Showing posts with label madness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label madness. Show all posts

13/03/2014

Panic Art – In Praise of Madness

“There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”
Antonin Artaud

“The Romantic artist, if defined in terms of behaviour, is in fact, timeless. As far back as the Renaissance Vasari was writing about artistic temperaments and the supposed link between madness and genius, citing Michelangelo’s anti-social behaviour, fighting in the streets, never changing his trousers; or the queer ways of Portormo, a recluse who lived on boiled eggs and refused to answer the door. Practically every surviving anecdote about Apelles, first painter of Ancient Greece, has him using his draughtsmanship as a defensive weapon and storming the streets in a massive sulk. In the seventeenth century, the Italian Baroque painter Pietro Testa, friend of Poussin and former pupil of Annibale Carracci, himself afflicted by depression, seems to have succumbed to melancholy and killed himself. His first biographer wants to describe it as an accidental death brought about by his habit of ‘depicting night scenes and changes in the atmosphere of the sky’ but it was not night when he drowned himself in the Tiber, and Testa’s contemporary Salvator Rosa might be said to have single-handedly invented the Romantic sensibility even before that.”                                                                                      
Laura Cumming, A Face To The World, HarperPress, 2009, P186.


Salvador Dalí famously exclaimed: “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” In fact Dalí might not have been clinically mad but he was highly eccentric, neurotic, narcissistic and a shameful exhibitionist. Remember Sigmund Freud famously told Dalí: “in the paintings of the Old Masters one immediately tends to look for the unconscious whereas, when one looks at a Surrealist painting, one immediately has the urge to look for the conscious.” In fact, for all their apparent lunacy – Dalí’s paintings were highly intellectual, contrived and steeped in Western art.                                                                         


Well the only difference between me - and a madman - is I take my medication! Yet, as a sufferer from a Borderline Personality Disorder, I am neither sane nor fully insane - I painfully straddle both worlds. I have reached a point in my life - where I have come to accept my madness and I am tired of trying to be normal. While I am not nearly as mad as I was in my youth – it still lurks in the shadows and snares me every few weeks. But I have developed good coping strategies, which help - along with the love of my girlfriend and family. Writing has both helped me understand my life and become aware of my failings, yet it has also taken somewhat from my art – reducing my passion for painting and my autocratic spontaneity.


I am an anti-social savage at my core – the one formed by my chaotic childhood. As a youth, I found it hard to care about the lives or art of others and I did not believe in the myths of family, friendship, society or God. My adolescent ambition was monstrous in its intensity and my contempt and blindness to the art of others was almost total and I viewed my fellow artists as enemies. When dragged along to mass by well meaning family or foster parents - I thought the whole thing a ludicrous charade. In school, I loathed the systematic elimination of independent thought and grooming for the work place. In art classes - I could not stand the mediocrity and technical incompetence of others. I viewed culture as part of a grand conspiracy - to avoid the truth of existence. Like Holden Caulfield I viewed everyone else as phonies – but could not see the phoniness of my own delusions.                          


Time and again, I have read art critics and cultural commentators say that they find madness inexplicable. I find the reverse true. I find reason impossible to comprehend. To me madness has a savage logic to it where as reasonable life has a baffling hypocrisy and idiocy I cannot fathom. I paint, because I have no other option. It is my only hope at bettering my life, my best therapy and the only thing I do with some gift. Art like religion and philosophy has no purpose and it is impossible to prove or disprove. It is entirely based upon persuasion. In art, like religion, one has cult leaders, tribes, insiders and outsiders – but ultimately there is nothing to discover behind the facade except the ego of the creators.


It perplexes me how many on earth earn their living hitting balls about, running nowhere, writing books or making films that are just a rewording of a handful of core stories, etc. It confuses me to see how badly the sane and good act, while a madman of mild manners can be shunned for asking awkward questions. Life is a game - I do not know how to play. In fact, it is a game I only wish to overthrow in order to point to the human condition and death.                                                


I maintain that the causes of madness are the self same tragedies of life that many suffer and move on from but which mentally break weaker souls. There are two different worlds, the social world, in which we are obliged to act with consideration for others and the private world in which we face our own weakness and mortality. In the social world, we are actors playing a role accepted by others and if we act badly we are punished or ostracized. In our private world of sorrows and unregulated desires we are free to be ourselves yet condemned to solitude and denied the rewards of public life.


Growing up I thought it was the norm for people to be committed to a mental hospital under Garda escort. It is only now that I realize my mother and I were exceptions. Growing up suffocated by madness – I had less fear of it or prejudice towards it than the average man on the street. Apart from my mother, most of the girls I was closest to were eccentric, depressive or manic. Added to that - many of my friends were also depressives, alcoholics, drug users, struggling artists, homosexuals, lesbians and other oddballs.


As a teenager, I was fascinated by the phenomena of ‘the-wolf-boy’ and I thought that I too could be a modern day wolf-boy.  It stroked my vanity to think of psychologists spending years trying to decipher my personality and biography! But I wasn’t going to make it easy on them! I hoped however, that one day they would have been able to tell me what it all meant.
           

I knew that I was not a true ‘wolf-boy’ even I had too many social contacts! Though I lived with my mum – she was insane and I never spoke to her. Yes, I went to school – but I had stopped talking to everyone. True I had a television – but that if anything made things even more interesting. If the question was asked, what can you learn about people and society just from television? My life’s example would have given the conclusive answer – only facts and spectacle nothing real! Only life – mixing with people, trying to get along with them, resolving conflicts, understanding their feelings, learning how to flirt, learning how to seduce, and learning how to debate without anger – can teach you how to be a successful human being. Incidentally artists like van Gogh, Hans Bellmer, Antonin Artaud and the writers Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet also explored the nature of confinement, isolation and the inner worlds of the artists’ Psyche and their works have striking affinities with Outsider Art.
           

Alienated from society, I lacked any understanding or empathy for other people. My vision of art was primitive and eccentric – raw and self-taught. My art conducted a private, solipsistic form of self therapy in which I tried to battle my demons in paint. It was Expressionism without an audience. While better socialized artists who had grown up around artist parents prided themselves on their sophistication, irony and sarcasm – I was an adolescent zealot who believed he was a new master while producing work of a raw brutishness that hinted at little cultivation or socialization. Convinced of my genius, I believed every scrawl I made had epic significance to future students of my art.                            


An amateur schoolboy painter, turned adolescent Expressionist, I thought I had nothing to prove to the art world except my agonized intensity. Since I none of my teachers had been worthy of me, since I had no peers, since I had no audience – my art grew in the echo chamber of my own subjective crucible. I understood and valued my art in terms incomprehensible to most people, so when I finally began showing my work to others their bemused adoration or disgust perplexed me.                


Still, though my heart was broken, I was painfully shy and lonely and suicidal in those dark days, there is part of me that envies my youthful self-belief and self-reliance. Life for me back then was brutally black and white - today it is an endless variation of greys. Today, I constantly try to compromise and learn from others, I may technically paint, draw and write better now than back then, I may know more know, I may be a better person, I may be happier and have experienced more - yet I have lost the single-minded focus I had as a young artist. My messianic belief in my anti-social art may have been deluded and doomed to failure – but at least I had my faith to sooth my solitude. While I am proud of my early years - I am also now shamefully aware of what an art brut I am and how I am thus doomed to never be accepted in the conventional art world who will always consider me a deluded primitive.


I still to this day remember flicking through a small book on artist’s self-portraits in my local library in 1986 - and coming across the 1919 screaming self-portrait of Franz Pohl (Franz Karl Buhler) – his crude but heartfelt drawing captured the inner anguish I was feeling at the time perfectly. I had no idea at the time what Outsider Art was - but I felt an instant connection with this kind of work.
           

Sometimes I pine wistfully for my mad, bad, days of 1991-1993 – I forget just how agonizingly suicidal, depressed and self-hating I was. I forget the intense mental pain I felt. Instead I remember my messianic faith in my art, my absolute conviction that the day I walked into a New York art gallery with my work – they would sign me on the spot and I would be famous the world over! I believed that artists and art critics and collectors would be in awe of my raw, recklessly honest, truthful and courageous art. I thought they would pat me on the back and say: “At last a painter who is honest about his sexuality and his life!” That is the tragedy and hilarity of my self-delusions and utter incomprehension of the real world and the common person. I had absolutely no idea how repulsive, ugly and hateful my work would look to most ordinary art lovers.  Yet despite my conviction that I was the greatest artist in the world (living in a three bedroom terrace house with my mother and foreign students - whom I cowardly hid from in my bedroom) I never actually even put a portfolio together, never mind approach a gallery – until cajoled into it by the art critic Mic Moroney in mid-1994. I thought about it – but time and time again I felt I wasn’t ready. Perhaps I was unwilling to leave the protective bubble of my inner world and face the judgment of the real world.
           

For years, I was cold-shouldered or merely tolerated - but never understood or accepted. I was seen as an oddball to say the least. I was a solitary because of the intensity of my thoughts, which drove me to live a hermit’s life. I was never a true Outsider artist in the classic definition. I had far too much technical self-teaching, knowledge of art history, craft and respect for the Western Canon. I am more like an Outcast artist. However, there were some uncanny similarities between my work and that of typical Outsiders; the unhinged psyche, the depersonalization, the manic degradation, the overwrought sexuality and the aggressive protest. Moreover, there was also no sense that my work was planned or verbalized before execution or created with any defined sense of audience. They were completely unself-conscious. In my work, I unburdened myself of all the fears, desires and ambitions most people bury inside and reveal only after a long night on the drink.                                                                       


As a misanthropic atheist, my vision of humanity was bestial and nihilistic. While I admired the painterly skills of the old masters, I viewed their papal, monarchist or nationalistic vision of humanity as nothing but elitist propaganda for the status quo – a kind of supreme mirage. I was too honest, too irrational, too anti-social and too nihilistic to partake in such grand fabrications. For me the greatest triumph was to fight for my own solitary vision outside of society even if I was dooming myself to marginalization, poverty, a crippling of the scope of my work, failure and damnation. A lost son of art, my work was never fully insane and out of this world, nor fully part of it, never fully Art Brut or fully High Art. It existed in an agonized nether world. At times, I tried to develop the quality of my line or the sophistication of paint in a desperate attempt to be accepted by the art world, yet at others I tried to be deliberately provocative and crude in a tantrum against the snobs who had denied me. I simultaneously worshiped the skills of the old and modern masters and admired the visionary weirdness and wildness of outsiders.      
          

My view of existence was thus extreme in its view that madness, depravity, corruption and animalist were as much a part of human existence as the comfortable, civilized and bourgeois conceit paraded a thousand times more often in conventional art. I wanted to reveal all those experiences deemed too intense, private and difficult to be acknowledged by middle class society. I had long noted the schizophrenic nature of human behaviour as different literally as between day and night - sober rectitude and drunken debauchery. For me, the moments of human crisis, private perversion, addiction and angst were more revealing of human nature than the social charades of civilized life. Thus in compensation in my own art, I dwelt disproportionately on my own faults and thought the expression of my virtues a bore. Born into wealth and privilege that was then tragically lost and sullied, I became a wild child rebelling against the ruthless cruelty of the legal system, the heartlessness of the psychiatric services, the indifference of the social workers and teachers and the hypocrisy of a society that claimed to be a caring Catholic Republic. I strove to burn myself alive with a confessional art that would demand first and foremost to be honest. The decorum, social positioning and ruthless attainment of status meant nothing to me though I did seek express my own vision of the world as an alternative.
            
*                                        *                                        *

Every day billions of art works are created around the world. A small fraction of them are made by trained-artists. Even less than that are made by artists whose work sells or has critical respect. The vast majority of these art works are made by; little kids, schoolchildren, art students, Sunday painters, eccentrics, spiritualists, prisoners and the mentally ill. The fact is that most of these works will be binned soon after they are made - as for the rest, they will never have anything but EBay, car-boot, fridge-door or family gift value. Before the late nineteenth century to anyone interested in art – these artworks were important only as a negative presence – to the positive presence of the accepted Grand Western Canon. But by the twentieth century they had became central to the formation of modernist art. Expressionist, Surrealist and COBRA artists in particular intensely studied the art of Africa, the insane and children in order to give their work a similar raw power and imaginative leap into the unknown of the subconscious.                                                                                                   

Art like religion acts as a safety valve for all those unanswerable pleas for personal expression, sexual honesty, social justice, utopia and communion with God that have no place in technocratic and bureaucratic world. Yet in religion, there is a profound difference between the faith of the disenfranchised and the faith of the institution of the church and in art too there is a gulf between art made by outsiders and art made by insiders.                                                                          


In life, Christ’s words of compassion and lack of concern for worldly goods may give solace to the marginal, poor and disenfranchised yet ironically they are nowhere rendered more absurd than in the Vatican City. Likewise in the contemporary church of art, platitudes of creative freedom may be uttered – but the whole system is designed to filter out anything too personal. Many professional artists may have started in their dim and distant past with visions similar to Outsider artists - yet like the bureaucratic  Bishops of the Church they soon learned the error of their ways and became more cunning manipulators of myth.                                                                                                                       


Understanding the limited and alienated nature of the Outsider artist, one also has to understand the way successful professional artists represent their antithesis. The Outsider is a person feared, pitied or made fun of but rarely respected in society - while the professional artist is often disliked but frequently respected. The Outsider is handicapped by an inability to interact, do business or cooperate with his peers, where as the professional artist is as much a businessman and operator as creator of aesthetic objects. Anyone can drop out of society, yet it takes a life time to build up a reputation of respect in society - and it can all be destroyed in one fell swoop by a scandal. Likewise, the Outsider artist can ignore all the rules of art, the opinion of his fellow man and create an alternate reality of his own but it rarely has any significance beyond his own imagination. The professional artist must deny these instincts at every turn and make his art a dialogue with society and his peers, aware that one aesthetic misstep and his hard-won audience and patrons could lose faith and evaporate into thin air.                                                                                                                                                

As such the outsider and professional artists are as different as a self-destructive homeless man and a competitive billionaire city trader. The Outsider art work is thus a homeless aesthetic object of talismanic power to the disposed creator but irrelevant in the larger world unless taken pity on by the art worlds masters of the universe – who often pillage its forms while still denying it cultural capital. Those who have come through the training systems of art colleges, learn as much about what is no longer permissible in art as they are directed towards what is. The Outsider artist creating for their own personal satisfaction, often creates without the moral compass or aesthetic sophistication of the professional artist. The nature of their expression also lacks the normal rhetorical devices and awareness of an audience that plagues the conscious of a professional artist. Thus the charm and power of Outsider art comes from its unselfconscious freedom of expression.


Ask the average person, to name a mad artist they will probably say Vincent van Gogh. However, if you read most current studies on van Gogh you will find the writers play down van Gogh’s madness – claiming that it was an incidental aspect to his great art. So what is the truth? Well it is a bit of both. Van Gogh worked far too hard to acquire the traditional skills of a figurative artist to be merely an Outsider artist. There is far too much realism, cultural awareness, technical mastery, intelligence and humanity in his art to be just the work of a madman. But in certain respects it had affinities with Outsider art. Vincent’s need to convert the whole canvas or sheet of paper into a field of energetic lines is similar to the Outsider’s need to fill up every square inch of their work with detail – a fear of what they call the horror-vacui. However, the fact remains that van Gogh spent his life fighting off madness – at those times when he succumbed – he was unable to create. When lucid he was able to mix his mad energy with Impressionist grammar – to create art works of undisputed greatness - which communicated deeply with all of humanity and not just a few specialists in the human mind.
           

Real Outsider or Art Brut is work made by schizophrenics, primitives, visionaries, obsessive’s or mediums. If we term art training, as four to seven years in an Art College – then most of these artists were self-taught. They might have had some experience of art in school – but that is usually as far as their training went. Outsider artists are different from naïve painters like Henri Rousseau or L.S. Lowry because their similar unworldliness, lack of training and eccentricity was compounded by sever, debilitating, mental illness. While the work of naïve artists can look fanciful or odd – they rarely look demented. Moreover, naïve artists crave desperately to be taken seriously as painters – but Outsider artists have no such fascination with the art elite – they are lost in their own private world. Some of the characteristics you can see in their artworks are all-over treatment of the page, eccentric colour combinations, obsessive detail, symbolic imagery, crude drawing and often the mixing of drawn elements, collage and handwritten prose. The materials they use are often the cheapest and most degraded – no fancy French handmade papers or Sennelier pastels – instead cheep wrapping paper and some children’s crayons. Because many of their works were made in secret – they are typically on a very small scale. Finally, most Outsider artists seemed to arrive at their own wild compulsive style very quickly - and never deviate from it for the rest of their lives (though the same could be said for many of today's art world stars.)
           

Since the early 1900s psychiatrists like Dr Hans Prinzhorn had been fascinated by the outpourings of the mentally ill. Dr Prinzhorn established the first collection of Outsider art (some of them his own patients) and later published a very important book on the subject. Prinzhorn and artists like Klee who read his book were seeking insights into the workings of the subconscious and the origins of creativity. As the twentieth century progressed other artists used the raw coal of Outsider art to fuel their own work. But commercially – neither Outsiders nor their families benefited much from this exchange – or creative robbery depending on your viewpoint.  One artist who did seem to give back was Jean Dubuffet who avidly collected ‘Art Brut’ as he termed it, and his collection was later established as a public museum in Lausanne in Switzerland in 1976. So by the turn of the millennium the oeuvres of dead artists like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger had become blue-chip investments and countless other living reclusive artists were courted.                                                          


Outsider art became so popular in the art world of the 1990s because it was enthusiastically adopted by many art lovers tired of the slick, commercial and academic nature of art in the 1980s-1990s. After a decade of pompous, vain and media savvy artists like Schnabel, Salle and Koons there was something of a backlash against the art-world star-system that had reduced art to crass commerce, media-celebrity, factory-like production of paintings or sculptures and insincere pastiche's of modernism. Outsider art in contrast offered obsessive handmade art by forgotten or anonymous artists who made art with a painful sincerity and lack of concern for art history, public recognition or common sense. Yet despite this faddish popularity, as the critic Peter Schjeldahl pointed out, even at the turn of the millennium the work of outsider art remained patronized, ““Outsider” artists, such as Darger, are folk cultures of one, oblivious of professional or communal standards and the existence of peers. The terms “folk” and “outsider” – never mind the spineless euphemism “self-taught” – are hard to use without condescension, affirming a superior knowingness in the speaker. The stereotypical folk-art fancier is conservative and patronizing. Folk art can be to art as pets are to the animal kingdom.” (Peter Schjeldahl, Let’s See, London: Thames & Hudson, 2008, P. 113.) Elsewhere Schjeldahl noted that, “… the wildwood of creativity of asocial and eccentric – perhaps mad- loners, which is sentimentalized by some art people and shunned by most.” (Peter Schjeldahl, Let’s See, London: Thames & Hudson, 2008, P. 219.)


A cynic might suggest that the bottom line in the art world is money - and in the early 1990s dealers caught on to the cheep and easily exploited world of outsider art. Personally, I turned in part to Outsider art in 1995 - as a relief from the diet of smart-arsed conceptual art, prefabricated sculptures and pretentious videos that were on offer in every gallery I visited. Whenever I saw outsider art works in the same museum as contemporary academic conceptualists (as I did in IMMA many times) – I was struck by how the compulsive Outsider Art blew away the pretentious and lifeless work of artists with a Masters in Fine Art. Moreover, as I read about the lives and art of these tormented artists – I profoundly identified with them and their obsessive productions.
           

Of course, there is much suspicion amongst the public, that many of these Outsiders are lucky opportunists lauded by a gullible art world. In one of my favorite Simpsons episodes Homer Simpson was trying to build a doghouse - yet again his attempts at DIY ended in disaster! In frustration he threw all his tools, the wonky kennel and wet cement into a wheel-barrow and flung it down a hill where it crashed and was spotted by a female art dealer passing in her car. She loved the work! It was the anguished cry of the suburban man! All her Euro-Trash friends liked the work too and a show was arranged. Homer’s wife Marge was peeved that her dumb husband who had no training in art was given an exhibition – while she had never had any similar offer – despite spending her life trying to master the craft of painting. Homer worked tirelessly creating more and more elaborate ‘outsider’ works. Then the work was unveiled – and the art public sighed in boredom. It was all too contrived and passé! After the disappointment of his show – Homer flooded Springfield in homage to Turner’s watercolours of Venice and Christo’s urban interventions – the art dealer loved it!
           

This story perfectly illustrates the difficulty of the Outsider in the Art world – even those who are genuine and are picked up by galleries - can find themselves just as quickly dropped once the novelty of their work wears off. The whole idea Outsider art is antithetical to the ethos of the art world. Outsider art is made beyond the realm of the professional, social and public world. It is not commissioned, it is often not for sale, and it may never have been intended to be seen by anyone except its creator. But the art world is about creating money and to do that it means creating reputations, connections and understanding. Outsiders are very good at making art – but very bad at making or maintaining friendships – and that is what counts in the art world.
           

So what kind of exchange is really going on between the public and the Outsider artist? Is the outsider artist a privileged exotic – forgiven sins that would have most people written off dinner party invitations? Is he or she a freak? Someone to be ogled at by a bored and prurient art world? Is he or she easy prey for unscrupulous dealers, collectors and curators – a maker of art works that but for the apparatus of the art world would be essentially worthless. Or is he or she a pure light in a crass world of fatally compromised art? Personally, I like to think that Outsider art gives us some kind of insight into the workings of the subconscious and the place of the individual, isolated, creator in the universe. But the real reason I like it is its aesthetics. To me the compulsively worked drawings of outsider artists are like nothing else in art. At their best, they have a psychic intensity comparable with the most tormented or animated religious work of Grünewald or Tintoretto. Some might say that their work is not a patch on the centuries old tradition of Western painters like Michelangelo or Rembrandt – but Outsiders would not want it any other way. They know only one way to draw or paint – their own.
           

That is the trouble with Outsider artists - they can be patronized or ridiculed but never understood. Theirs is an unknowable universe of private codes, myths, fantasies and delusions. Even those with a similar mental illness cannot claim to fully understand them – because mental illness is just a small part of the Outsider’s unique intellectual, imaginative, and emotional world. Each Outsider artist presents the world with a unique set of riddles – and half formed communications. I say half formed because the nature of art - is its dialogue - between the artist and his or her audience. He or she must know themselves, their tradition, their place in the art world and the views of those around them. They must then make an art object - which conforms to their ambition and is in knowing social and aesthetic discourse with its public, it’s society and it’s laws. But none of these considerations are on the minds of the Outsider. He or she is incapable of living sensibly never mind understanding the place of their art in relation to what has gone before. They are communicating – but on an autocratic and autistic level. It is a monologue not a dialog. That is what makes it such fascinating art and that is why I celebrate it. It is art at its rawest and most direct.
           


Most old Outsider artists were self-taught people, often with no knowledge of art history or the workings of the art world. Some though did have some art experience and many must have had at least a passing knowledge of the famous art of their day. But even if Outsider artists were uninterested in ‘Art’ – distinguished Modern artists like Klee, Kokoschka, Ernst, Dalí, Dubuffet, Appel, Rainer and Baselitz were intensely interested in them and their example. Looking around an exhibition of children’s drawings Picasso said, “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to draw like them.” (Ronald Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, P. 307.) It was something of an exaggeration - Picasso was never as good as Raphael as a kid.                                                                              


Jean Dubuffet did more than any other twentieth century artist to promote the work of Outsiders. His work although clearly influenced by Art Brut was rendered with such panache and painterly knowing that it was clearly the work of a trained artist. In fact, in his twenties he had been quite a good figurative and Cubist painter. The school of painters who really took the work of children and the insane to heart - were the COBRA artists (so called because they were from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.) Their paintings are big, bold and childlike in their simplicity. However, they were made by trained painters with delusions that they could return to the Paradise Lost of childhood. They could not. No matter how energetic, colourful and crudely drawn their paintings were – there was always something of a pose about their work. Their work was a study in primitivism not an expression of it. These and many other modernist artists sought an art that was free of the cant, dogma and compromises of academic art. They thought that the visceral tribal art of Africa, the joyful paintings of children and the symbolic and raw art of the insane – could give their art power and authenticity. In most cases however their work never came anywhere near the fundamental creations of Tribal sculptors, Outsiders or children. As art their work was often far more pleasing and substantial but as psychic creations they were faked. These trained artists had too much to unlearn from life as much as art.
           

Besides the whole idea of an ‘innocent eye’ was proved nonsense in ‘Art and Illusion’ (1960) by Ernst Gombrich. We are born into a particular culture and it imprints itself upon us in many different ways. There may be very few Artistic references in Outsider Art – but there are plenty of references to; newspaper photographs of adverts, sports, powerful people, or pop-culture references, architectural drawing, glamour photographs, illustrations from children's books, the kitsch pious or tormented iconography of Christianity and heroic or savage military subjects – the stuff of everyday life that we are all surrounded by.
           

Many Outsider art works are filled with a volcanic energy and obsessive detail. They use irrational means to understand and ward off an irrational world. Many of their works have a heartbreaking and hopeless pathos that can never be redeemed or rescued. Yet, some of their work is very funny, perhaps not intentionally - but funny none-the-less. However, I do not laugh at these artists I laugh with them at the absurdity of existence. I do not believe that the art of madmen is closer to the truth of existence – but I do believe they offer a unique gift to all men interested in psychology, the origins of art and the nature of the extreme creative mind.
           

It can sometimes be hard to see actual Outsider art in museums, but thankfully Dublin has one of the best collections of Outsider art in the world. It includes work by artist like Henry Darger, Aloïse, Johann Hauser, Sava Sekulic, August Walla, Carlo and William Marklin Van Genk. The collection was donated - by The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection to The Irish Museum of Modern Art. Over the years I.M.M.A have staged many exhibitions of outsider art alongside that of modernist artist – making telling comparisons and links.
           

The history of art before the nineteenth century is surprisingly limited in terms of examples of great mad artists. There is the strange case of the Gothic artist Van der Goes who after suffering from depression went into a monastery. He subsequently suffered a complete mental breakdown and died the following year. There is only one known painting by him the Portinari Altarpiece – a masterpiece of pious Gothic religion and northern realism. Yet while there is a dark piety and sorrow to his work, it is technically strong and ambitious.
           

The paintings of the Northern European master of the macabre and surreal Hieronymus Bosch - may appear to the layman to be the work a madman. However Bosch was a rich, successful, rigorously trained professional painter who was an upstanding pillar of his community. His work was not merely a record of his own inner demons and fantasies – it was an intelligent transcription of the rituals, myths, fairy-tales and superstitions of his homeland of The Netherlands.
           

Then there is Goya – who was often later accused of being mad – but his art was too intelligent, too skillful and too serious to ever be so laughably written off. But some continue to do so. I remember how in 2004 when I was in the Prado museum in Madrid - making sketchbook coloured pencil drawings from his late great ‘Black Paintings’ (1821-1823) - I overheard a tour guide say: “He had gone completely mad when he painted these!” I could understand her use of verbal shorthand but I was shocked by her classification of such fundamental artistic works as the product of a mad man - especially since there was no evidence that Goya ever had any clinical mental problems. Of course the ‘Black-Paintings’ can appear mad and deranged – but in fact they were the summation of a life spent analyzing the myths and folklore of Spain and critiquing its superstitions. They were also cries of pain from an intellectual who had seen his country ravaged by war and all the myths of Liberalism, Reason and Liberty amount to nothing but bloodshed and atrocity. By the way earlier in his career Goya had made a few oil paintings of the inmates in a madhouse – when I first saw them a few years ago I was blown away and traumatized by them – they seemed so true to my own worst nightmares of incarceration.
           

Around the same time that Goya was isolated and alone in his house in Bordeaux painting his ‘Black-Paintings’ on the walls of his house, Thèodore Géricault (1791-1824) the precocious genius who had painted ‘The Raft of The Medusa’ (1819) was also painting - a series of ten portraits in oil paint of psychiatric patients - under the care of his friend Dr Etienne-Jean Georget. Only five of these stunning canvases remain – but those that do are compelling in their psychological insights and humanity. Dr Georget believed in the new concept of ‘Monomania’ in which the patient was thought to suffer from one specific type of delusion or compulsion. So each one of Géricault’s canvases are known by the Monomaniac illness the patient was thought to suffer from. So there is one of a child molester, one of a compulsive gambler, one of a kleptomaniac, one of an obsessively envious person, and someone convinced he was a great military commander. Such ‘illness’ might raise an eyebrow today! But the fact that a stunningly talented painter who trained under Ingres would devote his energies to recording the faces of mentally disturbed no-bodies in French asylums makes them unique paintings in a Western portrait tradition that usually only recorded the pious, noble, rich, beautiful, famous, learned, and successful. Incidentally, in Ireland recently (1993-1994) Brian Maguire a socially conscious Neo-Expressionistic painter made a memorable series of charcoal and acrylic drawings and paintings of inmates in a Gransha Hospital in Derry. They document the pain and humanity of these Irish people but they are also rather voyeuristic. I can forgive Géricault and Dr Georget’s social and political naivety – but there is a part of me (as an ex-psychiatric patient in Dublin) that balks at human portraits being reduced to social categories – no matter how hard the painter tries to empathize with his sitters. These suspicions are not helped by the crudeness of Maguire’s drawing and insensitivity towards his sitters.
           

None of these professional artists I have just mentioned were clinically insane so their art might have illustrated madness – but it did not embody it. But there are some interesting cases of highly trained, professional artists - who later suffered from extreme madness. One early professional artist who went mad was Franz Xaver Messerschmidt who was born in 1736. He trained in the academic Neo-Classical modeling style that was popular in his day and by the age of twenty-four he was an official Court sculptor. Messerschmidt molded his portrait busts of royalty in clay – which he later cast in bronze – the same ancestral technique he was later to use to express his mental wilderness. Suddenly in 1770, he began to exhibit signs of mental distress and breakdown. That was when he began work on a series of ‘character-heads’ – a series of sculptures of Messerschmidt’s own head contorted - in various vulgar, psychotic, and aggressive facial grimaces. They are terrifying works – full of psychic energy. But what makes them so odd is to see such psychotic faces – rendered with all the skill of a sculpting master. Sadly, after his death nearly 40 of these heads ended up in a circus freak show. However, by the nineteenth century his reputation began to be reestablished. Messerschmidt was later to influence Modern artists like Arnulf Rainer and later even myself.
           

Another case of an artist gone mad - was Richard Dadd also known as ‘Mad Dadd.’ He was a Victorian genre and orientalist painter who went insane, killed his father and then tried to kill another man - before he was caught and locked up in Bethlam Hospital in London. While there, Dadd began to paint meticulously detailed images of fairies and sprites. They are eccentric paintings – but technically quite conventional for the time - made by a trained realist painter who had not forgotten or forsworn his craft.
           

Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911) was also an interesting case. His early canvases were in the vein of Barbizon painters like Camille Corot. His oil paintings have a freshness and beauty quite unlike his later crude and compulsive outpourings of delusion and pain – but both are very interesting to those interested in the degeneration of madness. Hill desperately craved public success but by the age of twenty-nine he had still not sold a single canvas and his work had been rejected by many galleries - his mind snapped. He began painting in nothing but Paris Blue and Cadmium Yellow as his persecution mania increased. He was eventually hospitalized, and in the asylum, his work became darker and more messianic. After over a year in a psychiatric hospital, he was released to the care of his sister, who looked after him for the rest of his life. Hill’s work was later to be a big influence on the German Neo-Expressionist – Georg Baselitz.
           


Adolf Wölfli is said by many to be the greatest schizophrenic artist of all time and he was astoundingly prolific. He his vast autobiographical project which he started in 1908 and continued obsessively for the next twenty-two years, came to forty-five volumes and was 25,000 pages long and full of 1,460 illustrations and 1,500 collaged elements. It is crazed mix of fact, fiction, fantasy and wish-full thinking. He was born in 1864 in Switzerland and died in 1930 in Bern. The youngest of seven children – Wölfli was orphaned at the age of ten when he was moved into a series of grotty and cruel foster homes. As a teenager, he worked as a farm hand for a while. When his tyrannical father refused him permission to court a girl he loved - he joined the army. In 1890, he was sentenced to two years in prison for attempting to molest two young girls. Then in 1895 after a third incident, he was committed for the rest of his life to Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern. It is a distasteful crime to have committed but perhaps his up bring and mental illness had rotted his sense of decency. Wölfli’s drawings and collages are crammed with; architectural drawings, musical notation (he composed his own music – which has subsequently been performed by avant-garde musicians) collaged adverts from magazines of his day (usually featuring some winsome looking beauty) numbers, lettering and his handwriting. They are works of great complexity and psychotic order a hind of paranoid-schizophrenic Gesamtkunstwerk.                                                                                                           



One of the great female Outsiders was the Swiss artist Aloïse (Aloïse Corbaz.) She was born in Lausanne Switzerland in 1886.  Her mother died when she was six - leaving Aloïse and her five sibling under the care of her brutal father. In 1911, she went to Germany to work as a private teacher for the three daughters of Kaiser Wilhelm’s pastor. It was while there that she became infatuated with the Kaiser. She had to leave Germany in 1913 as war loomed. But once back in Switzerland her behavior became more and more bizarre. Finally, in 1918 she was committed to a psychiatric hospital - she would spend the rest of her life in an asylum. At first secretly, but then later with the encouragement of her doctors – Aloïse began to draw. It is no surprise that a stridently assertive, attractive, redhead drew these wonderful drawings. They are full of such colour, power and inner strength. In her drawings, Aloïse compared her love for the Kaiser with the great loves of history. The bright deep colours of her drawings seem to blush, bloom and throb. She depicts women as big beautiful sphinx or bird like creatures with large breasts and the eyes of these women are often just all blue ovals.  She mixes up imagery of women, flowers, birds, insects and abstract biomorphic shapes – on the same page. In fact, there is a wonderful joy to some of her work – even if it did come from a place of mad love and loneliness.
           

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a poet, playwright, actor, theorist and artist. From the age of nineteen, he suffered from depression – leading to progressively worse and more traumatic nervous and mental disorders. In the mid-1920s he aligned himself with the Surrealists. In 1933, he established ‘The Theater of Cruelty’. He sought to shock the public out of their complacency with wild gestures, dramatic lighting and visceral prose. ‘The Theater of Cruelty’ did not last long. Artaud traveled to Mexico (where he frequently took peyote a very powerful hallucinatory cactus – if he was not mad before it – he was certainly mad after it) and then in 1937 - made a fateful trip to Dublin where he tried to gain entry to a Jesuit college. They would not let him in and he was jailed and then sent back to France. On the boat back, he threatened to harm himself and others and was put in a straight jacket. From then on he was to be committed to mental hospitals - principally the psychiatric hospital in Rodez France. While in hospital, Artaud created some of the most blistering portraits in the history of art. Anyone who sees madness as a ‘gift’ or a bit of a lark - should look intently at these works. What they show is the terrible mental anguish and pain of mental illness experienced by the sufferer. Antonin Artuad’s portraits of friends are quite simply some of the most electric and heartbreakingly profound drawings in Modern art history. There is brutal, ugly rawness to them, it is quite clear they are the real deal – not some fashionable pose by a Neo-Expressionist. In his drawings Artaud mixed portraits and nudes with chains, coffins, nails, ex-voto images, writing and he often burnt or stained them as part of a magical process.
           

But my favorite outsider artist of all time is Henry J. Darger (1892-1973) – the creator of an extraordinary universe populated by the little Vivian girls fighting in a war against child-slavery. Darger was born and died in Chicago Illinois. His childhood was spent in orphanages, he was pronounced ‘feeble-minded’, and he experienced extreme poverty and worked as a janitor all his life. He had a compulsive Christian faith and went to mass up to five times a day. It was only after Darger had to be moved to an old folks home - that his landlord (and an artist himself) Nathan Lerner discovered the amassed collection of Darger’s writings and drawings amongst his vast collection of balls of twine and newspaper clippings. Living alone in a small bedsit Darger had created his masterpiece “The Story of the Vivian Girls in what is known as The Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.’ The book ran to fifteen volumes and had around 300 watercolour illustrations recording his fictional tale of child war. Since he had no training in art – Darger would take children's book illustrations or photographs of children in the newspapers and trace their outlines onto one of his large scrolls of wrapping paper. Sometimes he would strip the children and draw them nude – but since he had obviously no knowledge of female anatomy – he put a little penis on all the little girls! To modern eyes, there is the suspicion that Darger might have been a thwarted pedophile – but there is no clear evidence to prove what was really going on in his mind. I tend to think he was a well meaning and harmless old man – who had been so traumatized by his own childhood suffering that he sought some kind of moral salvation for all other children in his work. There was a beauty in Dargers watercolours, that was quite staggering. Painted using children’s watercolour and poster paint sets on cheep wrapping paper – their beauty belies their poor quality materials. His sense of colour and composition was extraordinary – as good as a Gauguin. In fact, I do not know any realistic or fantasy depiction of childhood that is as profound or moving. Since his death, Darger’s work has been a huge influence on art students, and contemporary artists.                                                                


What is the future of Outsider art? Pretty bleak if you ask me. If anything, its commercial success has destroyed its integrity. The trouble with a lot of Outsider art or naïve art is that unless you understand the person’s biography and context – you are never sure whether the clumsy incompetence is put on or genuine  – knowing or ignorant.  I pity the art dealers today who have to pick out the real lunatics from the sane but opportunistic and crotchety amateurs who have jumped on the bandwagon. Besides, with the advances in psychiatric medication and treatments – the age of the psychotic paranoid-schizophrenic given nothing but cold baths to cure their illness is long gone. Those patients were locked up their whole lifetime, receiving little help and stewed in the collective madness and misery that is an asylum.  Had they not been locked up - and given the freedom of the city one wonders if they would have made art at all. Perhaps the combination of imprisonment and madness created their desperate need to create. I know in my case it did – even if my imprisonment in my bedroom was self-imposed. Today it is rare for patients to be locked up for long, medication can do wonders for their mental health – but it can also kill their creativity, and most people recover and live productive lives in the community. Others however live their lives one breakdown, treatment, recovery and breakdown after another. They come on and of medication – in and out of madness. This means that if they are artists (and can work at all on meds) – their work can change quite dramatically from medication to abstinence to medication. Add to that the increased awareness and contact that the television and the Internet provides isolated individuals - and it is clear that there will be fewer and fewer artists like Adolf Wolfi or Henry Darger – at least in the developed world.

A Visit to Munch in The NGI 2009



"My art is self-confession. Through it, I seek to clarify my relationship to the world. This could be called egotism. However, I have always thought and felt that my art might be able to help others to clarify their own search for truth.” (Edvard Munch, quoted by Sue Prideaux in 'Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream', New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.VIII.)

I had heard about the Edvard Munch print exhibition in the National Gallery weeks beforehand on the internet. I was very excited to see a small fraction of Munch's amazing oeuvre since he had been a perennial hero of mine since at least the age of sixteen. Over the years, I had read many books on him, read his diaries, read reviews of his exhibitions, watched many documentaries on him and seen a handful of his oil paintings and drawings in various exhibitions. I had always found his work very moving and strangely haunting. I identified with him; I admired his courage, honesty, persistence and individualism.  Yet because I had never been to Oslo where the vast majority of his work was held, my opinions on Munch remained unfocused and provisional. Moreover, like Francis Bacon, I found Munch's style so personal to him, that I knew it was foolish to try to copy him directly. However, when I painted my series of screaming women in September 1990 and my screaming self-portraits in January 1991, I was of course aware of Munch's famous Scream though I myself was thinking more of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s ‘Character Heads’, Gerstl's laugh and Schiele's grimace.                                                                             

In the last five years under the directorship of Raymond Keaveney, The National Gallery of Ireland had punched well above its weight, putting on one fascinating exhibition after another. This Munch show was just another fine example of what an intelligent and ambitious curator with limited funds could do. In the Anglo-American world, Munch had only lately been appreciated as much as he deserved, since his emotionally charged and extrovert art sat uncomfortably with an aesthetic rooted in French painting.    
           

From September, Munch became an obsession with me as he often had in winters past. Carol got me five large books on him from the NCAD library to add to the three of my own I had in the house as well as a number of others in which he was included. When not painting my own paintings, I was reading about Munch, looking at reproductions of his paintings and prints and thinking about the lessons of his life and art. At a time when I was still in mourning and battling my own demons, his story and example gave me consolation.                                                                                                       
           

I told Carol I had to go alone to the print exhibition, in panic and grief, in order to get the full effects of Munch's brand of angst ridden Expressionism. "Without the entanglements of a woman!" she laughed acceptingly. However, for weeks I put off my trip into town, on the busy DART and into the increasingly crowded National Gallery of Ireland. Even though the show opened on 19th September, it was only on the 3rd November that I managed to summon up the courage to go into town alone, like a God forsaken pilgrim to see the relics of a tortured Saint.                                                                                       

In the gallery shop, I went a bit crazy. I bought the catalogue to the show, a white t-shirt with the print version of The Scream and a stuffed-toy of The Scream called The Screaming Scream, which when you squeezed its belly it let out a cyborg wail. I thought it was a bit tacky, but secretly loved it. I bought it for Carol who adored all things kitsch and art related. She thought it was hilarious. Carol said, "Well you know an art work is finished when they make a stuffed toy of it!" I was not so sure, to me the image still had power. Carol said it looked like an alien. Our dog Lucy had never shown any real interest in art. Her main loves in life were; food, walks, cuddles and teddy bears. So when she saw 'The Screaming Scream' she went into a trance wanting to chew it! While in the gallery shop, I also bought a new Taschen book on Lucian Freud, which had a very good text on him plus large reproductions of his technically amazing paintings.                                                                                                                                      

While in the Munch exhibition, I found myself more interested than usual in the responses of those at the exhibition. The work was having a visceral impact on me and I wondered how it was affecting those around me. I saw some square-jawed men walk briskly past The Scream, clearly not impressed or interested. I heard others talk about printing techniques. I saw people engrossed by the works - peering into them deeply and in silence. I saw people almost unable to look and cracking jokes. Women seemed far more engaged with the work than men who approached his work with bluster, bravado and ego.                                                                                                                                

As the guards changed over, I heard one say to the other with mock seriousness, "Very intriguing exhibition.” "Yes indeed.” The other retorted shoeing him out. "Very intriguing!" The first guard insisted as the door closed behind him. Then much to my annoyance a group of twenty something students and a teacher or guide came in. The guide was giving a pedestrian lecture and I enjoyed hearing her struggle to explain Munch's depressing works, complicated love life and politically incorrect attitude to women - to a group of mostly young middle-class women. But after a few minutes I found her pedantic voice, evasions and qualifications grate on my nerves and I quickly moved to the opposite end of the exhibition. Where, I could still her lecture, and the chatter and laughter of her students, and many other visitors to the exhibition. It was louder than a Pearce Street train station!                                                                         

I love to immerse myself in another person's vision - to be exalted, thrilled and given joy. However, Munch brought me to the brink of madness and I felt sucked into a world of shame, jealousy, loneliness, death and pain. I do not think I have been as traumatized and emotionally disturbed by any other exhibition. Which is saying a lot! The only thing I could compare it to was visiting a friend in a mental hospital and being approached by the inmates desperate for companionship. Yes, I was in a bad place in my life but that was only part of the reason. Nor was it really to do with the content of Munch's art, which paled in comparison to what one found in contemporary art, media or the news. It was the way Munch, dramatized the stories he was telling through Expressionist grammar, so that one went beyond shock, beyond fear - into tragic pathos. Yet the journey that I took that day and over the following months studying his life and art I found therapeutic. These were more than mere prints - they were emotional alchemy. Most print makers have nothing to say. What they do say is all about techniques. Munch was a genius and he had a lot to say. At home reading the very good text, I was surprised to see how mild the prints felt in reproduction compared with the shock of them in reality, which only made me feel more regret that I had not visited Oslo to see his best paintings.               


Since Dürer in the 1500s and Rembrandt in the 1600s great artists had turned to print as a means to popularize their art. In the hands of such masters, print became more than mere mechanical reproduction - it became the reproduction of the soul. It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, if you have seen Dürer's Adam and Eve or Rembrandt's The Three Crosses, you will know that I am right. The communicative power of the print was based on the stupendous skill and risk-taking in the original wood block or copper plate - as unrepeatable as an oil painting - except it was made to be reproduced.
          

Although artists like Rembrandt and Goya had made massive reputations for themselves as print makers, print by the middle of the nineteenth century had gone into a fallow period. Most prints were of an illustrational quality made by inferior printmakers. Yet by the 1880s, print had become of renewed interest to artists who had discovered the beauty and startling modernity of Japanese wood-block prints. Artists like Toulouse-Lautrec had used new print mediums like lithography to produce startlingly modern designs, which bridged the gap between high art and popular culture.
            

Munch's reasons for turning to print were manifold. He hoped of course that it would be a profitable medium at a time when he sold few oil paintings. However, for the first seven years, the cost of printers and assistants left him with little profit from his prints. Nevertheless, he was getting his work more widely known and appreciated through this affordable artwork for budding collectors.
           

Although not conventionally trained, Munch became a master print maker - always experimenting and developing its form. He was a master print maker because he was also a master draughtsman. What was evident to me about these prints was just how much heart and soul Munch had put into them. His enjoyment of learning new techniques and developing new ones himself - was clear in these inventive and varied graphic works. Munch often retouched by hand his old prints with gouache, watercolour or crayon - turning mechanical images back into handmade testaments. He would carry small copper plates in his sketchbook and draw directly on them in cafes. This spontaneous approach increased their immediacy.                                                                                                                                   
           
The 41 prints in the exhibition covered a range of techniques including drypoint, etching, lithography, woodcut and a number of mixed media techniques. None of Munch's prints were conventional but while his technique in some could have made a printmaker laugh with derision others would have made them weep with envy. Together they showed that Munch knew how to adjust his talents to his message, like an orator who knows when to reason and when to emote. Using the conventional skills and standards of beauty in his more affectionate works and abandoning them in favour of the ugly and unruly when he needed to express painful unhappiness. That he could do both was proof of his genius.


Even in works in which great technical skill was not required - the work that went into them came not from the labour of the hand but from the labour of a mind in which; civilization and nature, man and woman, good and evil, and the sacred and profane battled it out night and day. From this mental and emotional turmoil and ferment - Munch dispelled the meaning of these conflicts to him onto paper. He thus sought to redeem his life of suffering through art and thereby help others involved in similar struggles of existence.
            

The exhibition started with a series of portraits of writers, intellectuals and friends of Munch. Portraits of lunatics - staring out at me with mad looks in their eyes. These early portraits of artistic and literary friends were very painterly in their broad sweeps of lithographic crayon. Strindberg was gravely offended by Munch's print of him, in which Munch had misspelled the dramatists name and added a boarder that included a female nude, which seemed to indicate that women were the centre of his mind. Of course they were, but no one likes the truth. Munch corrected the spelling and removed the frame in later prints.                                       
           
The masterpiece for me in this first room was Munch's Self-Portrait lithograph from 1895, in which his ghostly white head emerged from a velvety black ground making it look like a severed head levitating in the darkness. On closer inspection, it suggested a memorial tablet with his name inscribed at the top and a jokey nod to death at the bottom in the form of a skeletal hand and arm. It was a wonderfully artful image full of skill and dark humour showing Munch had a sense of humour.                                                     

Looking at Munch's woodcut The Kiss IV from 1908, I was infuriated to see the explanatory text on the wall say: “... it was described ('unhelpfully') by the misogynist Strindberg as “... the fusion of two human beings one of which in the form of a crap, seems to be about to swallow the larger.” Personally, I found this Feminist framing of Strindberg unnecessary and distorting. Firstly, Strindberg was many things other than a misogynist. Secondly, he was a close friend of Munch at the time and thus his views had documentary importance to anyone trying to unravel Munch's art. Finally, Munch himself saw women at the time in terms of suffocation, blood sucking and consumption. Funnily enough, the aside ('unhelpfully') was not mentioned in the catalogue where other than that the wall text had been taken wholesale.
           

Jealousy I, was another psychosis-inducing image. The eyes of Przybyszewski burnt into my mind as his lover Dagny Juel embraced another man (maybe Munch) with his consent and Munch imagined the scene and committed to art. Munch was recording the fatal flaw in free-love - man's intense possessiveness and fear of cuckold.                                                                                                    

Madonna was another powerful print based on an original oil painting. It was inspired by Dagny Juel, but yet again, Munch had converted the soap-opera of his life into a universal statement. Seen from a pervert's point of view, it depicted a woman in the act of love, a fact reinforced by his later addition of a boarder with sperm, and the hunched figure of a foetus in the lower left hand corner. It was an image in which Munch celebrated the beauty of Woman, turned her fertility into a glory yet at the same time suggested her triumph over man. It was images like this, which got Munch into trouble with religious and conservative critics at the time and recently with Feminist critics.                                                                     

In other lithographs like Vampire II, 1895, Munch made his fears even more explicit when he depicted a pair of lovers in which, a bowed man was devoured by a vampiric woman with flame-red hair that entwined itself all over his head. Yet despite its grim subject, Munch's treatment was quite elegant and surprisingly sensitive, his sweeping, touching lines almost caressing the paper.


Munch was very attractive; his friends called him "the most handsome man in Norway.” His diaries confirm that he had many lovers, yet he would never describe the intimate details of their relationships, passing over them... His relationships followed a pattern of intense infatuation followed by Munch fleeing commitment. In his paintings women were either; Madonna's or whores, frail innocents or femme-fatales. Munch's vision of women was not unique. The 1880s saw a new breed of independent women who took the anonymity of city life as liberation from the prying eyes and vilification of village life. Women entered academies (all be it in segregated girls schools), began to work, rode bicycles, smoked cigarettes, dressed increasingly provocatively, became readymade art on the promenades, openly pursued men and women and began to fight for the right to vote. They also aroused fears of a crisis in masculinity itself. Many men found these newly liberated women threatening and artists being sensitive souls telegraphed the unease.
           

A generation of writers and painters like Gustav Moreau, Degas, Felicien Rops and Huysmans took woman down from the pedestal that centuries of art had raised her upon and exposed her as Huysman's put it in an essay on Rops as a, "venereal beast, the mercenary from the Shadow, the abject slave of the Devil.” Between 1878-1902, countless Salon and Symbolist painters like Felicien Rops, Fernand Khnopff, Alfred Kubin, Franz von Stuck and Gustav Klimt and illustrators like Aubrey Beardsley depicted aggressive, assertive and free-willed women as; Ishtar, Sphinx, Lilith, Judith and Salome. These threatening, accusatory, salacious and misogynistic depictions were tinged with repression, masochistic fear and even delight. The fact that these were exceptional cases (and often purely mythical) compared to the everyday cruelty of men, did not seem to trouble their irrational minds. Behind all of this stood the spectre of syphilis, which was taking the sanity, and lives of many in Europe at the time. Working class or liberated women were seen as carriers of death. Women who for centuries had been portrayed as the embodiment of beauty, grace and compassion where now depicted as the personification of evil and cruelty. All in all their vision of women was like nothing seen since the Gothic period. In Symbolism and later the Expressionism that was born from it, the extrovert sadism of Romanticism became introverted sado-masochism and Munch exemplified this tendency.         
             

"But how can one explain the widespread misogyny in late nineteenth-century western culture and the all pervasive cult of the femme fatale - the evil and fascinating woman - that can be seen not only in the art and literature of the time but in the vampire-like allures of fashionable portraiture. Is this a case of mass, male hysteria provoked by the very modest gains that women made in the late nineteenth century? In Britain, the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 and subsequent acts of 1882 and 1883 gave women some control over their own property. In several European countries women gained limited access to higher education and professions, throughout the Western world, while benefitting from the inventions of the sewing machine and the typewriter that offered alternatives to marriage and prostitution. In some countries they even began to discuss the possibility of giving women the right to vote. However such harmless progress would hardly seem to warrant such extreme reactions.” (Patrick Bade, 'Felicien Rops', New York: Parkstone Press, 2003, P.50-53.) My explanation is simple, the reason was the fear of a loss of power and control and a rewriting of the rules of the game as it had been played out for centuries. If women were free then the number of opponents these men faced on their crusade for personal power, had not only been doubled, but the game had been changed from simplistic checkers to eternally complex chess.
           

So Munch's vision of women was extreme but also representative of his time. His work exaggerated the differences between men and women and made every aspect of their relationships problematic. His female nudes spoke more about his own personality that the women he took as his models. Munch constantly portrayed himself as vulnerable and weak - a victim of destructive women.
         

Personally, I did not care if men like Munch were misogynists. I found the argument limiting and simplistic - a mere form of demonization. Munch's art was a form of therapy, in which the viewer shared a dialogue with Munch as he revealed his darkest fears. Therapy demands honesty on the part of the patient, but it also requires compassion and understanding on the part of the listener. "It would be perfectly correct to say that Munch, in his paintings and his graphic work, but most of all in his drawings, shows signs of misogyny. However, in many cases he is dealing with specific experiences: his sphinxes and harpies, his Salome's and his female birds of prey all show the characteristics of particular women. They represent his own personal traumas, when he had experienced 'the love that moves mountains'. It may be that he was telling the truth when he said 'I have never loved', but his extreme sensitivity to the human condition renders him capable of 'explaining' it to us. No misogynist could ever have portrayed the apotheosis of a woman at the peak of sexual ecstasy with so much insight, or given the scene such an aura of sanctity by the inclusion of a halo.” (Ragna Stang, Edvard Munch: The man and the artist, London: Gordon Fraser, 1979, P.109.)
              

I noted with curious wonder how Munch in prints like 'Angst', drew the figures in the foreground in a naturalistic way, but those in the background in an increasingly, masklike, caricatured, childlike and ultimately abstract way. However, this effectively conveyed the schism between individuals and the way distance made everyone into a mere idea of a person. Again, Munch used unconventional approaches to drawing to achieve emotional dissonance. Looking at 'Angst' the lyrics of The Doors came to mind: "People are strange when you're a stranger/Faces look ugly when you're alone/ Women seem wicked when you're unwanted..."
           

Feelings are like vapour - but Munch used his art to contain them all - even the shameful and awkward ones. Many of the prints were vortex works in which the directional lines surged in and out, side to side and up and down - creating a feeling of vertigo, drunkenness or hysteria. This was most acute with the stark The Scream print, with its stunning black and white Expressionist design, which if anything was more brutalist in its message than the colourful painting from which it was derived. I found the contrast between the naturalist details of railings, people and boats in the harbour only served to make the distortions of the man and the tempest of nature around him even more unnerving. I stared hypnotized in front of it for five minutes when I started to faint with a feeling of vertigo.                                      

Munch was only twenty-nine when he painted the first version of The Scream. Far from being a spontaneous work, Munch had in fact worked towards it for over a year and originally the painting had been titled Despair. It was probably a man stripped of everything after a bitter love affair and pushed over the edge. At least that was how it was conceived as part of The Frieze of Life. However, the image had taken on a life of its own and become a universal image so that this compulsive icon of angst had been also been compared to a woman, a mummy, a foetus and ectoplasm.                                                          

There were at least six versions of The Scream, including two pastels which served as preliminary studies, three paintings including an oil, tempera and pastel which was the most famous one, and oil on canvas which was thought to be a copy as well as the black and white lithograph which I was getting to see.                                                                                                                                                       

Munch described his inspiration for this icon of angst: "I went along the road with two friends - The sun set. Suddenly the sky became blood - and I felt the breath of sadness. I stopped - leaned against the fence - dead tired. Clouds over the fjord dripping reeking blood. My friends went on but I just stood trembling with an open wound in my breast. I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass through nature.” On the most famous version of the scream, in the seething sky, the words were written "could only have been painted by a madman", in handwriting similar to Munch's but it may also have been made by a disgruntled art lover.                                               


Historical research had discovered the exact place of The Scream, it was a path outside the city of Christiania between an abattoir and the asylum in which Munch's sister Laura had been committed. The Scream had become the archetypal image of Munch's oeuvre because its expression of dread was the culmination of the mounting anxiety and angst that The Frieze of Life - the story of a love affair – had built up. As one of the first masterpieces of Expressionism, it exemplified the exorcism of internal mental pain - outwards in art.


According to some, another possible source of inspiration was an Inca mummy, excavated in Peru and which had been a sensation amongst artists when shown at The Parisian Great Exhibition of 1889, when Munch was also in the city. The wretched looking, shrunken and bound up man, his skull still agape in agony certainly looked similar to the pose of the scream, but we cannot know for certain if Munch even knew this artefact of horror.
                       

Munch's friend the poet Przybyszewski commented: "There is something dreadful and macrocosmic in that picture.” Strindberg's interpretation of the Scream was suitably apocalyptic as, "A scream of fear just as nature, turning red wrath, prepares to speak before the storm and thunder, to the bewildered little creatures who, without resembling them in the least, imagine themselves to be gods.” (Strindberg, quoted by Sue Prideaux, 'Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream', New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.251.)
           

In the catalogue to the show they mentioned: "Arne Eggum states that The Scream was made in response to Schopenhauer, whose Philosophy of Art stated that 'the limit of the power of expression of a work of art was its inability to reproduce a scream, "das Geschrei", precisely the title which Munch was to give to the motif.'"  Yet Munch did not know this till after he had painted The Scream.                                                                                          

A backhanded compliment to the ionic power and priceless quality of The Scream, was the fact that twice different versions of it had been stolen. The first on 12 February, 1994, the same day as the start of the winter Olympics, when one version was stolen from the Norwegian National Gallery, the second version being stolen in August 2004 at the Munch Museum. Both were subsequently recovered. This brittle, hopeless testament of unspeakable anguish still managed to burn in the collective unconscious despite a blizzard of parodies in popular culture including cartoons, t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets, car adverts and toys. They mocked it because its plea for help - like most pleas for help - could never be answered. Hence the scream. Hence the mocking. Only psychiatrists, priests and poets knew how to respond to this kind of Existential pain.                                                                           


Examples of the extreme simplification of Munch's art to visual fundamental's were woodcuts like Two Women on the Shore, 1898 and Two Human Beings, The Lonely Ones, 1899. In Two Women on the Shore Munch reduced the picture of an old woman in black and young woman in white by the seashore to seven uneasy colours. The moon and its reflection on the sea he simplified into an 'i' shape. I found it a beguiling, enigmatic and eccentric form of visual short hand. A visual form of pathetic fallacy - in which Munch made nature an active actor in his psychodrama not just a backdrop. In Two Human Beings, The Lonely Ones, the 'i' of moonlight divided the picture and its central characters a woman and man in half. They were with their backs to us staring out to the horizon. The woman stared directly out transfixed, the man was a bit further back - maybe looking at her looking at the moon - but there was a distance between them that could not be bridged. In this print, the primaries red, yellow, blue were combined with black to create a radical abstraction. It was works like this that were to have a huge influence on Expressionist prints in the 1910s made by Nolde and Kirchner.
            

The Violin Concert from 1903 on the other hand was a technically beautiful print, full of pathos as Eva listened to Bella Edwards on the piano and waited with the violin held vertically in her hand like a soundless idol, her mind lost in the music and preparing to play her part in the duet.


Of the later prints, I found the woodcut and lithograph The Girls on the Bridge from 1918, searing in its intense, heartbreaking depiction of three young women waiting for their lovers to return from dangerous seas. Month's after the exhibition I still had visions of its white lightening-like lines and simple blocks of existence.
          

Edvard Munch was introverted, depressive, fearful of people, terrified of women, a hypochondriac, an alcoholic in his youth and had more than a handful of extreme emotional episodes in his life. But in the spectrum of madness he never went right over the edge. His art saved him from that.        


Munch was not fully recognized in Norway, until he was fifty and already famous on the Continent. It took him the best part of twenty years to achieve financial security and critical acceptance. He travelled throughout Europe for decades promoting his art, making contacts and securing exhibitions. Even in his hardest years, he was a relentless self-promoter and sophisticated student of art who shaped his vision by assimilating the ideas, techniques and styles of old and contemporary masters. He also managed to turn all his personal weaknesses into strengths in his art.
           

Along with Goya, van Gogh, Gauguin and Ensor he was one of the father's of Expressionism. It was his scandalous exhibitions in Germany, which made his name and was to influence a younger generation of German and Austrian painters like Kirchner, Nolde, Gerstl and Kokoschka. Even at the turn of the millennium his influence could be found in the confessional and auto-biographical works of Tracey Emin and in the evocative and mysterious paintings of Peter Doig.
                       

Munch proved himself a master both technically and creatively in oils, watercolour, drawing and printmaking. His creativity was relentless, obsessive and emotionally taboo breaking. More than any other artist in Modern art, Munch made private, shameful experiences of alienation, panic, jealousy, lust and fear of death central to his art. His best paintings were like suicide notes in paint, except he never tried to kill himself, because his art always brought him back from the edge.
            

He never married and he had no children, so apart from some dramatic love affairs, his life was dedicated to art. He was more than an artist he was a visionary. Death haunted him his whole, long life. He was a hypochondriac and was terrified of his own demise while astutely avoiding the burials of those around him. Like his friend Strindberg, he was attacked as a misogynist, but kept company with some of the most free-living, headstrong and vivacious women of his day. In fact, his 'hatred' of women was nothing more than the broken-hearted anger of a man who loved them too much and could not deal with his inner weakness.                                                                                                                     


Edvard Munch was born on 12th December 1863, near Loten, in the county of Hedmark, Norway. He was the second child in a family of five children born to Laura Cathrine and Christian Munch a doctor in the army medical corps and later a physician. His father's family included a distinguished painter, bishop, poet and historian of Norway. Christian Munch was a reserved man, known for acts of charity, who loved to read and had a strong Christian faith. Laura Cathrine's family were farmers and fishermen and her father was a merchant who was said to be as strong as beer.                           


In 1864, the Munch family moved to Kristiania (the name of Oslo before 1925), where Christian Munch worked as a physician to the poor who he would often treat free of charge, which meant his own family lived poorly. In 1868, Munch's frail mother Laura died of tuberculosis with Edvard and his older sister Johanna Sophie by her bedside. Christian Munch became withdrawn, ill tempered and insanely pious after his wife's death - warning his children of eternal damnation. Later Munch recalled; "Disease, insanity and death were the angles which attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life. I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the after-life, about the eternal punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell... When anxiety did not posses him, he would joke and play with us like a child... When he punished us... he could be almost insane in his violence... In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.” Perhaps he also harboured an idealized image of his dead mother no other woman could ever live up to. His aunt Karen Bjolstad assumed the upkeep of the household and family, bringing some small joy to their lives and educating the children. She discovered Edvard had a gift for art and encouraged him. She was an amateur landscape painter who with her sales bought them both art materials. Where it not for his aunt and his siblings - Munch may have ended up a far more broken child.                                                                                                                             


In 1875, Munch left Cathedral School due to rheumatism, fevers and sleepless nights so he began homeschooling. He also began visiting the Kristiania Art Association and its exhibitions. In 1875, Kristiania had a population of just 77,000 and its artistic community was small with few of them making a living through art. Ambitious artists knew they had to travel to the Continent and Paris in particular in order to train, study the old masters and learn about the latest avant-garde movements. However, such travel was expensive and Munch came from a relatively poor family so he knew from the start that he would have to make sales and contacts. Munch sold works from the start of his career, and as early as 1881 his work sold at auction, but such sales were unpredictable. In 1877, Munch's older sister Sophie who had become a mother-figure to him, and with whom he was very close, died of tuberculosis aged fourteen. Yet again, he had lost a woman dear to him. Later his younger sister Laura was diagnosed with melancholia, and faded into her own world. Munch himself was a melancholy boy and would later battle with mental illness and alcoholism. As a young man, he was cautious and shy, and reacted badly to criticism. However, Munch was kind to his young brothers and sisters and would tell them stories and amuse them with his drawings.                                                                                                                              


Prompted by his father, from 1879-81, he trained as an engineer at the Royal Technical College, however ill health meant that he attended little. His father had been against Munch becoming a painter, partly because so few artists could make a living and partly because he viewed them as immoral. However, on the advice of a local artist he finally agreed. Once Munch's father was so infuriated by his son's painting of a female nude that he destroyed it. Later, when he came to visit an exhibition in which Munch showed the heartbreaking nude Puberty, Edvard covered the canvas with a cloth in order to spare his father's feelings. "The petit-bourgeois prudery of the time can be most strikingly conveyed by examples. At the opening of the Christiania Museum of Sculpture in 1883, a professor of the history of art was obliged in the course of a public address to swear, with his hand on the bible, that the art of the nude was pure and beautiful and that no one need feel shame at contemplating and admiring it.” (J.P. Hodin, 'Edvard Munch', London: Thames and Hudson, 1972, P.35.)


So despite his father's reservations, in November 1880, Munch began studying in the Royal School of Design. That year, he also painted his first self-portrait, the first of over 70 oil paintings, 20 graphic works and 200 watercolours, drawings and sketches of himself, which he would paint between 1880 and 1943. Sometimes they were painted yearly, others monthly and even daily. He turned his own personal feelings of alienation into a more general expression of the alienation of the individual in society. His early paintings of himself, revealed a silent but strong willed young man - unwilling to wear his heart on his sleeve. In later years he would go to the other extreme and like Gauguin and Ensor, Munch depicted himself as Christ on the Cross - reviled and misunderstood. He also depicted himself murdered by a woman in The Death of Marat, a patient under the scalpel or given electric shocks, a big-breasted woman, a gambler at a roulette-wheel and a lonely drunk in a bar. In his last as an old man, he recorded the solitude of his life as a painter before death.
           

In 1882, he fell under the influence of a new group of talented Norwegian realist painters including Christian Krohg, Fritz Thalow and Eric Werenskiold and rented space in the Pultosten building with them. Christian Krohg was a skilful realist painter (albeit one who used photography to aid his hyper-real paintings) who liked to tackle the great social problems of his day. He had made a name for himself already with paintings like Sick Girl, 1880-81, which had caused a scandal when exhibited. Four years later Krohg would cause a further scandal with his novel Albertine the story of a poor girl who became a prostitute, a book which was confiscated by the police. Krohg took Munch under his wing and corrected and supervised his early work. However, Munch's involvement with Krohg, put him in a prematurely controversial light. In 1883, Munch attended Frits Thaulow's Impressionist Open-Air Academy in Modum and showed his first painting at the Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania. His talent was evident in his early student work, which was stylistically indebted to Norwegian Naturalism and Realism which itself was influenced by older trends in Paris. By the age of twenty-one Munch had already developed a skilful and mature style.                                                                                                        


In 1884, he began associating with Kristiania's bohemian community - who were in open rebellion against their Lutheran upbringings. Hans Jaeger was the head of a small group of radicals in Kristiania and the author of the salacious and anarchistic Kristiania's Bohemia. For which he received a prison sentence for blasphemy. He also wrote the pornographic passages in Krohg's novel Albertine because Krohg was unable to write them himself. One of Jaeger's commandments, which Munch was to follow emphatically in both word and paint, was 'Thou shalt write thy life'. This was infinitely more productive than Jaeger's last commandment 'Thou shalt take thy life'. Munch was not to follow it but a couple in the group did. They were anti-bourgeois, atheists, readers of Karl Marx and attracted to the nihilistic anarchism of Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin.                                                                      


They were representative off a broader cultural movement in the Nordic countries which would seek to challenge the injustice and hypocrisy of society: "At the end of the 19th century, the economic development of the Scandinavian countries provoked the expansion of a poor proletariat and the appearance of a new middle-class, which, raised to the level of nobility, vigorously defended its positions. The literature and the art which this middle class liked made a bitterly ironic contrast to the brutal reality; it was a romantic sugary art, giving a false image of life against which writers like Strindberg, Ibsen and Brandes strongly reacted... Their compatriots' early lack of understanding left a bitterness they could never shake off. They called themselves atheistic and amoral, but in fact they were mystics and moralists. They defended the poor and the misunderstood, and shouldered the sorrows of the world, but in exalting the individual they paradoxically cut themselves off from the masses for whom they believed they were working, moving gradually towards the cult of the solitary genius.” (Michel Ragon, Heron History of Art, London: Heron Books, 1968, P.20.)
              

Like most in Europe at the time, they were fanatical readers of the transcendent philosophy of Nietzsche and the philosophy of dread of Soren Kierkegaard. Most of their lives ended in some kind of tragedy including alcoholism, poverty, murder and suicide. They advocated free love and fought for women's rights. The women were from good homes, confident, eccentric and rebelling themselves against the constraints of bourgeois life. It was in this group that Munch became addicted to alcohol and increasingly dependent upon it when painting, which he began to do by candle light in his cold studio after a night of socializing and drinking. "Within the group, he was known and feared for his capacity for silence, reserve and formal good manners that remained in place however drunk, and made him seem like a spy, an interloper from the bourgeois world they were undermining. 'He would seem remote and detached and then, at a given moment he would cut in on the conversation, putting the whole discussion into perspective with his ironic, often self-mocking comments and his concise use of paradox'. Such an approach has never been the road to popularity and he made his share of enemies within the group.” (Sue Prideaux, 'Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream', New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.72.)
           

Munch won the Schaffer Bequest Fund in 1884, but was too ill to travel to Paris that year. In May 1885, he travelled to Paris via Antwerp where he showed in the Norwegian section of the World's Fair. He stayed in Paris three weeks, studying at the Louvre and visiting contemporary exhibitions but on this first trip it was mostly the Old Masters in the Louvre like Goya, Rembrandt and Velázquez that impressed him.
           

Back in Norway, he met Millie Thaulow the wife of a captain in the medical corps. Millie was tall and slim, with a fine boned face, thin lips and dark blonde hair - though Munch often painted her with flame red hair. She flirted with him and filled him with fear and terror. However, her seduction worked and he eventually lost his virginity to her. He became intensely jealous, felt shame and guilt about their relationship and was annoyed by her interference with his painting time. In his painting Evening on Karl Johan, 1892-4, he depicted himself alone walking in the opposite direction of a frightening and ghoulish looking crowd - hoping to bump into Millie. The relationship ended badly and Munch felt bitter when another man replaced him. Yet, she would inspire his later work, becoming a 'vampire-woman' in many of his paintings. She would feature in later paintings as a siren in 'The Voice' and the longing girl in the red dress dancing with the awkward Munch in The Dance of Life.
           

Meanwhile he began work on his first masterpiece The Sick Child inspired by the death of his sister Sophie. While painting, Munch was so overcome with feelings of grief that he was in tears as he painted. In a moment of inspiration, his threw turpentine on the wet canvas and watched as his tears - were echoed by the crying painting. The agitated wraith like lines and dripping paint also echoed Munch's interest in Spiritualist photography in which certain tricks and distortions of photography were used to suggest the spirit world. The Sick Child was Munch's first real masterpiece, decades ahead of its time in its painterly fracture. In 1886, he exhibited paintings in the Autumn Exhibition, including The Sick Child, which caused a storm of controversy. It did not help that he attended with Jaeger who was out of prison on bail. Judged by the conservative standards of the day, its lack of naturalism, its lack of detail, its frenetic brushwork and dripped paint was an insult to art. He was attacked as a charlatan and lunatic. Today however we can appreciate what Munch was trying to do. He was animating the deeply personal memory of the loss of his beloved sister by breaking out of the straightjacket of academic measure and restraint.
             

In 1889, he staged his first solo exhibition in Kristiania and charged an entrance fee to recoup the costs. He received a state scholarship and travelled again to Paris in October, where he studied at the atelier of Leon Bonnat, and learnt the skills of life-drawing and tonal painting. In addition, he met the circle of avant-garde painters around Theo van Gogh. On this trip Munch spent more time absorbing contemporary art including the work of Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Felix Valloton, Odilon Redon, Rodin, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir and Japanese prints which were all the rage. Munch began to adopt an open ‘unfinished’ look to his paintings influenced by the Impressionist sketch and in particular by Toulouse-Lautrec who had made the ‘unfinished’ bravura oil painting central to his work. Yet Munch's experiments with Impressionism were unconvincing and marked by a strange, empty, hyperactive activity. It neither suited neither his character nor ideas, and his work for a while descended into mere stylistic exercises.                                  
             

In November, he returned to Norway following the death of his father, but returned to Paris in December. Despite his father's tyrannical treatment of him as a child and deploring of Munch's later scandalous career as a painter, his death left Munch traumatized. In 1890, he wrote the "St. Cloud Manifesto" which was based on a series of "visions" he had had. "There should be no more pictures of interiors, of people reading and women knitting. There would be pictures of real people who breathed, suffered, felt, loved.” (Edvard Munch, quoted by Sue Prideaux in 'Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream', New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.120.) Munch's art began to take the form of a proto-therapeutic art.      
           

He won a second state scholarship and returned to France staying this time in Le Havre due to ill health. In 1891, he won a third state scholarship in Norway and again returned to Paris via Copenhagen. He travelled also to Nice in the south of France in December. In 1891, he had the idea for his Frieze of Life, but it was not for a few more years that he would begin work on it. In his Frieze of Life, he sought to tell the story of a love affair from its tentative beginnings to its bitter end - mostly staged along a coast line. The 'bad taste' of Munch's mature art - came from his instance on painting the shameful aspects of human life on the scale of History paintings.                                         
              

In 1892, after his second solo exhibition in Kristiania, he was invited to exhibit in Berlin. His show in the Verein Berliner Kunstler (Society of Artists in Berlin) in November was closed after a week - following a debate and vote by members of the Artists' Association who were incensed by his work. His art was derided as the crude daubs of a sick mind - a sinful and demonic art that could also produce a moral and mental decline in those exposed to it. However, younger members of the Verein Berliner Kunstler were angry with how Munch had been treated as a guest and broke away to form the Berlin Seszession. Even the older painter Max Liebermann the Manet of Germany and President of the Seszession was to come to his defence. The scandal was the making of Munch in Germany. He doggedly staged his own version of the show over the course of the year in Dusseldorf, Cologne, again in Berlin, Breslau, Dresden and Munich. Indeed, between 1892 and 1909, Munch exhibited one hundred and six times throughout Europe and even twice in the United States. In Berlin alone, he showed his work sixteen times.   
             

He spent 1893 based in Berlin, where he might have seen work by Gauguin and van Gogh at the Free Exhibition. In Berlin, he frequented the bohemian Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (Black Piglet Café) where he became friends with the dramatist, occultist and amateur painter August Strindberg, the poet Stanislaw Przbyszewski and Dagny Juel the muse that would feature as the ultimate Femme Fatale in many of Munch’s masterpieces including Madonna and Jealousy. She was the twenty-five year old daughter of a physician and niece to the Norwegian prime minster. She was not conventionally beautiful, but she was enigmatic and decadent. Four men including Munch and many of the women were infatuated with Dagny. She accepted and rejected their advances, played them off each other and inspired their art. She ended up marrying Przbyszewski though their marriage was an open one; she bore him two children and lived in poverty with him. She remained friends with Munch until her untimely end. She was shot in the head by a deranged admirer - who then shot himself.
              

Although after Strindberg's descent into madness, Munch was to disavow his friend. It is clear that for a few years in Berlin they shared an intense intellectual relationship, which shaped both their arts forever. August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a playwright, poet, novelist and amateur photographer, painter and student of the occult. He wrote over 70 plays in his tormented life, many centring on the battle of the sexes. Like Munch, Strindberg had lost his mother early in childhood, and he was a deeply insecure, misanthropic man who also hated women. He had three stormy marriages and a history of fallings out with his friends. At various times in his life he was to suffer from mental illness and had a number of severe psychotic and paranoid episodes. In dramas like Miss Julie, Strindberg created compelling characters that did not act rationally, were victims of their own subjective torments and acted with wilful cruelty. His friendship with Munch inspired Strindberg to pursue painting in a hope of making a living. Self-taught, Strindberg's intensely pastose seascapes - painted from memory - were compelling proto-Expressionist canvases. Later he claimed to have extracted gold from earth he had dug up in cemeteries, and in 1897, he was elected a Fellow of the Alchemists Association of France. It was all mumbo-jumbo but quite a craze at the time.


The group of decadent, satanic and rebellious artists that hung out at the Black Piglet Café was to shape the course of Munch's art dramatically: "During the winter of 1888-9 Strindberg had corresponded with Nietzsche, who sent him copies of Zur Genealogie der Moral and Gotzendammerung. Strindberg's admiration for Nietzsche was shared by other modernist writers in Berlin who rated psychology and personal intuition higher than aesthetics or morality. Their curiosity about unconscious layers of perception and the illusion that individuals were an arena for conflicting powers brought some of the writers and artists perilously close to losing their sense of reason and of the value of life. Brooding mainly on feelings of pain, loss and injustice, they used their private experience to create a polemic art. During the 1890s Strindberg, Munch and Przbyszewski expressed notions of the dramatic struggle between good and evil, darkness and light which recall the ancient Manichaean heresy. Despite their religious upbringing, their vanity and fondness for intellectual athletics made them callus, which led Przybyszewski to declare: 'For that which is normal is stupidity, and "degeneration" is genius.'" (Carla Lathe, 'Munch and Modernism in Berlin 1892-1903', 'The Frieze of Life', Ed. Mara-Helen Wood, The National Gallery, London, 1992, P.45.)
           

In 1894, Munch produced his first intaglio prints, and in 1895, Julius Meier-Graefe published a portfolio of eight of Munch's intaglio prints however it was not a commercial success. Also in 1894, his friend Stanislaw Przbyszewski wrote the first monograph on Munch.  
           

A large exhibition of Munch's paintings in Kristinaia, led to public rows about Munch's sanity. At the debate at the Student Union, Munch hid behind a curtain and listened as Johan Scharffenberg a medical student declared his art was insane and it was because he came from an insane family. Even his friends who defended him seemed to take it for granted that Munch was insane. Munch was less offended by the boorish attacks on his talents as a painter than by the questions about his sanity, particularly because it brought his family such shame. Since then the debates about Munch's madness have continued. His friend and historian J.P. Hodin, seemed to regard Munch as insane in some respects and certainly during a couple of famous  episodes, but he also thought his madness had given Munch his genius: "There is always the question as to whether genius can be seen as an illness as Balzac expressed it: 'Who will win, the illness over the man or the man over the illness?' or whether it should more adequately be conceived as a heightening of the faculties of perception, mental combination or intuition and an immense urge for and ability to work. As to illness - and Munch himself, as we already know was often assailed by it from his earliest childhood - let us remember what Nietzsche said: 'There is no profound wisdom without experience of sickness, and all higher healthiness must be achieved through its means.' A similar idea was expressed by Diderot, who said: 'I suppose that reserved and melancholy men have had some temporary dislocation of their personal mechanism to thank for that extraordinary and indeed divine acuteness of perception which was to be noticed in them on occasion, and which brought them sometimes to madness and sometimes to higher reaches of thought'. Bergson, Freud and Proust all ascribe a similar constructive role to illness.” (J.P. Hodin, 'Edvard Munch', London: Thames and Hudson, 1972, P.94.)


However, more recent writer's on Munch, have tried to play down or at least contextualize Munch's illness, and the way he used it to his own advantage: "The artist learned that by positioning himself as a radical outsider, and by capitalizing on the popular press's portrayal of him as a tortured, mentally ill Impressionist, he could attract substantial and sensational attention. Writing again to his aunt about the furor in Berlin, he claimed to have made a tactical error by not showing his "scandal pictures" at a gallery immediately upon the closure of the initial exhibition, lamenting, "I could have earned several thousand kroners... He was well aware of the bad press and, in some ways, appreciated its immediate effect: the entrance fees that kept him financially afloat.” (Jay A. Clarke, Becoming Edvard Munch, Influence, Anxiety, and Myth, The Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, P.78.)


That year Munch's brother Andreas died. The following year Munch exhibited at the Salon des Independants. He also produced decorations for Ibsen's Peer Gynt and illustrations for Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and created his first lithographs and woodcuts. In 1897, he exhibited again at the Salon des Independants and bought his first house in Asgardstrand.                                                                         


Between 1898-1901, Munch lived in a state of great spiritual agitation, overwork and alcoholism compounded by dramatic love affairs. In 1898, he met Tulla Larsen the daughter of a wealthy wine merchant and they begin a tumultuous relationship. Tulla Larsen was twenty-nine with an hourglass figure and known for her extravagant hats.                                                                                                      

He travelled extensively throughout Europe pursued by Larsen who had become fixated on him. Despite his fear of being ensnared by Larsen, he freely took money from her and then felt guilty for his weakness.                                                                                                                                     
His landscapes of the 1890s were startlingly modern in their almost total abstraction of nature to undulating forms and pulsing passages of loosely applied paint applied with very thin watercolour like layers - that dribbled and dripped in parts.                                                                                                

In 1899, he illustrated a special issue of the journal Quickborn containing a text by Strindberg. He travelled to Florence via Berlin, Paris and Nice and spent May in Rome. In the autumn of 1899, he entered the sanatorium at Kornhaug, in the Gudbrandsdalen. In 1900, he travelled back to Berlin, then to Paris, Dresden, Italy and Switzerland. Tulla became increasingly like a stalker.                                         


In 1902, he spent the winter and spring in Berlin where he showed the complete Frieze of Life at the Berlin Secession expanding the exhibition with prints. He described the cycle of paintings as such: "I have worked on this frieze for nearly thirty years. The first picture, The Kiss, dates from 1888-9. The Yellow Boat, The Street, Man and Woman and Anxiety were painted between 1890 and 1891, and have already been exhibited in Berlin. The following year I added new works to the series: Vampire, The Scream and Madonna. They were first exhibited separately in a private gallery, then in 1902, at the "Berlin Sezession", presented as a single series round the main vestibule as an example of the psychology of modern life. Certain art critics have tried to prove that the spirit of this frieze was influenced by German ideas and my friendship with Strindberg. I am certain that future criticism will refute this assertion. The work was conceived as a series to show a panorama of life.”                                                                            


He was introduced to the physician Max Linde, who wrote a book on his art and commissioned him to produce the print portfolio From Max Linde's House. He also began taking amateur photographs of his own - which he would use as aids to inspire is art. He spent 1903 paralytic with drink and got into a series of drunken fistfights.                                                                                                          


Meanwhile Tulla had rented a house near his and one night, Munch was told Tulla had tried to kill herself, and was dying. Since Tulla later destroyed all her diaries and letters about Munch, we only have Munch's account of what happened. He went to her house where in her bedroom he found her laid out like a corpse with candles and flowers around her. Suddenly she jumped up laughing. There was a gun, one of them grabbed it. A shot rang out. Munch's middle finger on his left hand was bleeding. Munch claimed he had shot himself in the hand (he was right-handed.) His hand was x-rayed and we can see in it the bullet lodged in the middle finger of his left hand.
           

The relationship was over. Munch the most handsome man in Norway, now found his beautiful hand deformed. He could not look at it. He wore gloves obsessively and never showed his left hand in photographs or paintings until at the very end he bore it bravely as he held a crayon. He said, "There is nothing more naked or disgusting than the fingers. I cannot bear people who are always playing with their hands.” (Munch, quoted by Michel Ragon, Heron History of Art, London: Heron Books, 1968, P.23.) In his house after his death, forty pairs of gloves where discovered.                                                                                               

The Hamburg collector and lawyer Gustav Schiefler started work on a catalogue of all Munch's prints. In 1903, returned to Berlin and then Paris where he became a member of the Societe des Artistes Independants. He also met the stunningly beautiful English violinist Eva Mudocci who became a close friend and muse. Eva was already involved with another woman and so their relationship was happily platonic. Meanwhile he painted portraits of Max Linde and his four sons. These bravura portraits revealed Munch as a master of child portraiture neither sentimental nor superficial. In 1904, he signed exclusive contracts with the Hamburg dealer Commeter for the sale of his paintings and with the publisher Bruno Cassier for the German sales of his graphic works.                                                                          

In November 1905, he took the cure at the spas in the Thuringen area of Germany - trying to overcome his anxiety and alcoholism. Yet he was fearful that if he were completely cured, his art would be crippled.                                                                                                                                     

In 1906, he worked on designs for the theatre impresario Max Reinhardt's production of Ibsen's Ghosts. In 1908, his long-time supporter Jens Thiis who had become director of Norway's National Gallery purchased Munch's work for the museum.                                                                           

It was only at the age of forty that Munch achieved financial security. He was now able to support his family, even though he hated to be in their company. With the deaths of van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, Munch had become a legendary figure and ultimately he would become a millionaire. Munch called his paintings his "children" and hated selling them. This was one reason why he chose to make prints of them. When he sold a painting, which he prized, he felt compelled to make a copy for himself.                              
           

In the autumn of 1908, he admitted himself to Dr. Daniel Jacobson's clinic, where he remained for eight months. In Norway, he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Olva. Munch's breakdown only served to increase his mythic status and the market for his work, which led to the success of his prints, based on the tale of Alpha and Omega and he still managed to organize exhibitions in Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden while in the clinic. Munch had been in a state for years leading up to his stay in the clinic, however he had feared that without drink and his anxiety he would lose his creative fire. "I must retain my physical weaknesses; they are an integral part of me. I don't want to get rid of illness, however unsympathetically I may depict it in my art... My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different to others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.” (Munch, quoted by Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.251.) Life in the clinic was relaxed, the food was good, the nurses pretty and flirtatious and the main remedy Munch received were baths with mild electrical currents nothing like those given in electro-convulsive therapy today. Other baths were made with concoctions of carbolic acid or mineral or herbal ingredients. They were no real cure but can't have done him any harm either. During his convalescence in Jacobson's clinic Munch made visits to the zoo where he made a number of wonderful animal studies full of character and bravura summation.


Munch became a teetotaler (apart from a few slips), ended his bohemian life and retreated to the country. Munch had made the choice of sanity over martyrdom, however his work after 1908 lost the obsessional quality that had given it so much power. The negative pessimism, and obsession with love and death that had helped create his early Expressionist canvases was replaced by pleasure found in the simple things of life and a growing expressive naturalism. His pallet lightened and his colours became more beautiful and complementary.
            

In 1909, he began work on decorations for the University of Kristiania Festival Hall known as the Aula. Due to discussions and conflicts, the decorations were not accepted until 1914, and completed in 1916.  The masterpiece of these frescos was 'The Sun' a massive cosmic evocation of the earth's light.   
            

In 1914, he journeyed to Paris and Berlin. In 1916, he bought a small estate at Ekely where he spent most of his time until his death in 1944. Although he lived as a virtual recluse, he had many models come to pose for him, which lead to a late series of female nudes in various mediums, which revealed a new tenderness and acceptance of women. In particular, his housekeeper Karen Borgen and later her sixteen-year-old daughter Ingeborg Kaurin were to feature in his late nudes. In the 1910s he painted a series of deceptively simple watercolour nudes. Rapidly painted with only a few strokes of the brush - the watercolour worked wet in wet these late works had an intimacy and loveliness absent in his earlier femme fatels. "The stream of live-in models was to produce a hidden portfolio of erotic art, parallel to his more public work. At the same time that he was producing it he was writing privately about the beauty of chastity. Maybe he did manage to keep the sex in his head. Maybe that is why the sexual tension in the pictures is so powerful. A characteristic of the erotic art is that it does not show open pudenda or the erect penis, an intensifying restraint that remains true to his earlier artistic goal to make pictures in which 'their soul, their inner world, is the only reality, a cosmos'... The second unusual episode in the line of erotica occurs in 1918, when he executed a lesbian series. It is puzzling. Lesbian erotica was very common in Germany at the time, but that was hardly relevant to Munch. In terms of his overwhelming concern with subjective states of mind, they can be considered a failure; they achieve the naturalist's 'veracity of the document' without engaging in any spiritual reportage.”  (Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.297.) In 1918, he revisited his 'Frieze of Life' and published a pamphlet defending his work and castigating Norwegian critics for their early neglect of his work.                      
          

In 1922, he painted murals for the workers dining room at the Freia Chocolate Factory in Kristiania. He also travelled briefly to Germany and Switzerland. In 1926, his beloved sister Laura who he had painted many times died, he could not attend the funeral, but hid behind a tree near the graveyard. He kept the temperature in his house a constant 70 degree Fahrenheit. If anyone told him he was looking unwell, he would take to his bed.                                                           
            

In 1927, he travelled to Germany, Italy and France and held large retrospectives at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the National Gallery Olso. In 1930, Munch was struck partial blind by an eye complaint. Yet determined to record what he saw, he painted a series of quick watercolours of his obscured vision, in which he went further towards abstraction than ever before. Like many of his late watercolors' they had a touching, personal and off hand quality that made them read like the private entries of a diary.  His eye complaint reoccurred in 1938 when he nearly lost his sight completely and even in 1940, he still found it difficult to work because of his illness. In 1931, his aunt Karen who had become a mother figure to him and had encouraged his art as a child died. Although he had a housekeeper and was occasionally visited by friends, much of the time he was totally alone, connected to the world only through long conversations on the telephone or with taxi drivers - who drove him around. He would go into Oslo and buy a pile of foreign newspapers and reminisce about his young life abroad. He was plagued by insomnia the only cure for which he found was to board a train to Stockholm on which he could fall asleep. He had no need for conventional creature comforts. Apart for one room where he eat and slept, all of the other rooms in his house were used as studios and storerooms for his art.                                                                            
            
By now, Munch had become hugely popular in Norway and was showered with honours and awards. In 1933, on his 60th birthday he was celebrated, but he cantankerously told journalist to go away when they tried to interview him. In addition, Pola Gauguin (son of Paul Gauguin) and Jens Thiis published the first biographies on Munch in Norway. Then in 1937, eighty-two works by Munch in German museums considered "degenerate art" were confiscated and sold by the Nazis.
           

In 1940, Norway and Denmark were occupied by German troops. In the neighbouring farm, there were Panzers and there was an anti-aircraft battery set up nearby. The Germans' were threatening to requisition his home that was crammed with his art works, though surprisingly he remained calm. Munch refused any contact with the Nazi's unlike his friend the novelist Kunt Hamsun the author of the novel ‘Hunger’, whose son approached Munch to join the ‘Honorary Board of Norwegian Artists' and thus endorse the Quisling regime - however he briskly declined. The board never materialized because the Nazi's thought it would have no credibility without Munch's participation. On his eightieth birthday greetings flooded in. A week later Ekely was shaken by the explosion of a munitions dump nearby and all the windows in his home were blown in. He was uninjured, but he contracted a severe bout of bronchitis. On 23ed January 1944, after a life of tribulations and triumphs, Munch died peacefully at the age of eighty-one in his home at Ekely.
            

Munch had never allowed anyone up to the second floor of house in Ekely - up there was found thousands of paintings and drawings as well as prints and journals. Wanting his Frieze of Life kept together, he bequeathed his remaining works to the city of Oslo including; 1,008 paintings, 15,391 prints, 4,443 drawings, 378 lithographs, 188 etchings, 148 woodcuts, 143 lithographic stones, 155 copper plates, 133 woodcut blocks, 6 sculptures, 92 sketchbooks and thousands of photographs, letters, and secret manuscripts. Paradoxically it was the worst thing he could have done for his future reputation. Up until the 1940s he had been one of the most famous artists in Europe but his reputation declined after his death since art lovers had to make a pilgrimage to Norway to see most of his best works.                          

He was a paradoxical artist, famous for his misery - yet it never prevented him from making art or promoting himself ruthlessly. He was an exemplary Expressionist artist, which in its crudest terms claimed to be a spontaneous and unreflective style. Yet his work had come out of the spirit of Decadence and Symbolism and borrowed many of the themes and subjects of Northern Realism and Naturalism like deathbed scenes and mood paintings of interiors and landscapes.


The paradoxes of Munch's oeuvre reflected the paradox of Expressionism. For while at its most basic it aimed at a purely subjective, autonomous expression of individual sensation and feeling - it could only do so within the pre-existing framework of contemporary art and culture. "Anxieties of influence, as Harold Bloom argued in his foundational text of 1973, are multifaceted: they can be considered homages or crutches, Oedipal dilemmas that can be either overcome or invisibly internalized. For Bloom, the term itself is a metaphor that suggests how individual artists misread and creatively reinterpret the work of their predecessors. The essence of any avant-garde movement is to exist on the cutting edge, which explains Munch's keen desire to be viewed as innovative and independent at every turn. However, as Bloom argued with regard to poetry, each of Munch's images "implicates a matrix of relationships".” (Jay A. Clarke, Becoming Edvard Munch, 'Influence, Anxiety, and Myth', The Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, P.12.)
            

Munch borrowed from Monet many of his early themes of people by lakes and the sea. From Arnold Blocklin he learned how to make an imaginary landscape heave with heavy symbolic mystery. From Vuillard and Bonnard he learned how to animate and vibrate an interior with feeling and life. Gauguin taught him how to construct a painting in large blocks of intense and symbolic colour. From van Gogh he learned how to create dynamic expressive forms using directional brushstrokes. From the erotic print maker Rops he took the pose for his painting Puberty, and from Redon he learned the grammar of intense visionary image making.
            

Munch's art was a symptom of his age, but the greatness of his talent raised his personal tragedy and that of his times to an epic level of universal tragedy. "In many of the notes he wrote during his long life Munch stressed the importance of the artist's role as mediator and redeemer. He believed that the spirit of the artist lived on through his work, and that even after his death the artist could help others gain greater insight into their own lives and problems - provided he was able to express in his pictures his own sufferings, ideas and feelings in a way that enabled other people to understand and relive them.” (Gerd Woll, 'The Frieze of Life Graphic Works', 'The Frieze of Life', Ed. Mara-Helen Wood, The National Gallery, London, 1992, P.45.)                                                                   


So Munch saw his art as therapeutic but was the cure more dangerous than the illness? Had he settled down and become an engineer like his father had wanted, would he have been happier? Maybe, but the world would have been deprived of one of its most compelling artists. Besides, life is too short to deny your talents.
              

Flicking through Munch and Photography, by Arne Eggum, from 1989, I was stunned and shocked to come upon photographs of Munch naked. What immediately struck me was the diminutive size of Munch's flaccid penis. It was tiny! I told Carol this and she came to his defence. "Well maybe it was cold.” She sympathetically suggested. "Well it does get cold in Norway! But no this was in summer.” I laughed. "Well you know what they say it's not the size of the train it's the size of the engine.” She retorted. "Yes but surely it had some effect on him? Maybe that's why he feared women. Maybe he feared he could never satisfy them? I retorted. "Well he didn't seem to have any problem getting them! And they became obsessed with him!" Carol pointed out. "Yes I suppose your right.” I replied, still not so sure. Later I realized that in those paintings that he had painted himself naked he had recorded his penis with even less attention, hardly conveying it with anything more than a smear of paint or even just bare canvas.                 

Munch had famously declared, "The camera cannot compete with brush and palette - as long as it cannot be used in Heaven or Hell.” His paintings were archetypal Expressionist works in which he intensified colour and drawing to express his inner demons - yet many of his early paintings were based on postcards and later works aided by photographs that he had taken of his models. In his earliest works, Munch was thought to have experimented with the camera obscura and the camera lucida, in this he was like many Naturalist and Realist painters of the day, and like them, he never revealed his use of this secret aid. From 1902, Munch made his own amateur experiments with photography and was particularly active as a photographer between 1902-1910 and 1926-32. In many of his portraits, he was to use photographs as aids and produced a sizeable number of photographic self-portraits. However, Munch would alter the placement of hands, or spacing in the composition and crop or extended the figure according to his taste, making his interpretations as notable for their differences from the photos used. Some of the works based on photos suffered from a lack of intimacy and tended towards illustration, those that worked best were when his colour and paintwork achieved an autonomous intensity of their own moment. He was also indebted to the look of staged 'Spiritualist' photography, and experimented with photographic tricks like double-exposure - to suggest ghostly presences. In his paintings, the wraith like application of paint was an echo of the distortions, overexposures and imperfections of amateur photography.
           

Munch's technique as an oil painter left a lot to be desired. He was a fitful, impetuous and instinctive painter who frequently left his paintings in an unfinished state. Yet it was the sketchy, immediate approach that he adopted which made works like The Scream work so visceral. He frequently painted out of doors and exposed 'finished' canvases to the elements. He believe that the damp from rain and snow, the scuff marks from casual treatment and even the bird dropping that splattered his canvases added to their psychic intensity. "Good pictures never disappear. A brilliant thought never dies... One line in charcoal on a wall can be a greater work of art than a painting carried out in the most accomplished technique. Many painters work so hard towards posterity that the poor overworked canvas loses the fire of the original thought. The picture so carefully constructed then remains alive forever - and dead.” (Munch, quoted by Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, P.273.) Over the years, he would return to old canvases and paint corrections to them - frequently creating even more pictorial disjunction. The dating too of his canvases was a nightmare, since Munch sometimes back-dated works he had worked on for years. Or dated old paintings more recently because he had made a few additions. Of the 1,008 canvases found in his various studios after his death, not one had been varnished.  After his death, those in charge of his estate had his canvases cleaned and varnished his paintings, altering their texture and sheen completely. Despite the conventional soundness of their approach to restoration, in Munch's case, this was a betrayal of his painterly ethics.