We Carry Worlds Inside Us [Royal Academy of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art]

During my last days in London, I attempted a sort of last-dash series of visits to some of the standard 'cultural institutions' I was sure I'd miss once I changed my status from metropolis- to just city-dweller. On one of my visits I viewed the Royal Academy of Art's newly opened exhibition on the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, Munch By Himself. It's a solid afternoon's undertaking, filling all of the main gallery as well as the Sackler Wing upstairs, and a thorough, if fairly conventional, introduction to this man's work. The rooms ached with an innovative approach to color and line, which made the autobiographical bent of the commentary seem naive and limiting. When I exited the gallery and found myself back out in the almost overwhelming self-absorption of Piccadilly, I wandered the side streets of the area for awhile. I needed the quiet, smug dignity of the small art dealers and specialty shops, to help shake the feeling that at any moment a black taxicab might smear its color along the street as it sped by, like the flowing, engulfing hair of Munch's femme fatales.

Munch is often appreciated for his ability as a printmaker and lithographer as much as, if not more than, his skill as a painter, and in fact the images which crept into my mind again the next day, and the day after, were not the fiery women of 'Vampire' or 'The Death of Marat', but the eerie ecstacy of 'Madonna' or the bluntness of 'Self-Portrait with a Skeleton Arm', a chilling example of memento mori. These solemn images, recurring at idle moments in my memory, were happily counterbalanced by a flurry of busy, cheerful goodbyes with my friends.

I suppose it's true -- if you've lived in a Big City, and enjoyed it, smaller cities can seem a bit quaint. Driving home from Philadelphia International Airport, I felt myself slide into the person I am here, who is not so different from the person I might be elsewhere, only with a wider range of memories and local knowledge than I can claim in any other place. The familiar skyline felt like a security blanket -- a feeling I experienced again the next day when I came upon a pile of soft pretzels in my neighborhood's mom-and-pop grocery store. Instead of the stark skeleton arm, the comfortably browned pretzel. Preferably with French's mustard.

Until Friday evening, when my mother and I attended a late-night lecture at this city's premiere 'cultural institution', the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The subject? Edvard Munch, of course -- or more specifically, his painting 'The Mermaid', originally a private commission for the house of a wealthy Norwegian, which the museum has recently acquired. The accompanying one-room exhibition of several paintings and prints by Munch, chosen to highlight the development of the 'mysterious feminine' in his work, felt more careful, more attentive to the artist's oeuvre, and less to the details of his life. Among the other works hung the images which had been haunting me -- Munch's disembodied head floating over the skeleton arm, and the 'Madonna' -- ironically titled, as the woman of the painting is framed by wriggling spermatazoa and watched from a corner by a terrified fetus. The ecstacy of her pose is made ridiculous, her mythic sensuality is undermined, by Munch's calculated framing.

When I left the museum I sought out my own familiar frame, my cozy city. Instead I saw the lights of so many buildings whose names I don't know, and tried to remember what it was I thought 'mere' city-dwellers were missing.