Munch faces his demons

We know Edvard Munch (1863-1944) as the painter who created a succession of unforgettable icons of anxiety: the terrified figure with the skull-like head in The Scream (one of the most frequently stolen paintings in the world), the trembling adolescent girl in Puberty, the huddle of sombre, hand-wringing relatives in Death in the Sick Chamber, writes Aidan Dunne

In all these and other paintings, Munch deftly bypasses outward appearances and plunges us directly into painful inner states. We see the outside world as warped and distorted, as though through the eyes of his tortured subjects.

On his death in 1944, the bulk of his work, everything that he still possessed, he left to the City of Oslo. This huge bequest led to the establishment of the Munch-museet in 1963. There is, at yet, no complete catalogue of Munch's paintings, though one is in preparation.

Apart from a couple of early instances, there have been no systematic attempts to follow the self-portraits as a distinct strand in his oeuvre. Until now.

Drawing on the unique assets of the Munch-museet collection, Iris Muller-Westermann of Stockholm's Moderna Museet has, with London's Royal Academy, devised an exhibition that makes up an extraordinary visual narrative, an autobiography in paint and graphics. Munch by Himself is an engrossing exhibition that is revealing and fascinating on a number of levels.

The title itself could be interpreted in several ways. It seems that even from early on in life, Munch had an enhanced sense of himself as an isolated being. Despite achieving a significant level of fame and international success, he persisted in seeing himself as a misunderstood outsider. This is not to say, though, that his relentless self-portraiture is a symptom of self-pity. Particularly later in his life, there is an almost cruelly dispassionate aspect to his self-scrutiny.

And he subjected himself to comparable levels of self-investigation at more or less every stage of his life, as he faced everyday anxieties, unhappiness, depression, alcoholism and illness. Several of the later paintings are, in this regard, stunning works when seen in context - in Munch's own words: "It becomes really interesting when everything can be seen in context."

It is reasonable to see many of the personal difficulties that beset him as stemming from his childhood and adolescence. While his background was materially comfortable, his mother died from tuberculosis when he was just five years old. Though his aunt took over the running of the household, Edvard, the second eldest of five children, appears to have had an unhappy time with his father, who was obsessively religious and a reputedly violent disciplinarian. Worse was to come. Edvard himself was dogged by ill health and, when he was 15 his elder sister, Sophie, to whom he was particularly close, also died of tuberculosis.

Within a couple of years, he had abandoned plans to become an engineer and decided he was going to be a painter. According to his biographer, Sue Prideaux, he also decided early on that he would never marry, that he would dedicate himself to art.

Psychological defensiveness surely informed this vocational dedication. Not least on the evidence of his own work, he had great difficulty in relating to women as complete beings and continually cast them in traditional, stereotypical roles. Often in his paintings, woman is a mysterious Other, an unfathomable force of nature, life-giving but dangerous. As he said of his own Woman. Sphinx, the various embodiments of woman in the painting represent her as "saint, whore and an unfortunate devotee". The latter term might apply to several women in his life.

His relationships were marked by a terror of letting a woman get too close to him. This fear is articulated in visualisations of the woman as Vampire, draining the life out of her lover, or as Salome or, most melodramatically, as Charlotte Corday, the killer of Jean-Paul Marat. Munch's Charlotte was Tulla Larsen, whom he first met in 1898. Their tempestuous, on-off relationship culminated in a denouement that might have been scripted by Ibsen with a little help from Woody Allen. Larsen apparently wanted a stable relationship, the mere thought of which so unsettled Munch that he was plunged into a state of suicidal depression.

Larsen destroyed all her papers and correspondence before her death, so we only have Munch's version of their final, theatrical confrontation on an autumn evening in 1902, during which a gun was produced. Somehow, the artist managed to shoot himself in the hand, very bloodily and painfully. A finger was reduced to a mess of fragmented bullet and bone, and his hand was permanently damaged.

A central section of Munch by Himself is given over to his artistic translation of this traumatic event, casting Larsen as Corday and himself as Marat. The several paintings with variations arising from these events are fascinating. What is also fascinating, though, is Munch's in-built propensity to see himself as victim.

When he had embarked on a career as a painter, he went to Paris by virtue of a government grant. Quite quickly, he moved on from naturalistic observation to expressive possibilities. He was a very capable naturalistic painter, but he began to work against his own facility, eschewing conventional pictorialism.

Having painted the requisite pictures of women knitting in sedate interiors, he later wrote, disparagingly: "We should no longer paint interiors with people reading and women knitting; they should be people who live, breathe, feel, suffer and love."

Van Gogh and Gaugin indicated a direction away from the Impressionists. Munch's uncompromising pursuit of inner subjectivities was radical, so radical that an exhibition of his work in Berlin in 1892 caused a scandal and was closed prematurely. Mind you, as is often the case, the scandal worked wonders for his reputation.

Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that he was an isolated figure. Myriad aspects of modernity had encroached on comfortable assumptions about the stability of human nature, society and religious beliefs, and Munch was as influenced by all of this as anyone. The changing status of women could also be seen as highly significant for him.

Still, apart from battling his own demons, he was without doubt exploring dangerous psychic terrain, and the strain was real. In 1908, despite achieving unprecedented official approbation and being showered with honours, he had a nervous breakdown, and was fortunate to find a sympathetic physician in Dr Jacobson in Copenhagen. At the doctor's clinic, he managed to work fruitfully and renew his resources.

The final part of the exhibition is titled The Hermit at Ekely. It's a good description of the latter part of his life. He moved to isolate himself, living in comfort at Ekely, on the outskirts of Kristiana (Oslo). While much of the work he made there is preoccupied with feelings of ageing, isolation and melancholy, with numerous references to ill health (he weathered the potentially lethal Spanish flu and had some horrific eye trouble, among other afflictions), he also comes across as being, if not quite content, then living as he really wanted to.

Some tremendous paintings give an account of the meditative, lonely artist looking backwards and forwards. In the famous Self-portrait Between Clock and Bed he muses with stark clarity on his own mortality. His shadow intrudes into the beautiful snowy view of distant city lights in Starry Night and, in Self-portrait: The Night Wanderer we see the artist as a gaunt, ghostly presence, haunting the spaces of his own home. He died there, in Ekely, in January 1944.

Munch by Himself is at the Royal Academy, London until Dec 11