The Black Angels

"Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle," wrote Norway's greatest painter, Edvard Munch, recalling his tormented, sickly childhood. His mother died when he was four, and his physician father became a kind of fanatic, "with periods of religious anxiety which could reach the borders of insanity as he paced back and forth in his room praying to God. When he punished us, he could be almost insane in his violence." The black angels hovered over Munch (pronounced Moonk) to his death in 1944 --and they helped inspire some of the world's most chilling prints and paintings. Last week 133 of them could be seen in a generous Munch retrospective on display in Frankfurt, West Germany, as the opening show of the newly rebuilt quarters of the city-supported Art Club, which was bombed out during World War II.

Shadows in a Cell. When Munch began painting, the great new movement was impressionism. Though Munch admired and benefited from this exploration into the mysteries of light, he himself was concerned with "shadows and movements, such shadows as a prisoner sees in his cell, those curious grey streaks of shadows which flee and then return, which slide apart and come together again like fans, bending, curving, dividing." In almost all his canvases there is such tension and vibration that even a bright landscape like Midsummer Night (see color) seems about ready to disintegrate into tragedy. For Munch, nature was filled with menace, and the human body was inhabited by demons.

The vibrant rhythms of his brush linked him to the swirling style of art nouveau, but what in that art was precious and affected became in Munch a swirl of passion, often equal to that of Van Gogh. One of his first major paintings, inspired by the death of a sister, was called The Sick Child, and all his life sickness and death, suffering and fear were to be his themes. His people could cry out and the sky would seem torn apart. They might wander blankly down a street, eyes sick with anxiety, together but each alone. Few artists have ever recorded as well the cold terror and unrelenting melancholy of a person gripped in the clutches of a paralyzing neurosis. A Munch painting, The Cry, painted in 1893, became an appropriate TIME cover for a story on guilt and anxiety (March 31, 1961).

Lust & Hate. Munch knew the feeling well: he spent time in a mental hospital, drank heavily for many years, was involved in a number of scandalous public brawls. He was devastated by one love affair, but when he tried to break it off, the woman countered by having herself laid out as if she were dying, so he would have to come to her for a last visit. Another time she threatened to shoot herself, and one of his fingers was shot off when he grappled for the gun. Munch's attitude toward women, like the playwright Strindberg's, was a curious mixture of lust and hate.

In both his paintings and prints, his women are often shown as heartless temptresses, vampires, even assassins, the undoers of men. Munch did a number of works called Jealousy, in which the man is always the one betrayed. What is so nightmarish about these pictures is not the harlotry of the woman, but the helpless humiliation of the male.

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