The Royal Academy’s principal autumn exhibition, “Munch by Himself”, consists of a mass of self-portraits by the most famous and most overrated of Norwegian painters, set afloat in a bath of lukewarm rhetoric. “With his abiding interest in self-analysis, Munch ranks among the great self-portrait painters – the doubters, interrogators and prophets, from Rembrandt through Goya to Van Gogh and Gauguin.” So proclaims exhibition curator Iris Muller-Westermann, in the introduction to a catalogue as unconvincing as the pictures which it seeks to aggrandise. Many visitors to the show, having paid their entrance money and equipped themselves with the leaking acoustiguides that spout a version of the same twaddle, will be tempted to will themselves into believing that they are indeed in the presence of Great Art. But they will find it difficult to do so, unless they walk round with their eyes shut.

The exhibition begins, as Munch’s career did, in promising fashion. The artist’s early self-portraits, painted in a hybrid of styles derived principally from European Symbolism and French Post-Impressionism, are alive with nervous energy. They are also shot through with the morbid spirit of misogyny that characterised so much late nineteenth-century Northern European thought, from the philosophy of Nietszsche to the plays of Strindberg.  In Self-Portrait Beneath a Female Mask, an oil painting of 1893, Edvard Munch, just turned thirty, frames his own sallow and sombre countenance underneath a rouged mask of female malevolence. In Salome-Paraphrase, a work on paper begun the following year, he arranges his own decapitated head on a field of blood-red watercolour. He has drawn this self-portrait in Indian ink, somewhat incongruously, in a style that owes much to the vibrant graphic shorthand devised by Toulouse-Lautrec for posters advertising the allure of French fin-de-siecle music-hall stars. Above Munch, once more, looms the sinister head...

To read the full article please either login or register .