Art review: Edvard Munch: Prints

Published on Saturday 13 June 2009 13:38

Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

A SKULL-LIKE figure clutches his hands to his ears, in a defensive gesture of pain. His mouth is open in agony as all around him the landscape quivers and the sea and sky seem to vibrate. It's hard to think of any other image which has had such a strong life beyond the gallery wall as Edvard Munch's The Scream. First painted in 1893, there are four painted or pastel versions of the work and numerous lithographs. In any form it is instantly recognisable: a shorthand for all manner of male angst, the very image of northern neurosis and existential anxiety as the 19th century flipped convulsively over into the 20th.

It's an image that has been subject to all manner of appropriation and jest, but has remained remarkably resilient. Even Wes Craven's Scream movie franchise failed to dent its power, simply reinforcing the fact that the high culture parent of Craven's serial killer Ghostface is an exceptionally memorable piece of graphic design.

The work's fame has been helped by its unfortunate habit of being stolen. The Norwegian National Gallery lost a version back in 1994, while the rest of the country was distracted by the opening of the Winter Olympics. A decade later, masked gunmen nabbed another version from the Munch Museum. Both works were recovered and restored in 2006, but the curatorial scars run pretty deep. So when the Hunterian in Glasgow announced that this summer a lithograph of The Scream would be among the prints on show in its loan exhibition from the Munch Museum, it was alongside the news that once the show packed up, this particular Scream wasn't going anywhere but home to Oslo.

If Munch is the high priest of gloom, and The Scream his most famous icon, then it is fitting that the Hunterian's print room has been painted a sepulchral grey for this show of 40 prints, the biggest of its kind in the UK for more than three decades. The appetite for Munch in Britain was slow to develop in a climate conditioned by the taste for the colours and pleasure of France and Italy. Then, as now, Brits quite fancied a year in Provence but were less open to the challenges of colder cultural climes such as Munch's Norway. Munch studied in Paris but found his mtier in gloomier more challenging Bohemias, the circle of determined (and pretty miserable) rule-breakers in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) which formed around the charismatic nihilist Hans Jaeger and the intellectually rigorous, emotionally fraught world of Berlin.

The Scream itself may overshadow the rest of the work in this show, but it is also a key to much of Munch's art. It appears deceptively simple, but its title does not refer to the central figure, but to a blood red sunset the artist witnessed, "a loud endless scream through nature". Munch's art seems – and indeed is – visually direct, but it is not simplistic. Cited sources for this, one of the most analysed works in art history, range from ancient Egyptian mummies to the philosophy of Schopenhauer.

Certainly among the friends, influences and fellow travellers who appear in Munch's prints and paintings are some of the more complex figures of the age: they include the dramatists Ibsen and Strindberg, the poet Mallarm and the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Similarly, Munch's aesthetic choices: strong rough lines, the rawness of his woodcuts and references to folk art are a sign not of simplicity but of sophistication. He drew on an avant-garde culture that was seeking more direct means of communication, and now in retrospect he is widely seen as one of the founding figures of expressionist art.

Munch's best works all share the contradictory qualities of instantaneity and monumentality. There is his self-portrait as a pale wraith set against inky darkness, beneath him a memorial image of his own arm turned skeletal. There is the picture of his dead sister Sophie that conveys not just his sense of loss but her instant character. His Madonna is not some alabaster cipher but a woman in ecstatic sexual abandon, a thoroughly modern take on the Renaissance staple of the annunciation. The Kiss, which takes the hackneyed subject of entwined lovers, becomes a meditation on the making of images: the figures seem carved from wood, and the grain of the woodblock that forms them is undisguised.

Born in 1863, Munch lost his mother and his sister to tuberculosis and was raised in genteel and restless poverty by his miserably religious father. He was bright, but often poorly, and his years in full artistic flight were later curtailed by a significant and life-changing breakdown in 1908. This show is not cheerful. There is misery aplenty: early death, sickrooms, melancholy, ennui, jealousy and desperation. There is the curse of ageing, anxiety, sexual frustration. What pleasure there is seems fleeting: the joys of the bottle, the briefest moment of orgasmic release, the fleeting accident of conception.

And there is the fascinating rub about Munch, his work for all its surface histrionics is the art of real life. Many of the works in this show were intended for his all encompassing project The Frieze Of Life, a kind of early high point of confessional culture.

Munch was no priapic Picasso, full of superhuman hunger, joy and brutality. And for all the superficial resemblance Munch is no visionary Van Gogh hovering somewhere on the edge between daily misery and religious ecstasy. The best of Munch's art is recognisably human, beset with dilemmas, everyday sorrows, mishaps and miserable recollections.

If some of Munch's imagery seems laughably simplistic, particularly in its attitude to women, it also prefigures generations of everyday anti-heroes: the anxious, the moderately unhappy, the self-loathing. People fall in love; make fools of themselves, are jealous and foolish. Death is an unwelcome visitor, family life is hard. Munch himself is miserable hanger-on, a masked outsider in many of his own life's scenes. He drinks too much, causes his friends misery by messing around with their lovers, can't settle down, seeks and then flees love. Bohemian life is not cost-free as much as gruelling.

And in Munch's visual shorthand, everyone in Bohemia is pre-occupied. Gauguin's painting The Vision After The Sermon suggested that for the modern painter the inner and outer world could exist in the same picture plane. Munch absorbed this lesson but applied it to more mundane worries. Many of his figure compositions are not group portraits but signs of trouble in mind: girl trouble, family trouble and especially drink trouble. The earliest work in this show is a drinking scene, a scratchy drypoint of a young woman with a hangover, prone from excess with the empty bottle beside her bed. The last work is a 1930 version of an earlier self-portrait, the artist in a bar in a period where he "senselessly poured wine and cognac down my throat".

In between lies a life not just of sorrows drowned but of artistic innovation.

Until 5 September, www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk