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* Sue Prideaux. Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. New Haven: Yale up, 2005. Pp. 391. $25.00.
While a great deal of scholarship has focused on the paintings and prints of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), relatively few books have made their principle focus Munch's equally absorbing Ufe. Sue Prideaux's biography is a very welcome addition to the small group of works that document Munch's year-to-year existence in revealing detail. Prideaux has made excellent use of Munch's own diaries, letters, and journals archived at the Munch Museum in Oslo. Many of these anecdotes appeared earlier in Ketil Bjornstad's impressionistic 1993 biographical novel Historien om Edvard Munch (translated into English as The Story of Edvard Munch), but the Prideaux book does a more thorough job of footnoting its sources. The author herself is a British-born art historian and novelist who was baptized in Norway and whose godmother was painted by Munch.
As much as in the case of his contemporary August Strindberg, Munch's life and art are inextricably bound. Key scholars of Munch's art have invariably also explored the biographical ?^ef????t^ of his artistic process. But nearly always, these scholars have been art critics and historians first, biographers second. Prideaux has reversed those terms by foregrounding the riveting, often sensational life of Munch in its own right. This biography reads very much like a thriller about a driven, volatile genius who ended up pioneering expressionism. The general outlines of his life are familiar from most studies...