We love anniversaries. This year is being pushed as the centenary of modernism, since The Waste Land and Ulysses were both published in 1922. But Edvard Munch had TS Eliot and James Joyce beat. In 1892, Munch painted the first modernist masterpiece of the city, anticipating their radical visions of urban life by a full three decades. Now that masterpiece, Evening on Karl Johan, has come to Britain as part of a precious loan of incendiary Munchs from a collection in Bergen, Norway.
These people really need to work from home. They come towards us at the close of day, their faces harrowed by the misery of the office or factory. They are ghoulish grey cartoons of loneliness and sadness lit by yellow glowing windows. A woman stares out with white circles for eyes, her pupils shrunk to dots, while a man in a funereal top hat has a shrunken skull-like face, as if modern life has reduced him to one of the walking dead. In fact, they are all workaday zombies, their bodies stunted, their pace robotic, approaching in a single mummified mass.
