Nothing gains headlines for art quite like high prices. A few weeks ago, one of the versions of Munch’s famous image of ‘The Scream’ was sold at auction for £74 million, which couldn’t have been bettered as advance publicity for the Tate’s new show. Admittedly, there is not a single version of that key painting in this exhibition (owners are jittery about loaning them — particularly since one was stolen from Norway’s National Gallery in 2004), but there are plenty of other treats for admirers of this Scandinavian ray of sunshine. Among his favourite subjects were sickness and death, lust and jealousy, fear of sexual disease and even fear of life. A Symbolist who was also a forerunner of the Expressionists, Munch dealt largely in the negative aspects of existence, using art to exorcise his demons. We are now invited to share his horror.
This new exhibition, sponsored by Statkraft, wants to claim him as a great Modernist, rather than a fin-de-siècle figure obsessed with the femme fatale.
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