Self-Expressionism

Edvard Munch's painting The Scream is among the world's most reproduced images. So when one of his original versions was stolen from Oslo's Munch Museum last August, along with his Madonna, the heist left art lovers as anguished as The Scream's subject. After closing for nine months, the museum reopened this summer with tighter security and a stirring new exhibit of works by the tormented Norwegian.

"Munch by Himself" is billed as a survey of the artist's self-portraiture. But whether nailed to a cross in Golgotha (1900) or lying in a pool of blood as the assassinated French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in Marat's Death I (1907), Munch remains elusive, instead appearing in different metaphorical guises.

There he is, too, leaning on a railing beneath a blood red sky in Despair (1892), an obvious precursor to The Scream (1893).

The howling stick figure of The Scream could itself qualify as a self-portrait under the liberating definition employed here by curator Iris Müller-Westermann. "He started painting himself when he was 18, and didn't finish being interested in himself until he died at 80 [in 1944]," she says. "Through self-portraits he developed a pictorial language for emotions and doubts that he could then transfer to more general motifs."

Müller-Westermann assembled most of the exhibit's 150 oils, watercolors and graphic works from the Munch Museum's own vast collection, and added items from private collections and Stockholm's Moderna Museet, where she is the head of international art. Together the works form a powerful — and often uncomfortable — record of six decades of Munch's explorations of pain and troubled sexuality.

"Munch by Himself" is to run in Oslo through Aug. 28, and London's Royal Academy of Arts gets its turn from Oct. 1-Dec. 11. Despite several arrests in the case, The Scream and Madonna are still missing, but their disappearance has only heightened the public's fascination with the enigmatic Expressionist's work. tel: (47-23) 49 35 00; www.munch.museum.no