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Edvard Munch Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery

Munch at the British Museum 2019

Six years ago the British Museum held a big exhibition of Edvard Munch’s prints, including the famous Scream. In my review of the exhibition I summarised the exhibition’s narrative of how Munch (1863 to 1944), when a youngish man, in the 1890s, was part of a hard-drinking, permissive Bohemian set in the capital of his native Norway, Oslo (then called Kristiana), and how the hedonistic free-love and hard drinking ethos of this world clashed with his strict Protestant rural upbringing to produce an often unbearable tension and angst in the young man. Not just unhappiness – intense mental distress. The British Museum show had numerous quotes from Munch’s journals and diary up on the walls all making the same point:

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)

All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)

You get the picture, and a feel for the troubled mentality which produced not only The Scream but a host of other deeply haunting woodcuts – of vampire-like young women, of traumatised couples standing in front of lakes of bottomless meaning and forests of endless threat.

However, alongside the woodcuts and paintings with titles like Despair, Anxiety, Death, and so on, Munch throughout his life was an accomplished painter of portraits, of his family, his Bohemian friends, of society patrons, and of himself. In fact he produced hundreds of them.

Munch at the National Portrait Gallery 2025

This fine exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery brings together 40 of Munch’s portraits, ranging across 40 years of his long career, from the 1880s to the 1920s, for us to enjoy, savour, compare and contrast. It is the first such exhibition to focus on Munch’s portraits ever held in the UK and includes foreign loans never before seen in the UK.

A mixed bag

The main point to make at the start is the great variety of size and treatment over these 40 or so years – and the very variable quality. Munch’s star is obviously in the ascendant and the curators, and many of the media reviewers, make a big case for him being one of the twentieth century’s great portraitists. I just don’t think that’s true. It’s nearly true, there are a lot of good portraits here, including some portraits of writers which have long been classic – but there are a lot of poor paintings here as well; ones I thought were poorly executed, showed bad draughtsmanship, sketchy painting technique.

There are quite a few powerful, notable works, but just as many that I’d cross the road to avoid or wouldn’t look twice at in a general exhibition.

Stories

One other point. The gallery labels accompanying the portraits are excellent and full of interest. Very often exhibition labels fall back on woke clichés or very general descriptions of what you can already see for yourself, and can be exasperating or futile, accordingly.

However the picture captions here are uniformly excellent. Almost all of them move beyond a brief background of the image to give fascinating potted biographies of the subjects, and seeing as these come from a surprisingly broad range of figures, in Norway but also Germany where Munch spent a lot of time, all these potted biographies build up into a fascinating mosaic of the times. They range all the way from the biography of Munch’s father and sisters, via the various writers, artists and poets he knew in his merry Bohemian times, through to fascinating accounts of the physicians, industrialists and patrons he painted, and their lives and fates after he painted them.

Putting to one side the questionable merit of some of the paintings, these potted biographies bring to life a whole world of culture and patronage in north-central Europe which we in Britain, in thrall to a very Paris-based view of modern art, are almost completely ignorant of.

Layout

The exhibition is arranged thematically and chronologically, taking visitors on a four-part journey through Munch’s immediate family, bohemian artists and writers, his patrons and collectors, and finally his closest confidants, the so-called ‘Guardians’ who supported him in his later years. I’ll pick a key work from each section.

1. Family

The earliest paintings, from his early 20s, are small oil paintings of himself, his father and the aunt (Karen Bjølstad) who moved in after his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five (in 1868). I really liked the small portrait of his bearded father – Dr Christian Munch, a military doctor – lighting his pipe. They’re small, dark and inside and hark back to naturalist painting of the 1860s and 70s which he would swiftly work through and move beyond.

Quite quickly we move outside, though, to a much larger work like ‘Evening’ (1888). This, the caption tells us, depicts Munch’s sister, Laura, on a family holiday, just a year before she was permanently hospitalized with schizophrenia. The curators claim it captures her sense of alienation from her surroundings. Do you agree? Apparently in the centre of the painting was a standing figure but Munch painted over it in order to emphasise and increase the sense of distance between the soulful woman and the figures by the lake.

Evening by Edvard Munch (1888) © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

2. Bohemian friends

Munch left his family home to study art formally in the mid-1880s, becoming part of the bohemian scene in Kristiania. This was a network of internationally-connected artists and writers whose their ideals ran contrary to the strict religious principles of Munch’s upbringing. They advocated free love, atheism and women’s emancipation.

It was here that he developed a free-er more expressive way with paint which he called ‘soul art’, and which relied on the intensity of the relationship with the sitter as much as technical proficiency. In other words, his brushwork became looser. Leader of this set of freethinkers was the anarchist Hans Jæger whose portrait dominates this section and was chosen by the curators to promote the entire show. They comment on the cynical, confident pose of a man who knows he bosses his social group, comfortably slouched on a sofa in the Grand Café, Kristiana.

Hans Jaeger by Edvard Munch (1889) © Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, The Fine Art Collections. Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Børre Høstland

Munch didn’t stay in Kristiana but travelled to Berlin where he had been invited to show. Here he met the Polish writer and dramatist Stanisław Przybyszewski whose 1894 monograph ‘Das Werk des Edvard Munch’ was the first publication to promote Munch internationally and to suggest the idea of the ‘Naked Soul’ as being fundamental to his work. Przybyszewski believed that society placed such a constraint on basic human instincts that it was the artist’s duty to compensate by giving free rein to unconscious impulses and desires – what he termed ‘the naked soul’.

The other strong work in this section is the portrait of lawyer Thor Lütken. Do you notice anything odd about this picture?

Thor Lütken by Edvard Munch (1892) Private Collection. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong

The oddity is that, on close inspection, the lawyer’s left sleeve, along the bottom of the picture, contains a moonlit landscape inhabited by two mysterious figures, a man in black and a woman in white.

Detail of Thor Lütken by Edvard Munch (1892) Private Collection. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong

Are they lovers or a symbolic portrayal of life and death, Death and The Maiden? Whatever the intention, it’s a pretty unconventional thing to do in a professional portrait but indicates the tremendous influence the 1890s movement of Symbolism had on Munch’s thinking.

Talking of Symbolism, the section includes a series of works which aren’t paintings but black-and-white lithographs. These depict some super-famous figures from the time, notably the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé, and the composer Frederick Delius who Munch met at the health resort of Wiesbaden, alongside group sketches of north European Bohemians in a number of cafes and bars.

The point is that for some of these portraits – notable Ibsen, Mallarmé and a striking portrait of himself – created a novel approach, presenting the sitters as disembodied heads floating in space. The detached floating head was a familiar motif in Symbolist art, signifying a split between the physical and spiritual self but hadn’t been used in such intimate and realistic portraits before.

The novel format does several things. In the portrait of Ibsen it emphasises the distance between the floating head and the busy life going on outside the window; in the wonderful portrait of Mallarmé, probably the most successful likeness in the show, it focuses you on the face and eyes so you feel you are just about to hear a pearl of wisdom from the witty old gent. According to the ever-interesting picture caption, Mallarmé was fascinated by the occult, which may explain the ghost-like feel of the portrait. And he said that the image reminded him of one of the images of Jesus on a holy shroud…

And in the self portrait with skeleton, the jet black background makes Munch’s head seem as if guillotined and floating in space, as in a bizarre dream.

3. Patrons and collectors

The third section of the exhibition examines Munch’s relationship with his patrons and collectors. By the early 20th century, Munch was one of the most exhibited artists in Europe. Returning to Berlin in 1902, he won the support of a group of wealthy and influential collectors, whose patronage further elevated his profile. It’s fascinating to learn that, in the curators’ words, ‘Many had Jewish heritage and held key professional and institutional positions in German society. They all shared an enthusiasm for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and his belief in the creative power of the individual’ – indeed the influence of Nietzsche’s insistence on the Superman overthrowing all society’s traditional values and creating his own, is mentioned in the commentary of quite a few works from this period. Also, disapproving moralists nowadays frequently associate Nietzsche with the strains of thought which led to the Nazis, so it’s striking to learn that quite so many Jewish figure were attracted by his ideas.

From 1902 to his breakdown in 1908, Munch began to take commissions from the rich and successful and this marked a turning point in his portrait style. Increasingly he painted in bright and bold colours to reflect the dynamism of his sitters. The outstanding work in this section is the super-striking portrait of German physicist Felix Auerbach, commissioned in 1906.

by Edvard Munch (1906) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

In my opinion, you can see at least three things going on in this portrait. 1) The face and in particular the eyes address you really directly, with startling immediacy. Their clarity and figurative accuracy are comparable to the Mallarmé image’s eyes.

2) This immediacy distracts you from the fact that a lot of the secondary detail is no precise, is done using Munch’s trademark curves. Look at the hand holding the cigar: the fingers, the hand, the sleeve do not stand out with photographic realism from the background coat but instead are moulded with his trademark blurred curves. Instead of focusing on light and shadow to make the detail crisp, he prefers to go over the rounded outline of the hand again and again, in different colours, to give it an almost cartoon simplicity.

Lastly, of course 3) the bright red background. Maybe it’s an attempt at the actual wallpaper behind this rich patron when he painted him, but it feels more like an aesthetic statement. At first glance it made me think of the Fauves and Matisse who were just starting to do the same kind of thing in France but the wall caption tells me it’s a homage to Van Gogh’s use of bright and non-naturalistic colours. (n fact this painting now resides in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.) It certainly feels like Munch felt free to create any kind of background he wants, and to use very strong vibrant colour in order to create an effect, in this case an extremely powerful and stirring effect.

The redness of the image reminded me of John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece, Dr Pozzi at Home (1881). Look at Sargent’s treatment of the hands, and indeed of the face. Pretty much none of the works in this exhibition demonstrate the draughtsmanship, the accuracy, or the painterly precision of Sargent.

In a very different mode, and much more reminiscent of his famous woodcut prints in its appreciation of feminine sensuality and its air of mystery, is The Brooch (1902), Munch’s lithograph of the Brixton-born violinist Eva Mudocci. As we’ve seen, Munch created a series of Symbolist ‘floating head’ portraits but almost all of them are of men. This portrait of Mudocci is a rare example of a woman depicted in this manner.

The Brooch (Eva Mudocci) by Edvard Munch (1902) © Private collection, courtesy Peder Lund

As usual the picture caption gives us a fascinating potted biography of the sitter and I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I read that ‘Eva Mudocci’ was actually born Evangeline Hope Muddock in Brixton.

These are the outstanding good works in this section, but there began to be ones I didn’t like or felt fell far short of a professional standard. There are three prints from a set of 16 commissioned by a Dr Linde of his wife and young children. These ought to be good and they’re nearly good, but when you look closely, you see that they’re not good. Look at this drawing of his four sons – all the faces are bodged and wonky. Sorry to be so literal minded, but compared to the draughtsmanship of Holbein or Sargent or Lawrence or numerous other painters, ancient and modern, Munch’s technique feels good, but not wow.

Breakdown

Ten years of heavy drinking, of numerous affairs and moving constantly from place to place took their toll and in 1908 Munch had a breakdown. He was admitted to a private nerve clinic in Copenhagen, run by Dr Daniel Jacobson and slowly, steadily made a full recovery, going on to become a virtual teetotaller.

When Jacobson requested a portrait, Munch chose to pose him in a powerful stance echoing Holbein’s iconic portraits of Henry VIII, painted in bright swirling colours as if engulfed by flames. The wall caption amusingly tells us that Jacobson hated the portrait.

Dr Daniel Jacobson by Edvard Munch (1908) © SMK, National Gallery of Denmark. SMK Photo/Jakob Skou-Hansen

This reproduction makes it look quite dark and more coherent than it is in the flesh. In the flesh it is enormous, larger than life size, and scrappy. You can clearly see the untouched canvas through the scrappy hurried brushstrokes. Now ordinarily I really like this kind of thing when it conveys a sense of dynamism, as in Degas, or experimentalism, as in Cézanne. But, sorry everyone, in Munch, for me, it just felt scrappy and half-hearted.

My opinion was exacerbated by the presence in this room of quite a few other middling to poor paintings, which had the effect of dragging the whole thing down. Take Olga and Rosa Meissner from 1908. I can see that Munch is moving into the new world of German Expressionism, in the breakthroughs of post-impressionism, anticipating the scrappy portraits of English artists like Dora Carrington or Vanessa Bell a decade later. But I don’t like it. The faces are poor and the painting style is scrappy and half-hearted.

There were quite a few paintings with this half-finished scrappy vibe in this section and even more in the fourth and final room.

4. The Guardians

Following his recovery at Dr Jacobson’s clinic, in 1909 Munch moved back home and settled permanently in Norway. In that year (1909) Norway had gained independence from its union with Sweden and Munch was hailed a national hero, having been knighted the previous year.

Munch’s recovery of his health and turning away from the ruinous ways of his Bohemian lifestyle were supported by a small group of new friends who he came to call his ‘Lifeguards’ or ‘Guardians’ – friends and supporters he found among writers, artists and patrons. These Lifeguards were so important to Munch that he refused to be parted from their portraits, which acted as talismanic substitutes for them when they weren’t around. So this last section of the exhibition brings together ten or so portraits of these people which, I’m afraid to say, I found almost uniformly ‘bad’.

In its press images the NPG supplies the two strongest pictures in the room, which are the full-length portrait of Jappe Nilssen and the one of Birgit Prestøe in ‘Seated Model on the Couch’ (1924). They do not supply any of the weaker ones, such as the double portrait of Käte and Hugo Perls, of painter Ludvig Karsten or writer Christian Gierløff.

Here’s the best image in the room, the portrait of Jappe Nilssen.

Jappe Nilssen by Edvard Munch (1909) © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Juri Kobayashi

As you can see, it’s a powerful work, employing van Gogh-style slabs of primary colours to create a dynamic image – although the real source of its power is in the man’s four-square, virile pose. But it’s arguably the best image in the room, and not typical of almost all the others, which feel far weaker and less finished, in at least one case, literally so.

The only other work in the this section that I liked is a portrait of a regular sitter for Munch, Birgit Prestøe. He painted her many times between their meeting in 1924 and 1931.

Seated Model on the Couch (Birgit Prestøe) by Edvard Munch (1924) © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong

I liked this image because, from a distance, it reminded me of the kind of mathematical modernism I really like – the post-cubist angularity of Futurism and Vorticism. But of course, it’s more by accident than design. When you go closer you see that not many of the lines are straight, most are in fact bent or curved or swirly, although I still like the random pools of colour, such as the dark orange on her shoulders and hip and knee.

And here are links to some of the much more characteristic, much less finished, much scrappier, and less pleasing works:

The Olsen, in my view, showcases all Munch’s weaknesses. The draughtsmanship of the face is poor, the arms are worse (at first glance, she looks like a thalydomide victim), the shadow looks like a pool of spilled dirty water.

The Christian Gierløff demonstrates the hold of what I early on came to think of as The Swirl on Munch’s technique, the way 1) the outlines of a figure’s body are echoed and repeated in multiple lines to create a kind of shadowy, faltering effect, and 2) the way the figure doesn’t stand out distinctly from the background, as people do in real life, but what background he can be bothered to paint in shapes itself around the foreground figure. This is most obvious in the rock of whatever it is behind Gierløff and on his right, whose contours entirely shape themselves around his figure, and the yellow line outlining the black which is presumably his shadow, and which curves round to a kind of golden loop on the ground at his feet, which to the schoolboy mind, suggests a puddle of urine.

Clearly Munch considers the backgrounds to his later portraits to be very secondary, to have a mostly decorative effect. Now whereas this works excellently in the striking and very finished portrait of Felix Auerbach, which is indoors, and whose backdrop hovers with pleasing ambiguity between a real wallpaper and pure abstraction – in my opinion this approach does not work when the figure is out of doors and so the background becomes more important, is necessarily more varied, we as animals want to understand the context and precise positioning of a fellow human, so I found Munch’s collapse into semi-abstract swirls and half-arsed shadows, frustrating and incomplete. They’re neither the realism of a Singer Sargent nor the purely decorative abstraction of a Matisse, but a muddy no-man’s-land in between.

Conclusion

The curators, and a surprising number of critics in the papers and magazines, try to persuade us that Munch was one of the great portrait artists of the 20th century. This excellent exhibition makes the strongest possible case for its cause, and is certainly very enjoyable for the biographical and historical facts to be found in all the picture captions – but, in my opinion, ultimately fails. Some of his paintings are excellent, the famous writer lithographs are classic – but, in my opinion, quite a few, especially of the later portraits, are badly drawn, scrappily painted, and the deployment of the swirly outlines which made his 1890s trauma works and the Symbolist portraits so powerful, has degenerated into a messy, irritating mannerism.

Here’s another work which features in the fourth room, a portrait of himself with friend, Torvald Strang.

It’s mildly interesting to learn from the wall caption that 1) the lawyer and barrister Torvald Stang had been a friend of Munch’s since the 1880s, often supporting him during difficult times. He was said to be an elegant man about town. And also to learn that 2) Munch had a strong liking for yellow and often used it as a background for his portraits.

But is this painting any good? Not really, no.

The promotional video

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Posted by Simon on May 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/17/edvard-munch-portraits-the-national-portrait-gallery/

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl (1984)

Born in 1916, Roald Dahl had his first short text (an account of crashing his RAF plane in the desert) published in 1942 i.e. aged 26.

As we all know, this marked the start of a long and stunningly successful career during which he wrote over 60 (increasingly macabre and gruesome) short stories, brought together in a series of collections for adults, most successfully under the brand name ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ to tie in with the 1970s TV adaptations – but more famously, from 1961 onwards, a series of books for children which made him one of the best selling and best known authors in the world.

Forty-two years after that first published piece, at the age of 68, Dahl published this, the first part of his autobiography. Except it isn’t a continuous and comprehensive autobiography at all. Instead it is, as he carefully explains in the preface, a series of memorable incidents and events which have stuck with him since boyhood. It is more like a series of episodes, hence the subtitle ‘Tales of Childhood’.

Boy follows a chronological order and is divided into sections mostly named after the teaching institutions he progressed through:

  1. Family background
  2. Kindergarten
  3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)
  4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)
  5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

The first sentence sets the tone:

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

So this, also, is a book for children, pitched to, what age group would you say? 7? 11?

Taken in the way it is intended, it is a brilliant read. Why? For its wide-eyed, childlike candour. For his tremendous excitement about everything he describes. Everything is the best, everything is vivid with excitement and enthusiasm. Everything overflows with child-like glee.

Looking a bit more closely, every sentence says something interesting. There’s no padding or fat. People and places are summed up with skill and economy. This gives the narrative tremendous pace because things are always moving on, stuff is always being discovered and described, and all with the winning enthusiasm of boyhood.

1. Family background

When his father, Harald, was 14 he fell off the roof while fixing some tiles and broke his arm. A drunk doctor injured it further and it had to be amputated.

His father and brother, Oscar, decided they had to leave the small Norwegian town they’d grown up in so they left for France. Uncle Oscar ended up in La Rochelle, a fishing port, where he ended up owning the biggest fishing fleet and canning factory.

Harald moved to Paris and set up a shipbroking company. The main fuel for shipping was coal. Where was the biggest coal port in the world, Cardiff, so Harald moved there with his young wife, Marie. Here Harald’s business thrived and he bought a big house at Llandaff, just outside Cardiff. Marie bore him two children but died soon after giving birth to the second. Heartbroken, Harald went back to Norway and found a second wife, Sofie, who bore him 4 children, one of whom was Roald.

Business boomed and in 1918, when he was 2, the family moved to a grand house in the village of Radyr. It had a small farm attached and was full of servants. Harald led a vigorous life, mountaineering and was an expert wood carver.

In 1920, when Roald was 3, his sister Astri died from appendicitis, aged 7. She was his father’s favourite and when Harald went down with pneumonia he didn’t put up much of a fight and died.

This left Sofie without a husband and provider and father to the remaining five children, and pregnant again. She could have sold up and gone back to Norway, where her father, mother and unmarried sisters would have helped out.

2. Kindergarten

Instead she sold the big house, bought a smaller one and, a few years, later, sent Roald, aged 6, to his first school, a kindergarten run by two old ladies. He remembers vividly the excitement of travelling there in his brand new tricycle!

3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)

Two memories: one is of seeing an older boy cycle past him, taking his hands off the handlebars and crossing them on his chest. Oh how he wanted to be that boy!

Second memory is the sweetshop where he and his friends bought sherbet suckers and liquorice bootlaces, gobstoppers and tonsil ticklers. Unfortunately this sweetshop is kept by Mrs Pratchett who is ‘a skinny old hag’ with a moustache on her top lip and a terrible temper.

The Great Mouse Plot

He and his friends discover a dead mouse and conceive the wicked idea of slipping it into one of Mrs Pratchett’s big sweetjars. And that’s what they do, while his friend Thwaites distracts her, Roald lifts the lid of the gobstopper jar and drops the dead mouse into it, quietly replacing the lid. What an achievement!

Mr Coombes

Next day they walk past the sweetshop to discover it closed. At school the headmaster calls the boys to an identity parade where, to their horror, Mrs Pratchett identifies them.

Mrs Pratchett’s revenge

Mr Coombes then canes them while Mrs Pratchett looks on approvingly. Worth quoting in full:

As the first stroke landed and the pistol-crack sounded, I was thrown forward so violently that if my fingers hadn’t been touching the carpet, I think I would have fallen flat on my face. As it was, I was able to catch myself on the palms of my hands and keep my balance. At first I heard only the crack and felt absolutely nothing at all, but a fraction of a second later the burning sting that flooded across my buttocks was so terrific that all I could do was gasp. I gave a great gushing gasp
that emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them.

It felt, I promise you, as though someone had laid a red-hot poker against my flesh and was pressing down on it hard.

The second stroke was worse than the first and this was probably because Mr Coombes was well practised and had a splendid aim. He was able, so it seemed, to land the second one almost exactly across the narrow line where the first one had struck. It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin, but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.

The third one seemed even worse than the second. Whether or not the wily Mr Coombes had chalked the cane beforehand and had thus made an aiming mark on my grey flannel shorts after the first stroke, I do not know. I am inclined to doubt it because he must have known that this was a practice much frowned upon by Headmasters in general in those days. It was not only regarded as unsporting, it was also an admission that you were not an expert at the job.

By the time the fourth stroke was delivered, my entire backside seemed to be going up in flames. (p.50)

Roald’s mother discovered the welt marks at that evening’s bath time and went straight round to the school to complain. Roald stayed till the end of that term but then his mother took him out of the school.

Going to Norway

From 1920 to 1932, from the ages of 4 to 17, the family spent every summer holiday in Norway. The many islands and the freedom and innocence remind of Tove Jansson’s memoirs.

Roald gives an exciting account of the complexities of packing all the baggage and travelling first to London, then by train to Newcastle, then by boat to Oslo where his grandparents lived.

He loved his Bestepapa and Bestemama, they always hosted a celebration feast when he and his family arrived, which features ‘a mountain of ice cream’. See what I mean by the way everything sounds brilliant, the sweets, the food the family, the journey, everything!

The magic island

Day after the feast the Dahl family caught a steamer to the magic island. Like everything, it is the bestest of the best!

Late in the afternoon, we would come finally to the end of the journey, the island of Tjöme. This was where our mother always took us. Heaven knows how she found it, but to us it was the greatest place on earth. (p.61)

And:

Breakfast was the best meal of the day in our hotel, and it was all laid out on a huge table in the middle of the dining-room from which you helped yourself. There were maybe fifty different dishes to choose from on that table. There were large jugs of milk, which all Norwegian children drink at every meal. There were plates of cold beef, veal, ham and pork. There was cold boiled mackerel submerged in aspic. There were spiced and pickled herring fillets, sardines, smoked eels and cod’s roe. There was a large bowl piled high with hot boiled eggs. There were cold omelettes with chopped ham in them, and cold chicken and hot coffee for the grown-ups, and hot crisp rolls baked in the hotel kitchen, which we ate with butter and cranberry jam. There were stewed apricots and five or six different cheeses including of course the ever-present gjetost, that tall brown rather sweet Norwegian goat’s cheese which you find on just about every table in the land.

Yummy! Then they’d take the small boat and go exploring the islands, hundreds of them, looking for ones with a little sandy back when he and his sisters were small, later on rocky ones which they could jump off into the sea. In the evenings they went fishing for mackerel and cooked them fresh.

I tell you, my friends, those were the days. (67)

A visit to the doctor

When he was 8, a gruesome trip to a local doctor who takes out his adenoids with no anaesthetic, slashing inside his mouth and extracting great clumps of flesh covered in blood. The child-focused nature of the text is made explicit:

That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often the tonsils as well, without any anaesthetic was common practice in those days. I wonder, though, what you would think if some doctor did that to you today. (p.71)

4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)

First day

This was in Weston-super-Mare, from which you can look across the Bristol Channel and see Wales. Every boy had a Tuck Box containing all his treasures. Boarding schools were money-making machines and fed the boys as little as possible while encouraging them to write to their parents for ‘treats’. The school is long and low sitting in front of its sports pitches and the headmaster is a giant with a grin like a shark.

Writing home

Every Sunday morning every boy had to write a letter home. With Dahl the habit stuck and he wrote his mother at least one letter a week for the next 20 years, from 1925 to 1945, and she kept them all. When she died, in 1957, she left him a huge bundle of his letters, some 600 in total.

The matron

The dormitories are ruled with a rod of steel by the matron who is an ogre. One boy has a bright idea of scattering castor sugar along the corridor so they can hear the crunch-crunch of her arrival. This drives her into a fury and she calls the headmaster who goes red in the face with anger and confiscates all their Tuck Boxes with the result that the boys go hungry for the last 6 weeks of term.

Young Roald is terrified. He sleeps facing the Bristol Channel and therefore his family. It is a great comfort.

A boy called Tweedie snores in his sleep. the matron hears, is disgusted and tips soap shavings into his mouth, so he wakes up blowing bubbles. You can see where all the vicious tyrants in Dahl’s children’s fiction come from.

Homesickness

He is so homesick he decides to fake appendicitis to escape. The matron and headmaster fall for it so he is put on the paddle steamer across the channel to Cardiff, collected by his mother and taken to the family doctor who immediately realises that he’s faking it. He is kind, though, and tells Dahl that it was his (the doctor’s) idea to send him to boarding school. It will toughen him up and get him ready for life.

A drive in the motor-car

Home for the holidays and a hilarious account of a drive in the family’s new car, a De Dion-Bouton, with his eldest step-sister driving, which ends in quite a bad crash, with the glass windscreen half slicing Dahl’s nose off, hanging by ‘a single small thread of skin’ (p.103)! His mother sticks it back in place and they hurry as fast as the unnerved sister can drive, to the doctor’s, Dr Dunbar.

Here he has another operation, this time with a primitive chloroform cotton wool mask to knock him out. The doctor sewed his nose back on and it took. His mother hives him a gold sovereign for being so brave.

Captain Hardcastle

The stock monster teacher, Captain Hardcastle is short and wiry with vermillion hair drenched in brilliantine and parted in the middle. He has a giant orange moustache, teaches Latin and football, and has it in for Roald from day one.

The disaster comes during evening Prep (all the boys sit at desks in the big hall for exactly one hour in complete silence doing whatever task is assigned them) when the nib on Roald’s pen breaks halfway through writing an essay and he incautiously asks his neighbour for a spare. Hardcastle spots this and goes mad.

(This all occurs in 1926, the same year Evelyn Waugh was struggling to be a teacher at a boys preparatory school in Wales, the unfortunate experience which became the basis of his first novel, Decline and Fall.)

Dahl is given a slip to take to the headmaster who, despite all his attempts to explain, gives him six of the best. For the second time he gives a really super-vivid description of the different stages and level of agonising pain which result from caning.

Little Ellis and the boil

Roald is in the sick room with flu when he observes the doctor ‘treating’ the only other boy, young Ellis who has a huge boil on his inner thigh. The doctor throws a towel over Elli’s face and stabs the boil, turning the blade, so that Ellis screams his lungs out. Hardly anybody used anaesthetic on those days, even for dental procedures.

Goat’s tobacco

His eldest half-sister, the one he calls the ancient sister, starts dating an Englishman who accompanies them on their big family holiday. The entire family is irritated by his manly behaviour and poses and way of talking, and particularly by the way that he never removes the manly pipe he smokes from his mouth. So Roald plays a prank. The manly man has just stuffed his perishing pipe when the ancient sister asks him to go for a swim. He does at which Roald, in full sight of the rest of the family, tips the tobacco out and replaces it with goat pellets which he breaks up with his fingers and stuffs in the pipe before putting a thin layer of tobacco back over the top, with, as they say, hilarious consequences.

5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

Getting dressed for the big school

By now the family has moved to Bexley in Kent. His mother asks whether he’d rather go to Repton or Marlborough, two grand public schools. He chooses Repton because it’s easier to pronounce. It was September 1929 when, aged 13, he went off to boarding school. The entire chapter is devoted to the ridiculous school uniform he had to wear.

Boazers

Repton slang for ‘prefects’. These big boys could cane the small ones for almost any infringement. Yet again Dahl describes the mechanics of caning and the different techniques of the different ‘boazers’.

The headmaster

Dahl takes malicious pleasure in explaining that the headmaster of Repton, a charmless ‘shoddy bandy-legged person’, was later selected to be Bishop of Chester, and then Bishop of London, and then Archbishop of Canterbury, and it was none other than he who crowned Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

For he was a notorious deliverer of phenomenally painful and sadistic canings. Roald’s best friend, Michael, describes how the victim had to take down his trousers, kneel on the sofa in the head’s study with their head over one end, and then the head delivered ten severe strokes, in between filling his pipe and delivering a rambling lecture about sin and punishment.

On chapel the head maundered on about forgiveness but showed no forgiveness whatsoever when it came to caning young boys’ buttocks so hard that they bled – at which he handed over a basin, sponge and towel and told them to clean up the blood before leaving.

That this man was a vicar, and then a bishop, and then the Archbishop of Canterbury goes a long way to explaining Dahl’s lifelong atheism.

Chocolates

Surprisingly, boys at Repton were used as guinea pigs for new ranges of chocolates by Cadbury. they were sent boxes containing one standard and nine new experiments, and then asked to fill out forms. In a characteristically enthusiastic chapter he recalls this as the basis of his second children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Corkers

There were about thirty or more masters at Repton and most of them were amazingly dull and totally colourless and completely uninterested in boys. But Corkers, an eccentric old bachelor, was neither dull nor colourless. Corkers was a charmer, a vast ungainly man with drooping bloodhound cheeks and filthy clothes. He wore creaseless flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with patches all over it and bits of dried food on the lapels. He was meant to teach us mathematics, but in truth he taught us nothing at all and that was the way he meant it to be. His lessons consisted of an endless series of distractions all invented by him so that the subject of mathematics would never have to be discussed. (p.151)

These distractions involved getting the whole class to help him with the Times crossword or bringing in some live snakes to hand round.

Fagging

The humiliations of fagging including being one of the three fags who, every Sunday morning, had to clean Carleton’s study until it was as clean as an operating theatre. And he actually performed the cliché task of sitting on a freezing toilet seat in an outhouse to warm it up ready for a senior boy, Wilberforce, to use. In fact he becomes Wilberforce’s favourite bog seat warmer.

Games…

Dahl turns out to be brilliant at fives, a public school ball game quicker than squash. He becomes captain of fives which entitles him to wear a special colour on his straw hat and braid round his blazer etc. He ought to have been made a prefect or ‘boazer’ on account of this eminence but:

But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. There was no way they would agree to make me a House Boazer, let alone a School Boazer. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags. (p.162)

…and photography

Dahl turned out to be a very gifted photographer. He got permission to construct his own dark room and took it very seriously. The sensitive art teacher helped him organise a final year exhibition of his work. When still only 18 he won prizes from the Royal Photographic Society in London.

Goodbye school

He doesn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge but to get a job in as remote and magical a distant land as he can. To his own astonishment he gets a job with Shell. He leaves school in July 1933 and starts the new job in September, just as he’s turning 18.

In his last term he’d bought a motorbike, stashed it in a garage up the road from school, and used to go out for wild rides around Derbyshire disguised in helmet and goggles. On the last day he hurtles away from Repton with no regrets.

He goes on a public school outward bound adventure to Newfoundland, which he discovers to be inhospitable and cold, but returns fit and resilient.

Two years as a trainee with Shell in Britain and then several months in head office learning the business. He commuted in from the family home in Bexley. And here he makes some quotable remarks about the appeal of a regular job, salary, predictable commute etc as against the commitment needed to be a fiction writer, worth quoting in its entirety.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. (p.171)

Then Dahl gets his first placement abroad. To the managing director’s amazement Roald turns it down because it is Egypt. Flat and desert and sand and old relics – Dahl wants lions and tigers and excitement! To his surprise the managing director gives into his wish, gives Egypt to another intern, and a week later gets in touch to say Dahl’s posting will be to East Africa. He jumps up and down with excitement.

And that is where this book ends and its sequel, Going Solo begins.

Thoughts

A masterpiece of children’s storytelling, the book is notable for what it leaves out such as:

  • puberty and sex
  • friendships
  • intellectual development, discussion and debate
  • or even the basic central aspect of school, which is the subjects and the exams – none of these make an appearance

Old man blues

All this, you must realize, was in the good old days when the sight of a motor-car on the street was an event, and it was quite safe for tiny children to go tricycling and whopping their way to school in the centre of the highway. (p.23)

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous any more. (p.166)

But he’s right, of course. Cars have destroyed childhood and anyone can go anywhere now, often at Ryan Air prices, so that everywhere feels like the same huge shopping mall.

Credit

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984. References are to the 1986 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Roald Dahl reviews

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by Simon on May 27, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 27, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/27/boy-tales-of-childhood-roald-dahl/

Edvard Munch: love and angst @ the British Museum

The fin-de-siecle

The last decade of the 19th century is famous for the decadent, dark imagery of its art and literature, and even life. In Imperial Britain this was epitomised by the decadent sexuality associated with the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Book magazine and the pornographic prints of Aubrey Beardsley. In France there was a reaction against Impressionism which took many forms including the urban posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and the swarthy nudes of Paul Gauguin down in the South Seas. All were well-known and public artists, working in cosmopolitan cities which were the capitals of far-flung empires – London, Paris. They were famous and playing on large stages.

In the other countries of northern Europe, however, one of the most powerful artistic currents was Symbolism.

As the exhibition notes:

Symbolism was a literary and artistic movement that rejected representations of the external world for those of imagination and myth. Symbolists looked inwards in order to represent emotions and ideas.

In Belgium, north Germany and the Scandinavian countries, artists developed a wide range of techniques and styles, but tended to fixate on a handful of themes, namely sex and death. Death awaits with his scythe. Empty boats arrive at forbidding islands. Youths waste away from frustrated love. Beautiful young women turn out to be vampires.

Sex and death and anguish and despair, these are all much more personal, introverted, emotions. Wilde was a flamboyant public personality, Beardsley’s art was defiantly lucid and elegant, both were immensely sophisticated and urbane and cosmopolitan, confident doyens of the largest, richest city in the world.

Whereas much of the fin-de-siecle art from Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia was darker, more personal. Of course they produced urban and sophisticated art as well – the 1890s is characterised by an explosion of diverse art movements – but there was also a big strand of empty lakes and dark pine forests and brooding skies and agonised artist-heroes.

Edvard Munch

Munch is slap bang in the middle of this social and cultural movement. His most famous work is The Scream, which was first made as a painting in 1893 and then turned into a lithograph in 1895 which was reproduced in French and British and American magazines and made his reputation.

The Scream is probably among the top ten most famous images produced by any artist anywhere, and has been parodied and lampooned and reproduced in every medium imaginable (pillow slips and duvet covers, posters, bags, t-shirts). It featured in an episode of The Simpsons, clinching its status as one of the world’s best known art icons. It’s up there with the Mona Lisa.

The Scream (1895) by Edvard Munch. Private Collection, Norway. Photo by Thomas Widerberg

Why is it so powerful? Well:

  1. It is highly stylised and simplified – it barely looks like a human being at all, more like some kind of ghost or spirit of the woods.
  2. The rest of the landscape is drawn with harsh single lines, whose waviness seems to echo the long O of the protagonist’s mouth.
  3. The ‘primitiveness’ of the technique of wood carving – with its thick, heavy ‘crude’ lines – somehow echoes the primalness of the emotional state being described.

The exhibition

This exhibition brings together nearly 50 prints from Norway’s Munch Museum, making this the largest exhibition of Munch’s prints seen in the UK for 45 years.

It also includes sketches, photos and a few oil paintings, not least a big haunting portrait – The Sick Child – of his favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis when she was just 13. These are set alongside works by French and German contemporaries, to present a powerful overview of Munch’s troubled personality, the artistic milieu he moved in, and his extraordinary ability to turn it into powerful images conveying intense, primal human emotions.

Vampire II (1896) by Edvard Munch. The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, on loan to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo

Claustrophobic

The exhibition is up in the top gallery in the Rotunda, a relatively small space, which was divided into smallish sections or rooms, the prints hung quite close together on the walls, and the place was packed, rammed, with silver-haired old ladies and gentleman. It was hard to move around. More than once I went to move on from studying a print and found I couldn’t move, with people studying the next-door prints blocking me to left and right and a shuffle of pedestrians blocking any backward movement. Imagine the Tube at rush hour. It was like that.

Possibly, in fact, a good atmosphere to savour Munch’s work. Trapped, claustrophobic, slightly hysterical. it forced me to look up at the quotes from his letters or diaries which have been liberally printed up on the exhibition walls. Just reading these immediately gives you a sense of where Munch was coming from, his personality and the motivation for his art.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)

The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)

I would not cast off my illness, because there’s much in my art that I owe it.

We do not want pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want… an art that arrests and engages. An art of one’s innermost heart.

Sexual anxiety

There’s plenty more where this came from. The exhibition gives a lot of biographical detail about Munch’s early life, describing the Norwegian capital of Kristiana, how it was connected to the rest of Europe by sea routes, how it was a small provincial town whose every aspect was dominated by the stiflingly respectable Lutheran church, but how young Edvard was attracted to its small bohemian, artistic set of poets and writers and artists, how he conceived a massive sequence of works about love and sex and death which he titled The Frieze of Life:

The Frieze is intended as a poem about life, about love and about death. (1918)

How he travelled to Paris and to Berlin and scandalised respectable opinion with the exhibitions he held there, but created a stir and won admirers for the stark, elemental quality of his woodcuts and prints. (The exhibition includes a map of Europe showing Munch’s extensive travels during the 1890s and 1900s, along with a selection of Munch’s personal postcards and maps.)

We are told Munch was born and brought up in a fiercely religious and conservative bourgeois family which was horrified when he fell in with Kristiania’s bohemian layabouts. These bohos practiced sexual promiscuity, had numerous affairs, and so were plagued by jealousy and infidelity and fights – all exacerbated by the way they drank too much, far too much.

It seemed obvious to me that Munch’s anxiety was caused by the crashing conflict between his extremely repressed bourgeois upbringing and the chaotic and promiscuous circles he moved in as a young man. On the one hand was a young man’s desire and lust, on the other were all the authority figures in his culture (and inside his head) saying even looking at a woman with lust in his heart would lead to instant damnation.

The scores of images he made of women as vampires and weird Gothic presences and looming succubi emerging from the shadows, represent a repeated attempt to confront the epicentre of that clash – sex, embodied – for a heterosexual young man – by sexualised young women. They attracted him like a drug, like heroin but all these compulsive thoughts about them triggered the terror of physical disease – the appalling ravages of syphilis for which there was no cure – along with the certainty of eternal damnation – and all these led to anxious, almost hysterical thoughts, about the only way out, the only way to resolve the endless nightmare of anxiety – and that was release and escape into death, the death which he had seen at such close quarters in the deaths of his beloved mother and sister from tuberculosis.

The obsessiveness of his sexual thoughts, and their violent clash with orthodox Christianity, is most evident in the hugely controversial Madonna, an obviously erotic image to which he blasphemously misapplies the title the Mother of God. When you look closely, you realise that those are sperm swimming round the outside of the frame, and a miserable-looking foetus squatting at the bottom left. Sex versus Religion! It’s amazing he wasn’t arrested for blasphemy and public indecency. In fact his 1892 exhibition in Berlin so scandalised respectable opinion that it was shut down after just a week.

Madonna (1895/1902) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

So Munch’s vampire women aren’t real women, of course they’re not. They are depictions of male anxiety about women, namely the irreconcilable conflict between the demanding, drug-addiction-level lust many young, testosterone-fueled men experience, whether they want to or not – and the feelings of shame about having such strong pornographic feelings and experiences, regret at handling relationships with women badly, and anxiety that you are a failure, as a man and as a decent human being. And terror that – if there is a God – you are going straight to hell for all eternity.

Plus, as the wall labels indicate, there really was a lot of heavy drinking in his circle and by Munch personally, which led to chaotic lifestyles among the bohemian set. Munch became a clinical alcoholic. And this addiction – to alcohol – will, of course, have exacerbated all the psychological problems described above.

Exposure to so many of Munch’s prints – alongside detailed explanations of how he made them, the Norwegian and north European tradition they stem from, and so on – really rubs in the fact that he was a great master of the form. It’s not just The Scream. Lots of the other prints have the same archetypal, primitive power, and the exhibition brings it out by setting Munch’s work beside prime examples by other leading print-makers of the time, in France and Germany (many of which are themselves worth paying the price of admission to see).

The subtle prints

It tends to be the extreme images we are attracted to – The Scream, The Madonna, the numerous vampire women, the worrying image of a pubescent girl sitting on a bed. But some decades ago we crossed a threshold into being able to accept all kinds of erotic and extreme images, so these no longer scandalise and thrill us in the same way they did their initial viewers, although they still provide powerful visual experiences.

But having had a first go around the exhibition taking in these greatest hits, I slowly came to realise there was another layer or area of his work, which is – in a word – more subtle. If the most obvious and impactful of his images are about stress and anxiety mounting to open hysteria – there were also plenty of images which were far more restrained. In which – to point out an obvious difference – the women are wearing clothes.

Instead of vampire women whose kisses are turning into bites, these tend to be of fully dressed, utterly ‘respectable’ late-nineteenth century types, set outdoors, in open air situations where… somehow, through the placing and composition of the figures, a more subtle sense of aloneness and isolation is conveyed. They capture the mood of a couple who are, for some reason, not communicating, each isolated in their brooding thoughts.

The Lonely Ones (1899) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Like the complex ways relationships between the sexes fail, become blocked and painful in the plays of Munch’s fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. (Munch, as a leading artist of the day, was acquainted with both Ibsen and the younger playwright, Strindberg. It crossed my mind that if Munch’s more hysterical images can be compared to the highly strung characters in a Strindberg play, the more subdued and unhappy images in some way parallel Ibsen’s couples.)

Having processed the extreme images of vampire women, sex and death in my first go round, on this second pass I warmed to these less blatant images.

I noticed that the naked women images are almost always indoors (as, I suppose, naked women mostly had to be, in his day). But that the more ‘respectable’ and subtle images were all set outside, and often by primal landscapes – namely The Lake and The Forest – the kind of primeval landscape we all associate with Scandinavia and which really was available right on Kristiana’s doorstep.

The exhibition ends with a set of prints which perform variations on his characteristically hunched, half-abstract human figures – characteristically, showing one man and one woman – but in this series hauntingly isolated, leaning on each other or against each other, in postures which don’t look at all sensual but more like the survival techniques of characters from a play by Samuel Beckett.

Towards the Forest II (1897/1915) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Less striking than the vampires and naked women and girls, I thought these strange, half-abstract, ‘lost souls in the landscape’ images had a kind of purity and haunting quality all their own.

Breakdown and rebirth

It comes as no surprise to learn that in 1908 Munch had a nervous breakdown. His anxiety, compounded by excessive drinking and sometimes fighting, had become acute, and he was experiencing hallucinations and persecution mania. He entered a clinic and underwent a comprehensive detoxification which lasted nearly eight months.

When he left, he was a new man. Well, new-ish. His work became more colourful and less pessimistic and the wider public of Kristiania for the first time began to appreciate his work. Critics were supportive. His paintings sold. Museums started to buy his back catalogue. His life improved in all measurable ways. But in a textbook case of the artist who needs his anxieties and neuroses to produce great works, everything he carved and painted from then on – portraits of rich friends, of the farm he bought, murals for factories – lacked the intensity and archetypal power of his early years.

Years later all that storm and stress and hysteria seemed so distant as almost to be inexplicable.It is typical that, decades later, he told the story of how his famous painting, Vampire II, got its title. He himself had simply titled it Love and Pain. Pretty boring, eh? But Munch’s friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski, and clearly a man with a flair for publicity, described it as ‘a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’s face.’ And, looking back, Munch comments:

It was the time of Ibsen, and if people were really bent on revelling in symbolist eeriness and calling the idyll ‘Vampire’ – why not?

A man in remission from alcoholism and mental illness, the older Munch can be forgiven for not wanting to revive unhappy memories, and for wanting to palm off the idea for lurid titles onto his friends. But the prints themselves, and all his early writings, don’t lie. The later work is interesting and decorative – but it is the unhappy period covered by this exhibition which produced the intense and troubled works which seem to take you right into the heart of the tortured human condition.

Older, wiser and sober. Munch among his paintings at the end of his life

The promotional video

Related links

Related reviews

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by Simon on July 22, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Museum, Prints
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Posted by Simon on July 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/edvard-munch-love-and-angst-british-museum/