Art: Madman Munch

"Here there is no longer talk of Nature, only eccentric fanaticism, delirium-drunk moods and fever-sick hallucinations." So said the conservative Norwegian Aftenposten, outraged at the show of some 50 oils by young Edvard Munch (pronounced Moohnk) in the summer of 1892 in Christiania (now Oslo). The storm of criticism was all that Munch, then 28 and just back from Paris, needed to become a scandalous success in the gloomy provincial city. Berlin painters promptly invited him to show in the German capital, and the scandal was even greater, splitting the Union of Berlin Artists permanently into two camps. Gaily Munch wrote his aunt that "all the uproar was great fun," added that he had gained six pounds.

Today "Madman" Munch is recognized as Scandinavia's most powerful artist, one of the key founders of German expressionism, second in power only to Vincent Van Gogh, and on a par with Toulouse-Lautrec as a graphic artist. His work was first shown on a major scale in the U.S. seven years ago (TIME, May 1, 1950) ; the second major retrospective has already been an outstanding hit at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and Minneapolis' Institute of Arts, will travel over the coming twelvemonth to Chicago, Cincinnati and San Francisco.

Love & Death. In his early days everything that Munch did only served to reinforce the opinion that he was a madman, a Bohemian, a dangerous freethinker. He was obsessed by two great themes, love and death, and chose to depict them in terms of man's paralysis and anxiety when faced with them as raw forces in nature. Much of his anxiety had its roots in his early semi-invalid youth. His mother died when he was five; his father, a military surgeon, gave way to morbid religiosity and insane outbursts at his children. Recalled Painter Munch bitterly: "I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick and threatened with punishment in Hell."

When Edvard was 14. his elder sister Sophie died of tuberculosis. The delayed impact of his sister's death showed in Sick Child (opposite), a theme Munch first sketched when he was 22, continued obsessively in lithographs and oils. Owing some of its quality to the impressionist colors he had seen in Paris, it captures what he bore indelibly in his memory: "the pale head with bright red hair against the white pillow, the trembling lips, the transparent skin, the tired eyes."