EDVARD MUNCH CAN’T DRAW.

EDVARD MUNCH CAN’T DRAW. The poet Craig Raine had an article in the TLS (July 13) reviewing an exhibit of Edvard Munch’s paintings at the Tate Modern. Munch is a favorite of mine. I have gone to exhibitions of his work, and I consider the movie biography of him as one of the most powerful movies I have seen. Yet I enjoyed Raine’s attacks on Munch. He refers to Munch’s “confident ineptitude” and concludes with a description of a Munch self portrait from 1937 which has “the disappointed mouth of a failure. Which seems about right.”
I laughed at this riff: “‘Sailors in Snow’ (1910-12) demonstrates his inability to paint snow; ‘Street Workers in the Snow’ (1920) shows he still can’t paint snow; ‘Black and Yellow Men in Snow’ (1910-1912) shows he couldn’t paint snow—or black and yellow men either.”