of the fabric of the world, which could never conceive without it again."

For a fuller appreciation of Munch's work check out the spectacular exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York city-till May 19, 2006.

I welcome comments about this review at

newrealities@earthlink.net

There is probably no more fiercely recognizable image in modern art than Edvard Munch's _The Scream_ (1893). The nightmarish picture seems so essential to our way of looking at modern life that many people do not know anything of Munch's other works, which is a shame; he lived eighty years and was productive through them all. His most famous work is even in the subtitle of his first full biography written in English, _Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream_ (Yale University Press) by Sue Prideaux. The author seems particularly well suited to her subject. She is part Norwegian and has lived a life shared between Norway and England. Her grandmother was painted by Munch, and her great-uncle was one of the artist's loyal patrons. She has produced a big biography that is well-illustrated with the subject's works. This is essential. Munch 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." Many and varying results of the dissections in paintings and in his profuse journals are included here, making a biography that is surprisingly gripping.

Munch wrote, "Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that hovered over my cradle." He was born in 1863, and tuberculosis took his beloved mother and sister when he was a boy. His father, Munch wrote, "temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious... From him I inherited the seeds of madness." His illness kept him from attending school regularly, but he early showed artistic talent, even though he got little training in art, and often rejected the training he got. Instructors, and the public, could not understand that he had no obsession with painting with physical accuracy, but was obsessed with documenting impressions and feelings. His early career was the classic one of the starving artist, a bohemian life with many lovers (sometimes shared with others in his circle), and plenty of absinthe and other alcohol intake. Many of his great works were made when he was impoverished, but eventually he found an unlikely niche, fashionable portrait painter to the rich (or as he called them, his "Mycenaeans"). The portraits were untraditional, and often uncomplimentary, but they paid; he was to become a very rich man, although perhaps due to his years of penury, he always lived simply and fretted that the tax man was ruining him. It is perhaps not coincidental that with his increase in income came critical success, although in his own country, he suffered attacks in the press, and became reclusive and suspicious. He was able to sell his expensive portraits, but had trouble forcing himself to part with any of his personal work, insisting that his paintings were his children, and keeping them around him, even if this meant they were stacked badly, were exposed to weather, or became scratching posts for the cat.

He feared all his life that he would be touched with his family's insanity, and eventually he checked himself into a Copenhagen psychological clinic in 1908. His doctor diagnosed merely alcoholism, but he was put through a fresh air cure, heart massages, and mild charges of electricity. "I have been rather short of electricity," he wrote, but thought he was getting an excellent effect from "Galvanisation, Faradisation, and Franklinisation." None of it did as much good as the steps he took for his own cure, a method he had taught himself when he was young and could not sleep because of conflict with his father: he turned his thoughts into a drawing or painting. It was resolving life's difficulties in the arena that really mattered, in his art. His paintings thus form a spiritual biography like no other artist's. This book biography is a fine introduction to the biography on canvas.