Charlotte Grimshaw: Edvard Munch and his muses

Afterwards, the square was lashed with rain, and we sat on barrels in the foyer as lightning split the sky over the spires. Each time the thunder boomed the exuberant locals cheered. Men in football shirts, elderly couples in absurd rain hats, a villainous doorman with a flak jacket, an earpiece and a scorpion neck tattoo. I sat on a barrel and thought of history, the war, the Wall. This was the country of my muse.

A week later in Oslo, I moved through the National Museum, looking at the paintings of Edvard Munch. The vast collection includes Munch’s famous work, The Scream, and a detailed commentary on the artist’s life, work and preoccupations.

In the 1890s, Munch’s art was labelled “Psychic Naturalism”. He dedicated himself to painting the inner life of humanity. An artist after my own heart, he had a terrible time and wanted to express it in his work. He had numerous crises, a drinking problem, breakdowns, was traumatised by the illness and deaths he witnessed.

Critics were harsh, calling him mad. Rejecting the polite, twee and inauthentic, Munch was defiant: “I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.” He worked to create an artistic language of mental distress; he painted dreams, emotions and desires.

He painted his family, the same faces and figures reappearing. He made portraits of his doctor father’s patients. He had nervous collapses, received enlightened medical treatment – and painted his doctors and nurses. If you brushed up against Munch, you were likely to get painted. This, it seems to me, is the way an artist should work. He had muses too, working to represent them, rendering them repeatedly, trying to nail the quality. What made them significant, impossible for him to leave behind.

I hadn’t realised that The Scream is beautiful. Many of Munch’s paintings are gorgeous, vividly colourful, striking. Walking through Oslo you keep seeing scenes that are Munch motifs: the light in a city square; the long view of crooked black tree branches framing a pavement; two figures, a man and a woman, standing on a wharf looking out to sea.

Munch travelled, spent time in Monte Carlo, drinking too much, gambling in the famous casino. In 1900, he was living in Berlin. In 1908, having collapsed, he checked into a sanatorium for a course of psychiatric treatment and pine-needle baths.

I knew now what I had lacked after arguing with my own muse. The hushed peace of a sanatorium, handsome Scandinavian doctors, and a soothing regime of pine-needle baths. Instead, I looked over and archived 10 years of emails, texts and photos, and kept travelling. I was working on finishing my latest novel.

But the novel featured the muse, of course. My “psychic naturalism” now had to contemplate the final frame, the last portrait. I had to go on grappling with the mercurial muse without pine needles, handsome doctors or strong drink. I was all cold turkey and gritted teeth.