Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream

Munch's correlation between life and artistic work is unusually close. He created a body of work that was intensely personal. Sue Prideaux introduces the reader to what kind of person has created this extraordinary art and she does it very well. This compelling book reveals the life and work of a fascinating man and is invaluable for anyone interested in a captivating saga.

The book - as promised an excellent paperback copy, in very good condition - arrived earlier than I expected and it was beautifully packaged. I would be more than happy (based on this experience) to buy again from the same source.

As a long time fan of Edvard Munch's art, this is the best of all the biographies I've read about the artist including his own private dairy. "The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth" by Munch and translated by J. Gill Holland (no relation to this reviewer) should also be checked out by Munch admirers. Sorry about that digression--back to this wonderful biography. Sue Prideaux's nearly four-hundred page history first caught my attention on the "New Releases" tables of at the Boston Antheaum. After leafing through the volume, I immediately ordered my own copy because I knew it was a book in which I'd want to dog-ear pages and scribble comments in the book's margins. The beginning of the book was difficult to read. Munch's father was a religious zealot who made his living as a physician. Unfortunately, even with his own family, he seemed more interested in saving a person's soul than sometimes saving their life or curing them of their ailments. His very fanaticism overwhelmed Young Edvard Munch and the rest of his family. Munch's mother and sister died of TB and he himself barely survived it in his youth. The author's description of life in the Munch household was so depressing that it almost made me stop reading. It was certainly not a good advertisement for practicing this brand of Christianity. It's little wonder that in adulthood Edvard Munch became addicted to acholol and drugs. He was afraid to give them up because he felt his inspiration was one of the results of the drunken fog that often enveloped him. Once he finally committed himself for treatment, he was forced to clean up his act and he discovered his inspiration wasn't coming from a bottle. This book is a wonderful portrait of Munch and the era in which he lived. Germany was the country that first recognized and rewarded his genius. Munch's many phobias make him a fascinating character to study. Considering his own personal demon's, his artworks are actually quite tame. Learn why when he begrudingly sold one of his paintings, he'd immediatley paint another version to replace that lost child at his dinner table. Even though the Nazi's ordered all his work to be destroyed, Hilter's chief aides praised and collected it for their personal collections. Throughout the book the reader can only be amazed that either Munch or his work actually managed to survive the chaos that surrounded him during his entire lifetime. He was certainly an eccentric by any definition of the term.

You don't have to be a fan or "understand" Munch's work to enjoy this book. Edvard Munch was a very interesting and complex (not to mention screwed up) person. His art came from within and at many times, tormented him until he got it onto canvas. This book really gets you inside Munch's world and the influences (none of them good) that inspired him to paint the bizzare things that he did. If you should happen to read this, follow it with "The Rescue Artist" by Edward Dolnick. You won't regret it.

There is probably no more fiercely recognizable image in modern art than Edvard Munch's _The Scream_ (1893). The nightmarish picture seems so essential to our way of looking at modern life that many people do not know anything of Munch's other works, which is a shame; he lived eighty years and was productive through them all. His most famous work is even in the subtitle of his first full biography written in English, _Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream_ (Yale University Press) by Sue Prideaux. The author seems particularly well suited to her subject. She is part Norwegian and has lived a life shared between Norway and England. Her grandmother was painted by Munch, and her great-uncle was one of the artist's loyal patrons. She has produced a big biography that is well-illustrated with the subject's works. This is essential. Munch wrote, "Just as Leonardo studied the recesses of the human body and dissected cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is universal in the soul." Many and varying results of the dissections in paintings and in his profuse journals are included here, making a biography that is surprisingly gripping. Munch wrote, "Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that hovered over my cradle." He was born in 1863, and tuberculosis took his beloved mother and sister when he was a boy. His father, Munch wrote, "temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious... From him I inherited the seeds of madness." His illness kept him from attending school regularly, but he early showed artistic talent, even though he got little training in art, and often rejected the training he got. Instructors, and the public, could not understand that he had no obsession with painting with physical accuracy, but was obsessed with documenting impressions and feelings. His early career was the classic one of the starving artist, a bohemian life with many lovers (sometimes shared with others in his circle), and plenty of absinthe and other alcohol intake. Many of his great works were made when he was impoverished, but eventually he found an unlikely niche, fashionable portrait painter to the rich (or as he called them, his "Mycenaeans"). The portraits were untraditional, and often uncomplimentary, but they paid; he was to become a very rich man, although perhaps due to his years of penury, he always lived simply and fretted that the tax man was ruining him. It is perhaps not coincidental that with his increase in income came critical success, although in his own country, he suffered attacks in the press, and became reclusive and suspicious. He was able to sell his expensive portraits, but had trouble forcing himself to part with any of his personal work, insisting that his paintings were his children, and keeping them around him, even if this meant they were stacked badly, were exposed to weather, or became scratching posts for the cat. He feared all his life that he would be touched with his family's insanity, and eventual