Edvard Munch, at the Courtauld Galleries, is a powerful revelation. It could hardly be otherwise, in one sense, since most of these paintings have never been seen in this country before. They were bought in the 19th century by the Norwegian industrialist Rasmus Meyer, who owned grain mills in the coastal city of Bergen and was determined that the local people should have as good a chance to look at the country’s greatest living artist as anyone in Oslo. And there they have remained ever since, in a city surrounded by fjords and facing Shetland across the cold waters of the North Sea.
But what stuns is not just the unfamiliarity of the paintings so much as the sudden day-to-night shifts. You see Munch’s art evolving at exceptional speed, and with unusual clarity, in Meyer’s judicious collection. There are only 18 works, spanning a couple of decades, from the 1880s to 1909, when Munch was 46, but every one of them is a masterpiece of energetic and theatrical miserabilism.
