THE ARTS:Best known for 'The Scream', Edvard Munch produced almost 100,000 works – mostly graphic works and drawings – and an exhibition coming to Dublin might mark their last journey outside their native Norway
'SHOULD WE start at the beginning, then?" Magne Bruteig asks. The curator at the City of Oslo's Munch Museum is a tall man with a quiet voice, flawless English and an unqualified admiration for the prints and woodcuts of Edvard Munch. As an artist, Munch tends to get dwarfed by the superstardom of his iconic and instantly recognisable painting The Scream, which has taken on a kind of cult life of its own. Parodies and tributes turn up in the most unlikely places.
Remember that scene in Home Alonewhere Macaulay Culkin is messing with his dad's aftershave? Not to mention Ghostface, the baddie in Wes Craven's – ahem – Screammovies, who wears a mask inspired by the painting's famously angst-ridden central figure.
So it comes as no surprise to find the conference table in Bruteig's office adorned with a collection of bottles and glasses, the centrepiece of which is a spanking new brand of vodka called, you guessed it, "Scream". Bruteig smiles and spreads his hands in a gesture of resignation. Everybody wants The Scream. If they're not looking to license it, they're wanting to borrow it. And if all else fails, they steal it (see panel).
But there's a lot more to Munch than The Scream. And so we start at the beginning – which, as Bruteig tells it, comes with the artist's decision to bequeath his work to the city of Oslo. By the time Munch died in 1944, at the grand old age of 80, the accumulated totals were staggering. "More than 1,100 paintings," Bruteig says, with obvious relish. "Almost 80,000 graphic works and several thousand drawings. A vast collection."
It’s a collection in which graphic works and drawings outnumber paintings by more than eight to one: so when a selection of the former, rather than the latter, goes on display at the National Gallery in Dublin this month, there’s no reason for Irish art lovers to feel they’re being short-changed. “Munch was at least as groundbreaking an artist in his graphic works as in his painting,” Bruteig insists. “He established new techniques, particularly in woodcuts. And he put so much energy into his graphic works that they are really very outstanding works of art – and not something he did when he just wanted to relax or, you know, if you just want to copy a painting and make it available. It’s true that he does have graphic versions of many of the paintings; but he translates the work to suit the needs of the graphic media he’s using, and it very often comes out very differently.”
In the case of The Scream, for example, it was no mean achievement to recreate the power of the original – much of which comes from its flamboyant use of colour – in a black-and-white lithograph. "The overall composition is much the same, but it's built on line rather than colour. He chose to do it more or less like a woodcut. In fact, many people think it is a woodcut — because it's built on these lines which seem to be cut out of the surface."
Given that Bruteig is a specialist in Munch's graphic work and given that he worked very closely on the selection of prints in the current exhibition, does he have a particular favourite? "That's difficult," he says. "There are so many main works in this selection. But I am particularly fascinated by his woodcuts, so I would perhaps select one of those. The Kiss, for example, is a motif that he works on over and over again throughout his career in drawings, paintings and graphic works. And it's so fascinating to follow the development of this subject – particularly in woodcuts, where he makes it simpler and simpler until it's just this form of the two people tied together in one. So simple, and yet so strong. Because the difficulty is not making things simpler, but as you make them simpler you tend to lose the strength of expression. I think Munch has managed not only to keep the strength, but to augment it. So that's one of my favourites."
AS WE WALKaround the Munch Museum's summer exhibition, which runs until the end of September – there are far too many works to show more than a fraction of them at once – we find the artist's tendency to obsess over certain themes writ large on the walls. There is a sickroom with a deathly pale young woman on a bed. There is a sequence in which a man and a woman approach each other – Attraction– or move away – Separation. There is Munch's Madonna, her arms eternally raised behind her head. There are people with no features, or big, black, Batman-mask eyes. There are people with long, white, drooping hands.
And, over and over again and always looking lonely and anguished, there’s the artist himself. Munch’s childhood was marked by death; his mother died of TB when he was just five years old, and his elder sister when he was 14, leaving him in the care of his doctor father – whose religious fanaticism and strict lifestyle did nothing to lighten the young Munch’s early life. Then, when he began to paint, the Norwegian critics gave him a hard time. “They thought he painted very sloppily and didn’t finish anything,” says Bruteig.
In 1892 he was invited to Berlin to mount an exhibition. “But they didn’t really know what he was painting,” says Bruteig with a smile. “And so they were very, very angry when they saw the paintings – and they closed the exhibition after a few days. That was the so-called ‘scandal’ exhibition.” Scandal or not, the Berlin exhibition started Munch’s career in Germany.
IN 1902, HEhad another traumatic experience when his fiancée managed to shoot him in the hand. "And this was – what should I say? He couldn't really get over this incident. He kept coming back to it. He wrote about it and talked about it and painted it and was really very depressed because of this. He began to be quite famous and well known; but as his career goes up, his mental condition is going rapidly downwards," says Bruteig. "He was drinking too much, fighting."
In 1908 Munch was hospitalised for six months in Copenhagen following a nervous breakdown; on his release, he decided to return to Norway. "He leads a good life after that, isolating himself more or less on his estate in Oslo, keeping himself away from others but quite sound physically and mentally." Sound, if you don't look too closely at those self-portraits – particularly the final one, Between the Clock and the Bed, which was painted in 1940. The image shows Munch, trapped between an implacable timepiece and a terrifying bedcover, looking utterly defeated. "It was hard for him living alone in his big house," says Bruteig. "He wandered about at night when he couldn't sleep."
It may, however, have been Munch's very detachment that made him such a good portrait painter. As well as self-portraits, the exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland will include prints of his studies of Nietzsche, Strindberg and Mallarme as well as the woodcuts Girls on the Bridgeand Woman on the Shore. It's an extraordinary insight into an extraordinary mind – and something of a last chance to see these most Norwegian of artworks outside of Norway. Following two highly-publicised robberies, the Munch Museum's security policy has been tightened to a level where it won't be possible to allow many of the works to go on tour again.
Which, as Bruteig points out with another of his fatalistic shrugs, is a pity. "We really can't do that any more, so our Screamswill stay in the museum," he says. On the other hand, the entire gallery is about to be moved lock, stock and barrel to the centre of Oslo, with a spanking new building planned right beside the Opera House in the city's waterfront area. It's due to open in 2014. So if you ever find yourself in need of a Screammug, a ScreamT-shirt, a Screammouse mat, fridge magnet or even a bottle of Screamvodka, a weekend in Oslo is your only man.
Edvard Munch: Prints runs from this weekend at the National Gallery of Ireland until December 6th. Admission €5/€3; free on Mondays. See nationalgallery.ie
Scream If You Saw The Art Thieves Munch's Heist History
Across the road from the Botanic Gardens in the sleepy Oslo suburb of Toyen, the Munch Museum is an unlikely place to find art thieves in action: yet it has been the scene of two famous heists. When it opened in 1960, the Munch Museum was – as its curator Magne Bruteig puts it – "very open and inviting, with no security at all. We had concerts and different cultural events, it was free for everybody and it was open from early morning until late in the night throughout the year. At the time, the thought that somebody could walk in and steal an art work – well, nobody thought on those lines." Apart from the people who came in through a window and helped themselves to the painting known as Vampire, that is.
This prompted a big security re-think and although the painting was recovered, the museum was rebuilt and extended. In 2004 thieves struck again, making off with The Scream(right) and Madonna. It was, as Bruteig points out, an armed robbery – which no amount of security can really prevent.
Nevertheless, the museum was closed for a year while the whole security set-up was overhauled. At present, it is more like going into an airport than a gallery – and many of the most valuable paintings are displayed behind glass. Three men are serving between four and eight years for the robbery, and the paintings were eventually recovered. "In the case of Madonna, the canvas was penetrated but the hole could be mended so you can't see the difference," says Bruteig. "The problem with The Screamwas more serious. It's painted on cardboard, and it was stored somewhere that something had been dripping – probably water – down one of the edges. So some of the paint had been drained away, and there's a stain along the edge."
In truth, to the untrained eye the damage is barely noticeable. It’s the idea of it that is so scary. To put all those words into the same sentence – world-famous masterpiece, dripping water, cardboard, and all those vibrant reds and oranges – is enough to provoke, if not a scream, at least a definite shudder.
