Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream - Hardcover

Sue Prideaux is an art historian and the author of four novels.

*Starred Review* Edvard Munch (1863-1944) has always generated controversy. Long after his best-known work, The Scream, attained iconic status as a Mona Lisa of modern angst, it was brazenly stolen from Norway's National Museum as though Munch exerted what art historian Prideaux described as his "psychotic inability to part with his paintings" from the grave. Not to mention taking a final swipe at a society that vilified him. As one reads Prideaux's meticulously detailed yet always companionable and often startling account of Munch's dramatically difficult life and extraordinarily intense psyche, one marvels that he lived so long and achieved so much. Buffeted by his father's hellfire religious beliefs, his mother's and sister's early deaths, and his own grave illnesses, Munch turned to drawing and writing as modes of survival, and so extensive are his compelling journals, Prideaux makes Munch's voice a key aspect of her narrative. Prone to visions and indifferent to convention, Munch drank to excess, went hungry, became enmeshed in harrowing romantic entanglements, and suffered vicious condemnation of his shocking work. As Prideaux vividly chronicles Munch's tumultuous life in turbulent times in Norway, Paris, and Berlin, the reader's appreciation of this bold spirit who risked all to descend into the realm of archetypes and create art depicting "the secret life of the soul" grows exponentially. Donna Seaman
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