Edvard Munch: Love and Angst review – 'Ripples of trauma hit you like a bomb'

British Museum, London
From his sunsets and deathbeds to the world-warping Scream, the Norwegian created apocalyptic masterpieces that are brutal, refined – and addictive

The man who created The Scream introduces himself with morbid panache at the start of the British Museum’s inkily beautiful journey into his imagination. He looks normal enough, calm and sombre, except that he’s got a skeleton arm. “Edvard Munch 1895”, reads the inscription above him. He presents himself in this bony self-portrait as a specimen of fin-de-siècle decay, a morbid example of the modern condition. Munch was 32 when he created this. In his head he clearly thought he was finished. In fact he would live until 1944, but this exhibition concentrates on his apocalyptic masterpieces of symbolist gloom from the 1890s and 1900s.

Munch had good reason to feel cursed. Growing up in 19th-century Norway he was surrounded by illness and death. The most upsetting images here are not symbolist at all but distressingly matter-of-fact. Munch’s painting The Sick Child is shown beside its equally harrowing print version. They both mourn his sister Johanne Sophie, who died when he was a teenager. Nearby is another cry of anguish, Dead Mother and Child. The child’s face is a doll-like mask of terror. Munch’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was five years old.

Edvard Munch: Love and Angst is at the British Museum, London, from 11 April to 21 July.

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