Carole Angier
Paint it Black
Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream
By Sue Prideaux
Yale University Press 391pp £25
‘A shilling life will give you all the facts,’ Auden wrote. This one will cost you a lot more than a shilling, and will give you the facts, but not a lot more.
Edvard Munch should have been a glorious subject. He was handsome, brilliant and doomed. He came from Norway, which means suicidal gloom to start with (vide Ibsen and Strindberg). Then there was his family, tainted on both sides with TB and madness. TB carried off his mother when he was five, his beloved sister Sophie (as we know from his second-most-famous painting) when he was fourteen. His own childhood was dominated by illness, of which he nearly died. His Pietist father was a rigidly religious and unimaginative man, who terrified him with hell and damnation, and with visions of his mother watching from above. But Edvard could draw; and after overcoming his father’s resistance – as inevitable as in a fairy tale – he set off on the life of an artist. And this was like a fairy tale too. First was the struggle to realise a new inner vision, in ‘soul paintings’ of grief, jealousy, melancholy, fear; the poverty and neglect, the incomprehension and outrage – pointillism would give you the pox, Munch was a madman, a hoaxer, a poisoner of art. Then came the turning of the tide, first abroad, at last at home; until Munch was a legend in his lifetime, the author of one of the most iconic images in modern art, by his forties rich, by his sixties a millionaire.
And despite all this, he was still doomed. He was mad, sometimes very. He was afraid of the dark and of silence, of open space and of mountains, of beds and of illness, of men and (especially) of women. By his late forties he had drunk himself into hallucinations, paralysis
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism.
@PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right.
Peter York - Deluxe Editions
Peter York: Deluxe Editions - When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
literaryreview.co.uk
Henry James returned to America in 1904 with three objectives: to see his brother William, to deliver a series of lectures on Balzac, and to gather material for a pair of books about modern America.
Peter Rose follows James out west.
Peter Rose - The Restless Analyst
Peter Rose: The Restless Analyst - Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks...
literaryreview.co.uk
Vladimir Putin served his apprenticeship in the KGB toward the end of the Cold War, a period during which Western societies were infiltrated by so-called 'illegals'.
Piers Brendon examines how the culture of Soviet spycraft shaped his thinking.
Piers Brendon - Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll
Piers Brendon: Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll - The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker
literaryreview.co.uk