It’s enough to make you scream, the way some curators can’t see the forest for the trees, or the message for the medium. The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch is no exception. In the life and work of the great but gloomy Norwegian artist, there is some of the juiciest material in the annals of Western art. But that doesn’t seem to have had the least effect on these writers, who treat this extraordinary master of the neurotic as if he were some kind of mere technician whose meaning lies solely in his methods rather than in his madness. Do they really think their audience would rather read how Munch painted his most famous work than why?

Instead of dealing with the subjects of Munch’s art, they focus on his technique, an interesting subject, but not crucial. Even Schjeldahl (a critic, not a curator) doesn’t manage to bring his essay to life. Given that his topic is pop culture’s appropriation of The Scream – fertile ground if ever there was any – his failure is particularly hard to fathom.

Nevertheless, for Munch fans this catalogue of an exhibition mounted by the Art Gallery of Ontario will be required reading. The discussion of Munch’s sometimes obsessive working and reworking of certain pieces is revealing. Having created an image, Munch would spend years exploring the relationship between colour and expression. But Munch was not an artist who believed in art for art’s sake; his ongoing preoccupation with printmaking grew out of a desire to make his work available to as wide a market as possible. His friends tended to be poets and playwrights rather than painters, whom he seems to have avoided. Art was a means for Munch, not an end.

Of course, he was very much a man of his times, fully steeped in the insecurities and anxieties of the late 19th century. On the other hand, he, like Freud, saw that the issues of the 20th century would be fought on the battleground of the Self. Conflict, he realized, was no longer what happened to people, it happened within people.

Generously illustrated, the catalogue contains different examples of the same image. Given the artist’s habit of reworking certain pictures, this is an excellent way to show the particular nature of his genius. This book does make it clear that Munch’s scream can still be heard today.