Darkness Visible; A new exhibit illuminates Strindberg's troubled mind.(August Strindberg)

Byline: Tara Pepper

The first image of August Strindberg that visitors to London's Tate Modern see is a furrowed brow and wild shock of hair, sculpted in bronze by Carl Eldh. But that is hardly the only face of the Swedish dramatist on display in the new exhibit "August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer" (through May 15). He looks noble in Carl Larsson's 1899 charcoal drawing, vulnerable in a lithograph by Edvard Munch. But perhaps it is Strindberg's own third-person description of himself that best captures his fraught--and multifaceted--genius: "He never became himself, never stood on his own two feet, never became a complete individual. He remained, as it were, a mistletoe, which had to have a tree to grow on."

The Tate exhibit, which includes more than 100 of Strindberg's own works as well as portraits of him by others, offers graphic insight into his troubled soul. For much of his life the artist suffered from a paranoid psychosis, teetering on the edge of schizophrenia. His stark landscape paintings of Kymmendo, an island in the Stockholm archipelago, reflect that inner turmoil: buoys bob uselessly on turbulent waves, a solitary thistle battles for survival against the elements. "In his writing he was very intellectual," says curator Helen Sainsbury. "But in his paintings there is a much more raw approach to similar feelings. There's never a sense of it just being nature. I have this sense of his presence in all these works."

In some ways, Strindberg's struggle to understand his own mind was well ahead of his time. ...