Art & the Weather
I smiled when, on the escalator into the Arrivals lounge at Oslo’s airport, I saw this display. It was nice to be told that a pleasant evening was waiting outside; also to see that the supposedly congenitally dour existentialism of Norwegians is able to wink at itself. Munch’s Scream is one of the world’s best-known paintings, an emblem of fright. Yet how lovely the setting is. It was the beauty of an evening rich in contrasts that pierced Munch in Nice in 1892, causing him to record the experience both with colours and with words: ‘I walked along the road with two friends, then the sky all at once turned into blood, and I sensed a great scream sounding through nature.’ There is palpable terror; perhaps also hopeful anticipation. What Munch sensed could have been birth as well as death. In any case, his record enables us, 131 years down the line, to recognise within one man’s moment of crisis the loveliness of a Mediterranean sunset. And thereby to gain a perspective on our own inward moments of extreme agitation.
