MODERN MAN.(Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul)

When he was seven years old, in 1870 or 1871, Edvard Munch used a lump of coal to draw a sprawling procession of blind men across the floor of his home in Kristiania--as Swedish-ruled Oslo was then named--one in a series of squalid flats taken by a family prone to poverty, disease, mental disorder, and death. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was five; his fiercely beloved older sister Sophie would do the same when he was thirteen. Another sister would be lost to psychosis. Munch himself was sickly from birth; he said later that he grew up feeling "like a boat built of hopeless material, of old rotten wood." His father was a military doctor, at a time when doctors were ill-paid and little respected, and a guilt-ravaged religious zealot whose idea of parental duty was to instill the terrors of Hell in his children. The boy's drawing expressed an alarmed fascination with anonymous crowds on city streets--the same theme appeared in major paintings that he made some twenty years later. According to Sue Prideaux's assured and vivid recent biography, "Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream" (Yale), Munch's Aunt Karen, the family's mainstay, marvelled at "the trembling uncertainty" that the apparent prodigy had caught in the sightless figures. (As Munch matured, his talent was regularly noted--even as his art was loathed and his character deplored--in Norway.) In later years, Munch recalled "deriving such pleasure from the monumental format of my work, real satisfaction at the sensation of my hand so much more actively involved than when I drew on the back of father's prescriptions."

Two things impress me about this story. First, I believe it, despite its redolence of the sort of family lore that mythifies everybody's childhood and abounds in the hagiographies of genius. No other great artist--and only a rare writer, short of Proust--has made so absolute a principle of truthful memory. (A perceptive German critic, in 1902, characterized Munch as "a Romantic who cannot lie.") Second, I'm struck by the note of discovered joy in artmaking, never mind the direness of the subject, that may be typical of budding artists but would serve this one to an extreme degree, as an emotional tightrope over the abysses of a life that was otherwise pretty thoroughly awful.

"Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul," at the Museum of Modern Art, is the second comprehensive Munch retrospective in the United States in the past fifty years. The first, at the National Gallery, in 1978, came as a revelation to observers who had not previously visited Norway, where all but a few of Munch's paintings reside. (The Boston Museum of Fine Arts' "Summer Night's Dream (The Voice)," from 1893, is the only American-owned painting from his magnum opus, the series of pictures on themes of love, anxiety, and death which is commonly termed the "Frieze of Life.") He was known here as a great printmaker--the most original of the Symbolist era--and, vaguely, as the father of German Expressionism. But reproductions of his work, including the already famous "Scream," prepared no one for the originals' astringent textures, dense space, tensile drawing, and eloquent color.

That show revolutionized my sense of modern-art history, particularly of its canonical elevation of the quartet of Post-Impressionism: Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. Munch, though younger than those masters, and hitting his stride a bit later, suddenly seemed to me their peer in giving form to the seismic forces of European modernity. He still does, both despite and because of a radically impure style that, at its best, varies from picture to picture. His strongest works, dating from about 1890 to the early years of the last century, exalted pictorial functions--narrative and illustration--that were being combed out of modern painting as specialties more proper to literature and the popular arts. Thereafter, until his death, in 1944, Munch, with less to say of life, painted mainly just to paint, ...