The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  “Disease, insanity and death were the angels which attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life,” Munch wrote in his journal. “I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the eternal punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.”

  He learned many of those lessons from his father, a doctor who treated Oslo’s poorest residents for free but who adhered to fire-and-brimstone religious views. “When anxiety did not possess him, he would joke and play with us like a child,” Munch recalled. “When he punished us … he could be almost insane in his violence. In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.”

  Munch grew to be a shy, lonely, hypersensitive young man, tall, thin, and good-looking (reputedly “the handsomest man in Norway”). In his twenties he fled puritanical Oslo for the guilty pleasures of Paris and the Black Piglet Café in Berlin. Here he drank too much, chased women and fled from them, and painted obsessively, late at night, in a shabby rented room cluttered with his own unfinished pictures.

  The titles of some paintings from the 1890s, when Munch was in his early thirties and at his most productive, give some idea of his state of mind. He painted Despair and By the Deathbed in 1892, The Scream in 1893, Anxiety in 1894, Death Struggle in 1895.

  The paintings are as bleak as the titles suggest. In comparison with Munch’s portraits of isolation and woe, Edward Hopper’s depictions of near-empty diners seem cheerful. The Sick Child, for example, shows Munch’s sister Sophie, in bed and dying, attended by her despairing mother. Sophie is wan and weak, but—and this is characteristic of Munch—the dying girl seems less anguished than the mother she will leave behind. The mother’s pain is more than she can bear; she holds her daughter’s hand, but she is past the point where she could offer any spoken consolation.

  Even paintings with seemingly inviting subjects, like the 1892 street scene called Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street, are heavy-laden with grief. In Munch’s version of a spring evening, a stream of men in black top hats and women in dark dresses advance zombie-like toward the viewer, their eyes wide and staring and their heads barely more than skulls. A lone figure, depicting Munch himself, walks unnoticed in the opposite direction.

  Munch’s aim in such paintings, he wrote, was to find a way to represent human “suffering and emotion, rather than to paint external nature.” The painter’s task was “to depict his deepest emotions, his soul, his sorrows and joys.” An artist was a psychologist with a paintbrush.

  Freud and Munch were almost exact contemporaries. Though neither man ever mentioned the other in print, the two were engaged in the same quest. In the age of anxiety, if Freud was the great explorer, Munch was his mapmaker. Far more directly than most artists, Munch served up a kind of autobiography on canvas. His paintings put his private torments on public view.

  His relations with women, for example, could scarcely have been more fraught. “His father had prayed late at night to save his son from the sinful attractions of women, flesh, and free love,” one art historian writes, “but the diabolic allures of alcohol and a bohemian life overpowered his prayers.” In 1889, when Munch was twenty-six, his father died. One of the father’s last acts was to mail his well-thumbed Bible to Munch, in Paris, in the hope that the directionless young man could yet be saved.

  Women were temptresses intent on destroying men, and Munch had trouble resisting temptation. He fell in love for the first time at age twenty-two, with a married woman two years older than he was. “Was it because she took my first kiss that she took the sweetness of life from me?” he wrote later. “Was it because she lied, deceived, that one day she took the scales from my eyes so that I saw Medusa’s head, saw life as a great horror?”

  Later relationships proved even more disastrous. For three years, the penniless artist carried on a tumultuous affair with a beautiful and vain woman named Tulla Larsen, a wealthy member of one of Copenhagen’s leading families. After their breakup, she lured Munch to her room by enlisting friends to tell him that she had fallen deathly ill and yearned for one final conversation. Munch arrived, and Tulla sat up in her deathbed flourishing a gun. She was not sick, she admitted, but she would kill herself if Munch refused to take her back. Munch reached for the gun, Tulla grabbed it back, and it fired. The bullet took off the top joint of the middle finger of Munch’s left hand. (Munch painted with his right hand.)

  Munch later included Tulla Larsen in several works, notably in a portrait called Hatred and in another entitled Still Life (The Murderess). “I have painted a still life as good as any Cézanne,” he wrote, describing the latter work, “except that in the background I have painted a murderess and her victim.”

  In between stints with Munch, Hill pored over the Getty Museum catalogue. One of the prizes in the collection, he learned, is a strange work by James Ensor called Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. The huge painting, about eight feet by fourteen feet, is an angry satire depicting the chaos that would greet Christ if he returned to the modern world. Jesus (who is depicted with Ensor’s features) is nearly swallowed up in a tumultuous crowd; political banners and advertising slogans (“Coleman’s mustard”) wave overhead; the mayor preens as if the parade were in his honor. Ensor’s masterpiece, Hill read, was one of the great forerunners of expressionism and a key step on the path that led Munch to The Scream.

  Hill lit up. The Ensor painting, he figured, would be the key to his patter. The reason the Getty would pay the ransom, he’d say, is that the curators wanted to put The Scream on exhibition with Ensor’s painting. For Hill, seeing Ensor was the Aha! moment when his Getty story fell into place.

  No one else would have thought so. Even without Ensor, the Getty scheme was far from simple. If Hill was prepared to play a rich American, why go to the trouble of involving a museum? Why not simply pose as a tycoon bent on assembling an art collection no one else could match? Hill contemptuously brushed aside any such objections as exactly the kind of “conventional and narrow-minded” thinking he despised.

  “My art,” Munch wrote, “is rooted in a single reflection: Why am I not as others are? Why was there a curse on my cradle?” Painting was not merely a career, or even a calling, but a cry from the abyss. “There should be no more paintings of interiors and people reading and women knitting,” Munch declared. “There should be images of living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love—I shall paint a number of such pictures—people will understand the holiness of it, and they will take off their hats as if they were in a church.”

  Instead, they took out rotten fruit and hurled it as if they were in a burlesque hall. It was Munch’s raw, unfinished technique, not his subject matter, that inspired such scorn. The contempt directed at Munch echoed the critics’ mockery when, two decades before, the impressionists had mounted their first shows.

  “There is not even any proper underpainting in the picture,” one Norwegian critic scolded, when he saw Munch’s Portrait of the Painter Jensen-Hjell. “The colors have been crudely daubed on the canvas; indeed it looks as if it has been painted with the blotches of paint left over on the palette after another picture.” One newspaper reported that visitors emerged from a Munch exhibition asking whether he held the paintbrush with his hands or his feet.

  The abuse poured down even on paintings that would later be hailed as among Munch’s greatest. At one show, Munch reported with horror, he approached The Sick Child and found a rowdy crowd “laughing and shouting” in front of the depiction of his sister’s deathbed. Munch rushed outside, where one of his fellow artists, a then acclaimed and now forgotten figure, ran over and shouted in his face: “Humbug painter!” The critics were nearly as contemptuous. “The kindest service one can do for the painter E. Munch,” one wrote, “is to pass over his pictures in silence.”

  From the beginning, though, a few viewers did understand what Munch was up to. In 1892, a group called
the Association of Berlin Artists put on an exhibition of Munch’s work. The paintings were so controversial that they inspired a virtual civil war between an avant-garde faction of artists, who supported Munch, and a group of more conventional painters, who despised him. After only six days, the artists’ association voted to close the show down. A riot broke out. Munch’s reputation as an emblem of modernity was made.

  The Scream appeared the following year. Most viewers hated it. The impression it gave, according to one French newspaper, was that Munch had dipped a finger in excrement and smeared it around.

  The painting grew out of an actual experience, though scholars quarreled over its date. Munch had set out for an evening stroll along the water, near Oslo. “I was walking along the road with two friends,” he recalled years afterward. “The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red.”

  For years, Munch grappled with the memory of that sunset and labored to capture it in paint. The date of his evening walk has lately stirred a debate—1883 and 1886 and 1891 all have their partisans—because it now seems likely that poor Munch, his nerves already aflame, happened to witness one of the astonishing meteorological sights of all time. At 10:02 in the morning on August 27, 1883, half a world away from Norway, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa erupted. The island vanished from the earth, blasting itself apart into the heavens. Six cubic miles of rock, rendered into pumice and dust, rained down; smaller particles wafted high into the atmosphere. In the months to come, those floating particles drifted around the world and created sunsets that blazed and glowed with colors of an intensity and splendor no one had ever seen. The New York Times reported, on November 28, 1883, that “soon after five o’clock the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds. People in the streets were startled at the unwonted sight and gathered in little groups on all the corners to gaze into the west…. The clouds gradually deepened to a bloody red hue, and a sanguinary flush was on the sea.”

  More stolid observers than Munch lost their bearings. In Poughkeepsie, New York, a team of firemen harnessed their horses to their pump wagon and raced toward the setting sun to fight the inferno on the horizon. In Oslo, on November 30, 1883, a newspaper reported that “a strong light was seen yesterday and today to the west of the city. People believed it was a fire: but it was actually a red refraction in the hazy atmosphere after sunset.”

  Was this the sunset that Munch witnessed? Art historians have always attributed the appearance of the sky in The Scream to the combination of Norway’s vivid sunsets and Munch’s jangled nerves. (Some downplay Munch’s recollection and dismiss the question of literal sunsets altogether.) Now it seems that the detective work of two physicists and a professor of English may change that conventional wisdom.*

  The scene impressed Munch so profoundly that he wrote several descriptions of his evening walk. “I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead-tired,” he recalled in 1892. “And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.”

  That scream was destined to echo around the world. For Munch, it marked a personal, private terror. “For several years, I was almost mad—at that time the terrifying face of insanity reared up its twisted head,” he wrote later. “You know my picture The Scream. I was being stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood—I was at breaking point.”

  Decades later, The Scream would achieve universal fame. No longer seen as an expression of one man’s torment, it was taken instead as a shriek of despair that might have come from almost anyone. Munch had felt panicky and overwhelmed. Half a century later, after the deaths of millions in two world wars and the threatened death, from atomic bombs, of everyone else, those feelings resonated across the globe. Pop trends—the rise of coffee-house existentialism, a taste for European gloom à la Bergman, rumors of the death of God—had made angst and alienation fashionable. In March of 1961, Time magazine hailed the new mood with a cover story entitled “Guilt and Anxiety.” The cover illustration? The Scream.

  The Scream was everywhere, reproduced endlessly in posters and also in such austere settings as psychology textbooks. This first round of fame was more or less straightforward, a kind of homage. But paintings and sculptures can become celebrities of a sort, famous for being famous, and when they do, we subject them to the same indignities that we inflict on other stars who have had the presumption to fly too high. We daub a mustache on the Mona Lisa, dress Michelangelo’s David in boxer shorts, transform the heartland figures of Grant Woods’s American Gothic into pitchmen for breakfast cereal.

  For Edvard Munch, who was not a wry fellow, the fate of The Scream would have been a joke cruel beyond imagining. He had begun painting in the hope that his audiences would “understand the holiness” of his images. In time, the most famous of those images would adorn key rings and Halloween masks and, in Macaulay Culkin’s version, serve as the emblem for one of Hollywood’s biggest hits. The central figure of The Scream, one art historian proclaims, is now “the counterpart to the familiar smiley face.”

  The Scream was intended as one in a sequence of some two dozen paintings called The Frieze of Life. (The count is not exact because Munch worked on the project for more than three decades, and dropped, added, and revised various paintings along the way.) All the paintings dealt in some way with Munch’s favorite topics—sex, death, and alienation—but The Scream stands out from its fellows. In both emotion and technique, it is Munch’s rawest work.

  All the other paintings that make up The Frieze of Life are painted in oil on canvas. The Scream combines tempera, in essence poster paint, with pastel and chalk, and is painted not on canvas but on a sheet of ordinary, untreated cardboard. Munch worked and reworked the themes he took up in The Scream—the harrowing red-and-yellow sky and the other landscape features are nearly identical in his 1892 oil painting Despair, for example—but The Scream has an urgency that is almost painful. The famous central figure was sketched so hastily that we can see the cardboard peeking through the face.

  For Charley Hill, such details were crucial. Recovering The Scream, if he could manage it, would be another tremendous coup, a triumph to savor for a lifetime. On the other hand, faked masterpieces were everywhere, and falling for one would be a career-killing blunder. Hill’s very first undercover case had turned on a fake old master, and he feared fraudsters more than thieves—fraudsters were smart and greedy, he believed, while thieves were merely greedy.

  Hill needed to be familiar with all the standard questions that art historians mull over because he might find himself dealing with nasty characters, or with experts in their pay, who would not react well if they found that the Getty’s man seemed curiously ill-informed about art. This was detective work of a sort, and Hill enjoyed sifting through the expert opinions: is the central figure screaming, as it appears, or hearing a scream, as Munch’s description seems to indicate? Was he (she? it?) indeed modeled on an Incan mummy that Munch saw displayed in a natural history museum in Paris? What is the significance of the vertical red stripe at the painting’s right edge?

  But more important than such hard-to-resolve issues were nuts-and-bolts questions about the condition of the painting that would help Hill determine whether he was dealing with the real thing. In one of the red bands along the sky, for instance, someone had taken a pencil and written, “This must have been painted by a madman.” The handwriting is not Munch’s. Perhaps a visitor at some early exhibition scribbled the comment. No one knows, but the message is a crucial test of authenticity.

  Munch seems to have had second thoughts about the red vertical stripe, to cite another example. Midway along the painting’s right edge, he took a sharp knife to the stripe as if to cut it out, but then changed his mind and covered over the knife slit with a band of dark green paint.

  Many of these identif
ying marks derived from Munch’s working habits, which were as strange as every other aspect of his life. (Terrified by a scream that he heard piercing nature, he was equally terrified by silence. He always kept the radio on while he painted, though he often left it between stations, hissing static.) If a painting wasn’t going well, Munch sometimes took a whip and beat it. He called the punishment “horse treatment” and believed that it improved the painting’s character.

  In other ways, too, Munch treated his paintings as living creatures. He was not jealous of other painters, Munch maintained, but his paintings were jealous of other paintings and could not be exhibited near the work of other artists. He called his paintings his children and could hardly bear to sell them. But he was a capricious parent who was sometimes astonishingly careless with his own work. He built an open-air studio so that he could paint outdoors, summer and winter, and he left his paintings hanging exposed to the elements for years. “He would casually throw [his paintings] on the floor and trample all over them,” one art historian marvels, “or lay them like lids on a boiling pot of soup.”

  Endlessly experimental, Munch painted on canvas and wood and cardboard, using brushes and palette knives and, occasionally, his fingers. He painted furiously, racing to capture the images in his head and working to exhaustion. At the end of one late-night session of working and reworking The Scream, he finally wearied and blew out the candle near his easel. The wax spattered onto the painting, and the white drips can be seen toward the bottom right corner to this day.