Art: The Master of the Anxious Eye

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His father was a violently strict religious maniac; his mother died of TB when Munch was five, as did his favorite sister, Sophie, nine years later. "Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle," Munch recalled later. "In my childhood I felt always that I was treated in an unjust way, without a mother, sick, and with threatened punishment in hell hanging over my head." Not surprisingly, a great deal of Munch's creative life was spent exorcising the demons of childhood. The sickroom, the immobile praying faces, the small twisting hands of anxious women, the terrible apprehension that went with Munch's use of illness as a central metaphor of visionary insight — these surface in the paintings over and over again. In this exhibition Munch's chief image of illness, the wasted and vulnerable head of Sophie turned on the pillow like a profile on a Renaissance medallion, has a whole gallery devoted to its numerous versions, and rightly so: fatal illness of children was one of the big themes of 19th century art and fiction. But, unlike the death of Dickens' Little Nell, the tremulous and despairing tenderness of Munch's loss continues to affect us.

Munch's unsparing art was part of a larger cultural context. It was painting's equivalent to the fundamental insight that Freud, in the 1890s, was developing in Vienna: that the self is the product of a battle between insatiable desires and unyielding social structures. Munch gave shape to experiences which were fresh to the point of prophecy in the late 19th century but have become such commonplaces of 20th century culture that they are barely paintable today. The mass city engulfs the village; the social group breaks up into isolated figures; the watcher replaces the participant. Munch was the first painter of the lonely crowd, and if paintings like Anxiety and Ashes, both in 1894, are still disturbing (as they are), it is no longer because their radically simplified pictorial structure affronts taste, but because of the sheer intensity of Munch's feelings. The self was frail; in works like the great proto-expressionist Self-Portrait in Weimar, 1906, Munch becomes an intruder in what, for another painter, would be the hospitable space of his own fiction.

The continuous surface of shared pleasure the world presented to the impressionists in 1870 had cracked open in Munch's work by 1895, revealing fissures of discordant color, strange tiltings of space, isolations of form, and a deep pessimism about the very possibility of satisfaction. Nowhere was this more evident than in Munch's treatment of love and sex. There are two kinds of women in