Disease, Death and Disaster

...The pictures are grouped under such headings as Winners, Losers, Alarums and Conundrums, but the blowups are strangely alike, as if selected by an individual rather than a committee...

...Despite his early resolution to create "living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love," his most powerful work was obviously done in a trance of self-absorption...

...The work itself suggests nothing of the sort...

...one woman in a leopard spotted coat holds an umbrella over him, another stands in back pointing out of the picture, while a man in the foreground looks where she is pointing...

...There is, however, a beautifully composed shot of Babe Ruth's instantly recognizable rear, with other players and photographers in the background...

...Another expressive shot looks down a city street where a phalanx of youngsters are blocking the sidewalk, while a cop holds up his hand to stop them from advancing toward a human form covered with a blanket lying in the foreground...

...Until his breakdown in 1908, he traveled restlessly around the geographical triangle formed by France, Germany and Norway...

...She also mentions his observing "the sexual evolution of women," albeit in a highly subjective way...

...Its figures have merged into a blackish amoeba shape, rising from the bottom of the picture and set against a golden-brown, grained background...

...John Szarkowski, director of MOMA's photography department, proposes that were it not for "the rapid obsolescence of costume, automobile design [and] political leaders," it could be said that newspapers feature the same pictures every day...

...His father was an army doctor who later devoted his life to the poor and who sustained himself with religion, evidently of a depressingly Protestant kind...

...Never forget this...

...His prebreakdown work, which forms the bulk of this show, is held by most critics to be his best...

...On Art DISEASE, DEATH AND DISASTER BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Two separate exhibits in adjoining galleries at the Museum of Modern Art (through April 29), The Prints of Edvard Munch and From the Picture Press, have much in common: Both focus on the human condition, especially pain, and both are more fascinating for their content than their appearance...

...As a heroic composition this would have won at least a bronze medal in the French salon of the last century...

...Finally, there is an almost Munchian composition of a man standing knee deep in swirling water, his back to the camera, as he watches the torrents flood through his house...

...One or two prints are unforgettable for what are really painterly reasons...

...Others are interesting only because of the caption, i.e., that's Howard Hughes riding along Broadway in a ticker-tape parade, and here's Leo Durocher being Leo Durocher...

...Given the files at the museum's disposal, though, I was surprised at the paucity of works standing on their own merits...

...To borrow Strindberg's immortal epigram, Munch's women appear either "pregnant, painted or sainted...

...Munch got off to an auspicious start early in life...

...it isn't difficult to summon an empathy for his image of "a loud unending shriek piercing nature...

...The majority are flash or natural light assisted by flash, and of a genre made classic by the New York Daily News, from whose files many of them came...

...Beginning in 1893 [he] saw many of his compositions as part of a mural or frieze on love, life and death . . . [and] hoped to issue the prints in a similar series...

...In any case, it is hard to determine whether this show has been compiled for esthetic or moral reasons...

...In lithography, Munch's drawing was bold, particularly his treatment of male subjects, such as Emanuel Goldstein, the Danish poet...

...Riva Castleman...

...Take the group around the sole survivor of the 1960 airplane collision over Sterling Place in Brooklyn: The victim is huddled against what looks like a mound of snow, with a man kneeling be side him but turned toward the camera...

...He gave a Bible to the 17-year-old Edvard inscribed with the admonition: "Blessed are they who hear God's Word and keep it...

...the museum's curator of prints and illustrated books, notes: "Munch once gave as his reason for making prints of the same subjects as his paintings that their sale would allow him the economic freedom to retain the paintings themselves...

...Hypersensitive and filled with anguish, he is described as alternating between bouts of solitude and revelry, determined never to marry because of his family inheritance of tuberculosis...

...His early Impressionism helped precipitate the German branch of the movement and...

...In seeing him as affected by the social and moral ferment among Edwardian bohemians, Castleman implies parallels between his day and the present, citing the taking of drugs "to expand their awareness...

...From a soft-faced young ploughboy, he changed into a handsome, well-dressed blade, then gradually became more craggy-looking until at the end he resembled an embittered Scottish patriarch of the type that founded mercantile empires in the last century...

...the group of firemen led by Michael Maye trying to resuscitate a couple of infants, offering a moving tableau of brawni-ness and extreme tenderness...

...Munch soaked the paper with his feelings...

...After his illness he returned to Norway, where both he and his art settled down, so to speak...

...Probably everyone growing up in northern latitudes has shared the same "touch of melancholy" while watching the incomparably valuable sun set at the end of a summer day...

...Growing up in Oslo, he was five years old when his mother died of tuberculosis, 14 when the same disease claimed an elder sister...

...The Shriek, for instance (related to the painting entitled The Cry), with its little figure set low in the striated landscape, is a magnificent expression of Munch's own emotions...

...His prints, rather than being a sideline, were part of a grand plan...

...Besides its topicality, the only reason for dragging in feminism is that it is indicative of the artist's approach to reality...

...Events are "selected, processed and captioned to respond to such timeless issues as catastrophe and progress, pleasure and pain, victory and defeat, villainy and altruism...

...He died there during World War II...

...Similarly, the etching called The Morning After, depicting a girl lying clothed on a bed with bottles and glasses on a table in the foreground, is positively demure...

...with its crude, muddy colors, must have struck the world like a hairy relative of the French movement, just in from some esthetic penal colony...

...It is augmented with letters written by Munch and his friends and supporters, and with an absorbing selection of photographs recording the dramatic changes in his appearance...

...Lautrec-like figures, is terribly expressive even without its title...

...Even less surprising, he clearly had his share of woman problems and suffered from intermittently bad health, both physical and mental, though this may well have been caused as much by carousal and irregular living as psychic stress...

...The Death Chamber, a group of black...

...He synthesized styles that had grown organically out of civilized bourgeois comfort into an extraordinary, barbaric metaphor for anxiety...

...But if his male portraits, including those of himself, are confident and realistic, his women tend to be idealized creatures, often with compelling eyes...

...Above all, "they have directed journalism toward a subjective and intensely human focus . . . reproducing the texture and flavor of experience without explaining its meaning...

...If I understand Szarkowski correctly, he is saying that technical progress has enabled photography to probe deeper, but hasn't done much for its integrity or for that of picture editors and caption writers...

...He regards newspictures taken since the mid-'20s as being unlike those preceding them, for "they are (or seem) unimpeachably frank," having "redefined prior standards of privacy and the privilege of anonymity...

...Think of everlasting eternity...

...Some of the photographs are visually pointless, like the one of a substantially stacked Frankfurter Queen sitting among hotdogs and eating a giant one...

...The impact of Munch's work varies according to the intensity of his feelings...

...Where later Expressionists might have established fusion or tension by means of color, contour and an electrifying arrangement of space...

...If one believes in a connection between misery and creativity...

...The work of Munch is strange indeed, combining as it does the lassitude of Art Nouveau and Symbolism with the almost hysterical vigor of Expressionism...

...Sometimes it looks like another exercise in nostalgia (one wonders why most of the prints are 10-20 years old...

...Another example is the woodcut of The Kiss, an emotional rather than structural abstraction from an earlier realistic etching of two people embracing...

...Thus The Death of Marat, a chalk drawing of a female nude standing beside a corpse, has little or no thrust, and his rendering of the demonstration at the funeral of his patron Ruthenau (also a lithograph) might as well be a sketch of a market place...

...Though small, the show includes the recent gift of the Jaffe Collection and is an accurate "biography" of the artist who is considered the father of Expressionism...

...Small wonder Edvard switched from studying engineering to art and plunged immediately into the flesh-pots of Oslo...

...On the other hand...

...Still, he lived to be 81, producing a vast number of paintings, drawings and prints, 20,000 of which he willed to the City of Oslo...

...Nevertheless, several are worthy of note: the wrestler hanging mid-air like a blimp over his recumbent opponent, spotlighted in a darkened stadium...

...Very few outstanding sports pictures are rep-presented, which is odd considering how much good work has been done in that field...