All that drinking. All that smoking. All that free love and those bohemian goings-on, all that Nietzschean nonsense, the symbolism and the expressionism, all that madness and early death. These are the reasons we seek out the company of laugh-a-minute, devil-may-care bon vivant and man-about-town Edvard Munch, a selection of whose portraits are now at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Sadly, little of the drama we expect of his art is in evidence here. Most of it is in the catalogue and on the wall labels, in the things the paintings here don’t tell us.
Where are the sickroom scenes and the fights, the houses on fire and the shootings, the breakdowns and suicides and murders, never mind the woozy sunsets and the screaming? You can’t, I suppose, have everything. This selection of Munch portraits takes us from one of his earliest self-portraits (a priggish little oil painting on cardboard, from 1882-3, that has not worn well) to a loose, lithographic crayon profile of British composer Frederick Delius, enjoying a concert while taking a cure (Delius was syphilitic) in Weisbaden in 1922. This exhibition is as much about Munch’s associations, his family and milieu, his collectors and patrons as it is about stylistic or intellectual development. It is all very patchy and uneven.
