Edvard Munch

Sky Arts have been running a weekly series on exhibitions by great artists and last Monday it featured the Norwegian colossus Edvard Munch.

Tim Marlow interviews curators of the museum and there’s a visual treat of the pictures to view.

Previous painters have been Heironymus Bosch, Edourd Manet and David Hockney.

Munch is not my piece of smorgasbord.

He is too gloomy for me and reflects the grimness of Skanda noir in fiction and the Nordic psyche.

Munch like his father suffered from depression.

Even his best known work The Scream has a weird face with no definition and swirling brushstrokes in violent colours as the background.

Van Gogh had his demons too but even in the asylum of St Remy the pictures possess a serenity which he did not have.

It was argued that Munch’s paintings were unique in being both of their times and beyond them.

A strange claim as Heironymus Bosch’s canon of works were popular in his own times (the 15th and early 16th century) and especially in the 1960s.

An absurd claim was made that he was under the influence of transcendental drugs.

In fact he was a model and slightly dull bourgeois Dutch citizen.

Even those artists adopt a certain style – like Fernand Leger- his works in his Foundation in Biot, Nice  have sumptuous early portraits. Picasso never stayed in one style for long but his adolescent pictures in the museum of Barcelona are magnificent.

Munch did paint a fine self-portrait but most of his work is instantly recognisable and unlikely to cheer you.

I hoped afterwards the programme might convert me to Munch but it did not.

I guess I prefer painters like Matisse with more colour, vivacity and sense of light.