You could mount an exhibition entitled ‘The Moment of Edvard Munch’. It would focus on the Norwegian who first hit Paris in 1885, aged 21, and who, energised by his immersion in contemporary French painting, became a linchpin of the Berlin avant-garde of the 1890s. A gatecrasher to the metropolitan party, playing havoc with its pictorial etiquettes – that might be the drift. (‘The wild man of the north’, the Germans liked to call him.) In among modern art’s late arrivers (like Gauguin, not committed to painting until he was nearly forty) and passersby hauled inside (like Henri Rousseau), Munch would be one more newcomer embraced for his outlandish, provocative mangling of the existing guidelines for belle peinture.

LRB 30 August 2012 | PDF Download