Carry on screaming

That sale last month, however, has made the world aware that Munch may have been a lot more than a one-hit ­wonder. This had, perhaps, already begun to sink in. An exhibition called Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, attracted 500,000 ­visitors, and arrives at Tate Modern this month. It is Scream-less; Hamlet, you might say, without the prince. None of the four versions (the National Gallery in Oslo holds one, painted in 1893; a ­second painting from 1910 is at the Munch Museum, which also owns an 1893 pastel version; and the fourth is the 1895 pastel sold at Sotheby’s) will be on display. You can, however, see a lithograph version by Munch at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in ­Edinburgh, until ­September 23.

Do you want to see it? Possibly not. Its sheer familiarity makes it almost ­invisible. As Blake Gopnik notes in the online magazine The Daily Beast, at a Sotheby’s presale party/viewing, almost nobody gave the picture more than a passing glance — “most spent less than 10 seconds”. But there’s more than just familiarity at work here. Gopnik adds: “The Scream may be the original and greatest of artistic one-­liners.” You can “get” it from 20 yards away. You see at once that it’s a ­picture of anguish so powerful that it has recon­figured the outer world into the forms and colours of the suffering inner one. Wittgenstein said that the unhappy man sees a different world from the happy man; Munch showed the full horror of that insight.

Then, having “got” it, we use it. The Scream was the basis of the killer’s mask in Wes Craven’s horror film called, well, Scream. It was used in an advertising campaign for M&M’s, and for the Macaulay Culkin film Home Alone. Homer Simpson screams, and there are Scream mugs, T-shirts and assorted ­gift-shop paraphernalia. There’s a Gary Larson cartoon of a dachshund screaming, and the cartoon editor of The New Yorker reckons he is sent two Scream-based drawings a week. Sue Prideaux started collecting Scream cartoons when she was writing her definitive biography, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. She stopped when she had two boxfuls. This picture is a joke short cut, a one-liner that is also a punch line.

Its instant appeal also drives people to dig deep into the dustbin of marketing babble. According to the Sotheby’s press release, it is not only “iconic”, “defining” and “pivotal”, it is also “provocative” — pretty much the same as everything ­anybody ever sold, then. Simon Shaw, of Sotheby’s New York, added that it is “the defining image of modernity”, which, thank God, it isn’t. Even more inaccurately, the seller, Petter Olsen, said it made a green statement about “man’s relationship with nature”. I don’t think so.

Munch deserves better. More to the point, he deserves translating. As ­Prideaux tells me, he has suffered ­critically from the fact that very few art types — or, indeed, people — speak ­Norwegian. It is, however, Prideaux’s first language. Her book, first published in 2005 and happily now being reprinted, yanks Munch out of his popular role as a nutty Norwegian one-hit wonder and places him squarely in the mainstream of ­modernism and the intellectual history of the 20th century.

The critic Martin Gayford also points out that Munch tends to get overlooked because most of his work is in one place — the Munch Museum, in Oslo — which is rather off the holidaymaker’s or critic’s grand tour. In fact, Gayford adds, he is almost literally undiscovered, in that the museum is still sifting through its vast Munch archive, and much of the work from his later years is still scarcely known.

The life is also hard to understand. He was always mentally on the edge, from his lonely childhood to the miseries and terrors of his adulthood: “I live with the dead — my mother, my sister, my grandfather, my father... Kill yourself and then it’s over. Why live?” he once wrote. He also pondered the roots of his art in his private hell: “My art is rooted in a single reflection — why am I not as others are? Why was there a curse on my cradle? Why did I come into the world without any choice?”

In spite of all of which, he lived until he was 80 and was, throughout, deeply engaged with the ideas of his age. “He was a much more intellectual man than people imagine,” Prideaux says. “They think The Scream was done in two minutes flat and subject to a mood. But he read an enormous amount, and his circle of friends was very important to him.”

Crucially, he was part of the bohemian set in Oslo (then called Kristiania); he mixed with the impressionists in Paris and with the curious Black Piglet group in Berlin. (The name came from its pub.) The latter insisted that the only proper subject of study was the human soul, a concept under threat after Darwin had identified us as one species among ­others. It was the Black Piglet insight that turned Munch into the artist we now know and celebrate.

Initially, he saw impressionism as the great innovation of the time. “He thought their technique was amazing,” Prideaux says, “and brought it back to Oslo. It earned him the name Bizarro. He introduced them to pointillism, and doctors warned parents against allowing children to look at his paintings, in case they developed measles.”

The Black Piglet programme, however, made him impatient with the impressionists’ subject matter. He wanted to paint the human soul, and he became, in the process, one of the founding fathers of expressionism, the pursuit not of the real, but of the inner truth. “No longer should interiors be painted,” he wrote, “people reading and women knitting: there would be living people, breathing and feeling, suffering and loving.”

He embarked on The Frieze of Life: A Poem About Life, Love and Death, a cycle that includes his greatest works — Ashes, The Sick Child, Vampire and (okay, okay) The Scream. He wanted it to be hung in a round gallery. Prideaux compares it to a symphony, or to Wagner’s Ring cycle, but it is a project that can also be compared to other great modernist epics that aspired to make something of the world and the soul after the death of God — Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and, ­perhaps most exactly because of its ­pessimism, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The further link with the modernist mainstream is the theme of mental ­disorder. The psychiatrist Iain Mc­Gilchrist, in his enormously influential book The Master and His Emissary, argued that much modernist art betrayed symptoms of schizophrenia and psychosis. “Munch had a psychotic breakdown,” he says. “The diagnosis was either psychotic depression or schizophrenia. The Scream is rather different in style from most of his work, and the face exhibits features ­common to painters with a history of ­psychosis — concavity coupled with skewness of the face and swirls of colour.”

Perhaps Munch can even be said to go beyond modernism into postmodernism. He certainly anticipated the idea of reproducible art — there are all those Screams, for example. “People got cross because there was more than one Scream,” Prideaux says. “He said ­Raphael was allowed to do many Madonnas, Monet many water lilies and Cézanne many apples, so why couldn’t he do more than one Scream?”

Munch was one of the heroes of that great reproducer Andy Warhol, who, in the 1980s, made silk-screen versions of The Scream. The point about Warhol was that he only usually painted famous things and people, so this may be taken as just another sign of the picture’s raw celebrity.

Perhaps, in the end, it is that celebrity that still stands between us and Munch. Gayford observes that the version of The Scream sold by Sotheby’s was neither the best version nor one of Munch’s finest pictures — it was just the only one judged to be worth $120m. “It’s hard to avoid the suspicion,” Gayford wrote before the sale, “that whoever gets it will be buying not so much a drawing, but fame itself.”

Buying fame is an ignoble act, but at least in this case it has opened up art and a life worth knowing. Even the comedy now associated with his most famous picture can be seen as a kind of tribute to Munch. “It is all incredibly sophisticated and marvellous black humour,” Prideaux says. “It’s the humour of agony — and all the best jokes really hurt, don’t they?”

Or, as Vladimir Nabokov said, the first creature to know it was to die was also the first to laugh. Munch, in that sense, really was a scream.

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, Tate Modern, SE1, June 28-Oct 14

@BryanAppleyard