Edvard Munch was as dark as his famous Scream is what this article seems to be saying.

Beyond the ridiculous overuse of The Scream (I dated a girl who, in addition to suffering from a chronic tendency towards infidelity, also owned and displayed a three foot inflatable copy of the titular screamer, which should have been some sort of signal, but to be frank, I was in college and she was a delightfully proportioned c-cup), I do have a certain affection for him.

Firstly, I am unduly proud of some praise I received from the professor of my one art history course in college. The midterm consisted simply of a series of slides of art works we hadn’t studied and we were to write a paragraph explaining who we thought was the responsible artists and why. I was writing my answer for one of the slides and had written a goodly length bit, when, with time running out, I suddenly wrote something like, ‘Scratch that – I have a gut feeling this a Munch.’ I was correct and the professor read my answer aloud in a later class as an example of the need to rely on instinct and ‘gut’ as well as research when studying art. For some reason, I’m still inordinately proud of that, some twenty years later.

Finally, when I lived in Atlanta, I was just a few blocks away from the High Museum of Art and was also a member. They had a beautiful exhibit of the later works of Munch, titled ‘Munch: After The Scream.’ Munch would sometimes leave his painting outside deliberately, so that the damage and changes wrought on it from the elements, particularly the snow, would become part of the work. That struck me – it reminded me of the opening of Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar when the narrator praises a baby for its destruction of pages from the narrator’s book as being an honest form of editing.