Edvard Munch, Courtauld Gallery review — paintings both luminous and tortured

Edvard Munch was born and died in the depths of the Norwegian winter and claimed that “disease, insanity and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle”. After the childhood loss of his mother and sister, these angels never left his mind. We meet them everywhere in his painting.

Among several figures leaning out of their pictures to welcome you at the Courtauld’s superb new London exhibition, Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen, is a smiling round-faced child in a jaunty hat and sumptuous fur, standing blithely on a rusty red lane in “Four Stages of Life” (1902). Behind her, prophesying her future, loom the “angels”: a frightened middle-aged woman, a gaunt, sickly older one, and a spectral death-figure. Their fur coats, increasingly threadbare according to age, are metaphors for decaying flesh, faltering souls.

But the angels did not always win. “Four Stages” hangs next to another quartet of figures on a curving path, “Children Playing in the Street in Åsgårdstrand” (1901-03), loosely painted in thin veils of lilac, mint greens, pale blues — hues of a summer evening by the Oslo Fjord. Munch bought a home in Åsgårdstrand; he called it the Happy House.

For every sombre winter painting in this gorgeous, unexpected show, there is also a midsummer picture, suffused with the blinding light of long days by the sea, or a quivering twilit vista, or a nocturne of illuminated fjords where the sky is still wispy-blue as the moon rises. The variety is thanks to Bergen mill-owner Rasmus Meyer, who assembled an outstanding Munch collection under the artist’s guidance. A century ago, Bergen, and subsequently the city’s KODE art museum, received it as a gift. It leaves Scandinavia for the first time now.

Two monumental, luminous paintings of Munch’s sister at Åsgårdstrand fill the Courtauld’s first gallery with a brilliant soft light bouncing off her white dresses. In “Inger in Sunshine” (1888), quizzical, squinting under a wide-brimmed hat, she is seen slightly from below — an imposing, beloved presence against a turquoise sea. In “Summer Night. Inger on the Beach” (1889), her figure, perched on rocks, sun-warmed or dank, at the edge of cool water, becomes part of a pattern of interlocking natural forms, the pastel tones muting every element, according with her contemplative mood.

These dreamy scenes transport you wonderfully to a Nordic summer, yet the undertow of dread is there. Shimmering discs rain down, a sequence of reflections, in “Moonlight on the Beach” (1892); stones on the shore gleam eerie pink, a forest, lashes of impenetrable foliage, recedes into darkness — yet may encroach at any moment. On bleached-out sand a life-size adolescent nude stands in “Youth” (1908): tanned, robust, but awkward, solitary. The shifting watery depths behind him are all jagged azures and greens, uneven, unsettling.

The Courtauld’s poster image shows a purple expanse of sea, anchored by a golden jetty, flowing towards huge boulders whose heavy shapes are imitated by a hunched, downcast figure. This is “Melancholy” (1894-96), a perfect example of Munch’s instinct for linking the pictorial and psychological. He simplifies forms, plays off straight and curved lines, flat planes and perspectival effects, and manipulates strange, non-naturalistic colour, all to render landscapes of emotion and anxiety.

Like most Scandinavian artists — from Ibsen to Olafur Eliasson — Munch is a painter of the pastoral, intensely responsive to extremes of the seasons, evoked with rapture yet foreboding. It is fascinating to see him in the Courtauld context of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, who shaped him formally, without altering his sensibility.

Aged 25, Munch visited Paris in 1889, when Seurat and Gauguin were the new talent. Munch’s pointillist “Spring Day on Karl Johan” (1890), depicting the main avenue in Kristiania (now Oslo) on a bright morning, the crowds as tiny flecks, almost resembles a French painting. But in the view of the same boulevard in 1892, “Evening on Karl Johan”, he breaks free to forge his own images of urban alienation: under the radiance of gas and electric lighting, at the forefront of the picture, pale mask faces with button eyes stare straight at the viewer.

It was a breakthrough and became Munch’s recurring motif, iconic in “The Scream” in 1893. By then he was living in Berlin, beginning the Frieze of Life series, subtitled “A Poem About Life, Love and Death”, immensely influential on German expressionism and later 20th-century painting. The elongated mysterious forms of a young girl in a streaming white gown, a furnace-haired nude femme fatale and a withdrawn, harrowed figure in black in “Woman in Three Stages” (1894) herald Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s spiky metropolitan harpies. But Munch’s women hover on a winding shore where forest and ocean meet — a liminal space, the brooding Norwegian landscape of memory and conflicted feeling.

These original, tormented paintings attracted some adventurous German patrons, but fewer in conservative Norway, so it was a surprise that Munch’s boldest collector appeared in Bergen. Meyer was a rare spirit. In 1906, he was still “afraid of Munch”, but the same year he dared an initial purchase, “Kristiania Bohemians”. In an ominous start, the painting was destroyed in a ship fire en route to Bergen.

Undeterred, in 1907 he bought “Morning” (1884), a limpid Impressionist interior, considered to be Munch’s debut. Meyer advanced quickly, in 1908 acquiring the claustrophobic “Man and Woman” (1898): a powerful nude, sitting up in bed, leans back on her palms, while her dejected partner droops, head in hands. It reflected Munch’s defeated relationships with women and may have resonated with Meyer, a single father whose wife had left him.

By 1909, Meyer’s collection was outshining that at Oslo’s National Museum. His signal works included “At the Deathbed” (1895), Munch’s recollection of his sister dying from tuberculosis, where each family member’s grief is expressed by white or burning faces, and hands clenched, or gripping the bed, or in prayer.

From here, looking across to “Self-portrait in the Clinic” (1909), which Meyer bought straight off the easel, it is as if a curtain lifts. Munch, recovering from a serious breakdown in 1908, “rebuild[s] himself, stroke by stroke”, curator Barnaby Wright suggests. He portrays a richly detailed face offset by confident colours — violet, cobalt, vermilion, orange — squeezed straight from the tube for his smart suit and bedroom: vibrant, the world reborn.

After this watershed, Munch’s innovative period was over. “Let the molecules settle down after all my inner turmoil,” he said. Meyer, less fortunate, died by suicide in 1916, but he had achieved his goal, he told the artist, that “anyone who visits me wanting to study your art will be able to trace it through all its stages”. So we can, in this marvellous, fresh, moving exhibition.

To September 4, courtauld.ac.uk