As a rare Munch show opens in Britain, we travel to Norway to find the forces that unleashed his macabre art – from flame-haired Medusas to primal screams
Hidden away in the basement of Oslo’s Munch Museum lies a treasure trove. Here you’ll find madonnas and vampires, lions and tigers alongside the hefty white blocks from which they were printed, still blackened with printers’ ink. It feels like being conducted around the inside of Edvard Munch’s brain.
You might also spot, resting on an easel, a stunning early colour version of The Scream, scribbled with a rough urgency in pastel on cardboard, and therefore too fragile to be subjected to daylight. The distressed little figure, blocking its ears in horror against the scream of nature, has been described as the ultimate image for our catastrophic times. By far the best known Munch work outside his homeland, it is one of the few fine-art images to have its own emoji.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2UNcvnf
