Few artists are as strongly associated with a single painting as Edvard Munch is with The Scream. Even before its endless memeability became apparent it was as much a fixture of popular culture as of art history. But there has always been more to Munch than his most famous work, and a new show at London’s Courtauld Gallery gives a rare chance to trace his wider career.
The exhibition comes from the collection of Norwegian industrialist Rasmus Meyer, who discovered Munch’s work in the early years of the 20th century and soon became an avid supporter and collector, going on to buy paintings directly from Munch’s studio, the paint almost still wet, as the saying goes. This is the first time his collection, held in the Kode art museum in Bergen, has been shown together outside Scandinavia. It takes work from the 1880s, when Munch was the rising star of Norwegian art, through his “golden decade” of the 1890s – when he developed his characteristic style and produced what became known as his The Frieze of Life series, including various iterations of The Scream – and into the 20th century.
