Edvard Munch’s misfortune was to produce his masterpiece when he was 30 and then spend the next 50 years trying to match the achievement. And failing. The result is an iceberg-shaped career with a shiny bit poking out of the water and a massive slab of sunken effort lurking under the surface.
The masterpiece was, of course, The Scream, that nervy vision of a skull howling on a bridge that everyone knows. Painted in 1893, this precocious piece of Nordic noir is one of the most famous images in art, a one-picture pictorial revolution that seemed simultaneously to sum up the 19th century’s fin de siècle while prefiguring the terrors of the century ahead.
Over the ensuing decades Munch did his best to match its dramatic invention, with patchy success. But art history loves a lurch and recent years have seen valiant efforts to re-evaluate the disregarded slab and promote it from pig’s ear to silk purse. The parade of glum faces that has arrived at the National Portrait Gallery is the latest attempt at rehabilitation.
Munch (1863-1944) was an inveterate portraitist. Too inveterate. In the 50 years that constitute his drop-off he churned out hundreds of portraits. To its credit, the present display does its best to concentrate on his earlier years when he wasn’t yet a mass producer.
The helpful thing about portraiture is that it allows you to focus on the people being portrayed rather than the art portraying them. Much of the fun here comes from reading the captions and finding out who was sleeping with whom, why A hated B, why C went mad. As a cast, the Nordic grumpies painted by Munch — there isn’t a smile in the house — are entertaining specimens.
The display is divided into circles of friends and family. The opening group features Dad, Mum, sisters, brothers and Munch himself. His first style was gritty realism and the early close-ups reveal plenty of talent for capturing misery. A self-portrait, painted when he was 20, does that thing of staring into us so deeply it makes us feel uncomfortable. In real life, you can avoid staring eyes. In art, you can’t.
The show ahead keeps proving that his best portrait style was the single head examined from close up. In a lithograph done in his early thirties he reduces himself to a spooky face hovering in the dark, a portrayal that belongs, you feel, on a tombstone. Deeper into the show a set of scratchy drypoints featuring Mrs Marie Linde and her family finds him displaying unexpected warmth. I was wrong about no one here smiling. Looking closely into the faces of the four Linde boys you can definitely discern the turning up of the corner of one of their mouths.
Enlarging single heads into bigger compositions is where it gets tricky for Munch. Back in the family section he paints his sister Laura sitting outside a house, staring at the sea. Laura, we read in one of the helpful captions, suffered from mental problems and was hospitalised. Munch originally included a second figure on the lawn. But to emphasise his sister’s isolation he painted it out. The result is an uncomfortably wide lawn that feels as if it is missing something.
The most entertaining section is devoted to the arty bohemians of Kristiania (present-day Oslo), a doomy bunch of nicotine-smelling alpha males with whom Munch drank, debated, swapped lovers and argued. Employing his early realist style he gives us the ludicrously pretentious Hans Jaeger, chief bohemian and defender of free love for all blokes everywhere. Slumped on a sofa with a glass of schnapps, Jaeger is lost in deep Nordic thought about the meaning of existence. Or perhaps he’s just wondering what to buy for tea? With Munch, the moods are always interchangeable.
Karl Jensen-Hjell, “supercilious, shabby-elegant, self-assertive, sexually magnetic, notoriously loose-living”, stands full length before us and stares down at us through a flashing monocle while a smouldering cigar stinks up his fingers. Judging by this depiction of him I’d say Jensen-Hjell is miscast as a leading Norwegian painter. He should have played Toulouse-Lautrec in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!.
The daft bohemians mark the high spot of Munch’s portraiture. When he starts being commissioned by Norway’s rich and influential to record Norway’s rich and influential the exhibition starts to flounder. We have reached the sunken section of the Munch iceberg and even though the curators have been admirably and evidently ruthless in their culling, some truly awful art has managed to limbo its way under the low bar.
The writer Christian Gierloff is the subject of a staggeringly bad full length in which the paintwork swirls around muckily like the tyre tracks of a rally car skidding in the mud. Munch’s difficulty in expanding his compositions beyond the single head gives us an ugly shoving together of himself with his friend the lawyer Torvald Stang, in which neither of them knows where to sit.
Very clearly in his late work he is intoxicated by Van Gogh. You see it in the choice of colours, the flaying brushstrokes, the direct poses. But where Van Gogh never puts a brushstroke wrong, Munch hardly ever gets one right. As he tries to get quicker and quicker, freer and freer, the paint gets thinner and thinner, till we arrive at a messy expressionism that feels careless and stylistically lost.
Even with the abstemiousness shown by the curators in keeping the examples to a minimum, there’s no hiding the fact that the rightful place for late Munch is beneath the waves.
Edvard Munch Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, to Jun 15