4/27/2019 Edvard Munch: Love and Angst review – 'Ripples of trauma hit you like a bomb' | Art and

like a bomb' | Art and design | The Guardian

Edvard Munch: Love and Angst review 'ripples of

trauma hit you like a bomb'
British Museum, London From his sunsets and deathbeds to the world warping Scream, the
Norwegian created apocalyptic masterpieces that are brutal, refined and addictive

Jonathan Jones
Tue 9 Apr 2019 00.00 BST

T
he man who created The Scream introduces himself with morbid panache at the start of
the British Museum’s inkily beautiful journey into his imagination. He looks normal
enough, calm and sombre, except that he’s got a skeleton arm. “Edvard Munch 1895”,
reads the inscription above him. He presents himself in this bony self-portrait as a
specimen of fin-de-siècle decay, a morbid example of the modern condition. Munch was
32 when he created this. In his head he clearly thought he was finished. In fact he would live until
1944, but this exhibition concentrates on his apocalyptic masterpieces of symbolist gloom from
the 1890s and 1900s.

Munch had good reason to feel cursed. Growing up in 19th-century Norway he was surrounded by
illness and death. The most upsetting images here are not symbolist at all but distressingly
matter-of-fact. Munch’s painting The Sick Child is shown beside its equally harrowing print
version. They both mourn his sister Johanne Sophie, who died when he was a teenager. Nearby is
another cry of anguish, Dead Mother and Child. The child’s face is a doll-like mask of terror.
Munch’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was five years old.

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4/27/2019 Edvard Munch: Love and Angst review – 'Ripples of trauma hit you like a bomb' | Art and design | The Guardian

Distressingly matter-of-fact … The Sick Child, 1907, by Edvard

Munch. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock

Perhaps his most devastating portrayal of loss is his ensemble scene Death in the Sick Room. In a
room that looks like a stage set, a company of black-clad people slowly move in balletic sympathy,
as they coalesce in silent grief. A girl is dying. She’s got out of bed to sit in her chair one last time.
It is the final moment and everyone knows it.

Again, this is not morbid fantasy but closely based on Munch’s own experiences. The exhibition
shows this everyday tragedy beside Munch’s sketches for set designs for plays by the great
Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, as well as his immensely characterful portrait of Ibsen sitting
in a cafe, his face a map of human experience and insight as roughly sketched figures pass by on
the street. Ibsen shook stages across 19th-century Europe with the naturalism of plays such as A
Doll’s House and Ghosts. The intensity of Munch’s admiration for him comes as a fascinating
surprise. It shows that Munch too thought of himself as some kind of realist.

Realism may not be what comes to mind when you look at Vampire II. A man lowers his head so
his lover can sink her teeth into the back of his neck. She embraces him as she sucks his blood. Her
red hair, tangled like gore-soaked seaweed, falls over his head. Munch designed this image in
1895, two years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published. Yet this is not a gothic image. It’s
presented with the stark intensity of confession. The power of Munch’s art lies in the unparalleled
way it pierces exterior appearances to reveal the reality of the mind.

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4/27/2019 Edvard Munch: Love and Angst review – 'Ripples of trauma hit you like a bomb' | Art and design | The Guardian

Intensity of confession … Vampire II, 1896, by Edvard Munch.

Photograph: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter

The vampire drinking deep is just one of his images of sexual union as ecstasy and agony. In
Attraction I, two young people gaze at each other with hollow eyes. In front of them is a black
shore by an empty sea. On another of his eerie shores, a young woman looks from the pink sands
at a lemon sunset on a pale sea. It is not always winter in Munch’s art. The spectral light of a
Norwegian summer evening fills him with as much unease as the blackest night. Beside the young
woman in her white dress sits a figure wrapped in a jet black robe with a lifeless face. Death is at
your side even at midsummer.

Munch’s art is addictive. It is at once brutal and refined. This exhibition concentrates on his works
on paper, revealing their astonishing technical qualities, even showing some of his original plates
and lithographic stones. Many prints here were made using multiple methods, and reworked at
different moments. They are marvels of technique that glow with sickly gorgeous colours. His
erotic Madonna is a swirling dream of blue and black surrounded by a rich red border. The
woman’s body is pinkish paper left bare, her breasts delicately delineated in hints of ink.

Yet the real reason this exhibition of Munch’s prints works so well is that it captures the myth-
making essence of his art. In the 1890s Munch was not just sketching passing perceptions but
dredging up symbols of psychic states. Other examples of late-19th-century “symbolist” art are
shown for comparison, by the likes of Gauguin and Odilon Redon. Munch’s symbols are the
starkest and most universal. Almost all the prints here also exist as paintings, yet the prints are in
no way second best. They go to the heart of his enterprise. If he were to create a new symbolic
language of feeling, his images needed to be reproducible. The sensual delight of Munch’s colours
– including his sublime blacks – is ultimately secondary to content. In paint or print, his art lodges
in your mind. Lonely people on the shore, a zombie-like city crowd in top hats and bonnets, the
staring face of a young man possessed by jealousy – this exhibition is full of images you will never
forget.

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4/27/2019 Edvard Munch: Love and Angst review – 'Ripples of trauma hit you like a bomb' | Art and design | The Guardian

Fascinating surprise … Munch’s set design for Ibsen’s Ghosts.

Photograph: Sidsel de Jong

And then finally we come to the ordm where the whole of nature is transfigured by a great
scream. I was suspicious of the hype for The Scream visiting London in this show. It’s on huge
posters for the exhibition and has been in the media for months. It seemed a bit rich to big up this
1895 lithographic print of Munch’s masterpiece as if it was just as rare as the great 1893 painting in
the National Museum, Oslo – or the other painted version in the Munch Museum. Art thieves
know better (although after creating so much excitement around its lithograph, I hope the British
Museum has good security). But scepticism changed to awe when I turned a corner and saw that
ghost-like face, mouth wide open, hands over both ears.

The Scream hits you like a bomb in black and white. The sky is a wobble of warped wood grain.
Folds of black map the shore like ripples of trauma, crystallising in a lonely church tower. It’s like
looking at a heart monitor. The pulsations echo and amplify through space and you feel the same
claustrophobic oppression that is tormenting Munch’s universal figure of the modern soul.

It is a work of art that abolishes the distance between us. Even as he portrays despair and
loneliness and death, Munch does so in a way that celebrates our ability to communicate with
each other. He leaves you harrowed yet inspired. This is an exhibition that shows why we need
art. How else can we hear each other scream?

Edvard Munch: Love and Angst is at the British Museum, London, from 11 April to 21 July.
Topics
Edvard Munch
Painting
Art
Exhibitions
British Museum
reviews

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