Art: The Master of the Anxious Eye

In Washington's National Gallery, a major Munch show

In art as in life, the world is full of bad expressionism. The bore relentlessly baying "This is me" has his pictorial equivalent in the artist who decants his steaming guts on the canvas and asks you to admire their authenticity. In our post-psychological culture there are not many artists who make something aesthetically pleasing, let alone compelling, from the repetitive pattern of their own neuroses and fears.

The confessional splurge works against the kind of detached, highly wrought structure that art needs. There have been exceptions, of course.

From Van Gogh to Francis Bacon, the unease of some artists could reach such obsessive dimensions that it transcends mere dis play and becomes exemplary. In modern art, the father of anxiety was a Norwegian, Edvard Munch.

The show entitled "Edvard Munch, Symbols and Images," which opened Nov. 11 in the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is a great event. As Art Historian Robert Rosenblum writes in its catalogue introduction, "Even the most Paris- centered interpretations of the history of postimpressionist art have been obliged to consider the grand and disturbing presence of the strange Norwegian master."

Some of Munch's paintings — notably The Scream, 1893, with its genderless homunculus squalling in loneliness on a bridge against the thick ropy sky of evening—are among the most reproduced images in early modern art. Yet Munch's major paintings are not well known here in the original because most of his best work stayed in Norway, distributed among several museums. The National Gallery's show, which will go to no other museum, has 245 paintings, prints and drawings on loan from Norwegian collections; it is the most complete Munch exhibition ever held in the U.S.

Munch was born in Norway in 1863.

He gloomily expected to die young, like Seurat or Beardsley. In fact he lived on to a great age, until 1944; but the main themes of his work were all set forth well before World War I, and it is on the period from 1880 to 1914 that the show concentrates. Few painters have had more difficult beginnings than Munch. They might have crushed his talent; instead they gave it a permanent irritability. His family was sunk in a kind 'of permanent neurasthenia, the petit-bourgeois provincial twilight known to every reader of Strindberg or Ibsen. He was, almost literally, raised in the family sickroom, in a dreadful atmosphere of whispers, enforced silences, vomit, snot and the cold stink of carbolic acid.