In celebration of the return of “The Scream” to museums, Mike Marqusee recounts the painting’s remarkable life, and that of its creator, Edvard Munch.
July 3, 2008
FOUR YEARS after it was stolen by masked gunmen in broad daylight, and two years after it was recovered in still undisclosed circumstances, “The Scream” has gone back on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo. …
Part of Munch’s genius lies in his evocation of isolation; but though mentally embattled from an early age, he was not an entirely isolated genius. As a young man he was drawn into Oslo’s bohemian counter-culture, where he was exposed to anarchist and revolutionary ideas.
He enjoyed friendships with a wide range of contemporary Scandinavian and European artists and writers, who saw Munch’s work as part of a broader avant-garde challenge to a complacent establishment. An establishment that reacted accordingly, condemning the subject, tone and technique of Munch’s groundbreaking paintings of the 1890s. He was not accepted as the master he obviously was until he was past 40.
In 1937, the Nazis condemned Munch’s work as “degenerate” and sold off the scores of Munch paintings held in German museums. When they occupied Norway in 1940, Munch refused to have anything to do with them. He confessed to a friend that the “phantoms” that had haunted him for years had been put in the shade by the giant “phantom” at loose in the real world.
Last weekend I took my oldest son and his friends to see the new Narnia film; “Prince Caspian”. They were entranced: this is a near-perfect movie for eight year old boys. And the story remains faithful to the spirit of the book, and even improves upon it.
As a child I loved the Narnia books. Though their deficiencies are obvious: there is a general distrust of women, a certain middle class priggishness and occasional racism. But the values of C. S. Lewis were typical for a man of his class and background at the time he wrote them; and the same attitudes were equally found in other children’s books of the period, like Frank Richards’ Bunter books or the Biggles books by W. E. Johns.
The difference is that the Narnia stories are so good that the books are still read, while childrens’ books by C.S Lewis’s contemporaries are not. This is of course something that Lewis shares with another great writer with outdated social attitudes, Rudyard Kipling.
Gore Vidal once wrote that L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz, was one of the most important influences upon him, because if children learn to dream of alternative and different worlds, then they learn to dream that our own world could be changed for the better. Narnia is a beautiful imaginary for children, where animals talk and magic is real.
The religious content of Narnia is very clear, reflecting Lewis’s devout Protestantism, but only in the weakest of the books, The Last Battle, does the religion become so pompous as to drown the story. Generally, the didactic content of the Narnia books is a discussion of ethics, questions of right and wrong, free will, temptation and redemption that are useful ideas for children, and go beyond Christianity. …
The Second World War that contextualised Narnia also saw the shift of popular national understanding of what England and Britain represents. The old Britain of Empire loyalism and Anglicanism was reimagined as a new Britain that defined itself by the war against fascism, and the promotion of egalitarianism, of Beveridge and comprehensive schools. Narnia was dead.
Poem of the week: For Aneurin Bevan by Danielle Hope.
Bevan! You should be living at this hour
the NHS has need of you. She is a shell
sapped of spirit, a disoriented hull
a revengeful return of the Mayflower.
Her decks brim with pristine shops and babble,
burble like a jaunty airport mall.
Her cargo strains with episodes, manpower
and medicines, each counted to cut costs.
Below she battles ageing, accidents and old super-bugs
that breed below adverts for tomorrow’s drugs.
Passengers please travel on for health care
you’ll find private dentists, stocks, shares
and lawyers on each turning of the stair.
About the poet
Danielle Hope was born in Lancashire but now lives in London. She has had three collections of poetry, Fairground of Madness, City Fox and The Stone Ship, published by Rockingham Press.
John Rety of Hearing Eye Press and Torriano Meeting House is a former editor of anarchist paper Freedom.
Mr Malik said that many British Muslims now felt like ‘aliens in their own country’
Britain’s first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like “the Jews of Europe”.
Shahid Malik, who was appointed as a minister in the Department for International Development (Dfid) by Gordon Brown last summer, said it has become legitimate to target Muslims in the media and society at large in a way that would be unacceptable for any other minority.
Mr Malik made clear that he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust but warned that many British Muslims now felt like “aliens in their own country”. He said he himself had been the target of a string of racist incidents, including the firebombing of his family car and an attempt to run him down at a petrol station.
“I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe,” he said. “I don’t mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way.
“Somehow there’s a message out there that it’s OK to target people as long as it’s Muslims. And you don’t have to worry about the facts, and people will turn a blind eye.”
The claims are made in an interview to be broadcast on Monday in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme to coincide with the third anniversary of the London bombings of 7 July.
A poll to accompany the documentary highlights the growing polarisation of opinion among Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims, who say they have suffered a marked increase in hostility since the London bombings.
Shahid Malik should consider the contributions, like the war in Iraq, by the leaders of his own party, like Blair and Brown, to the sorry situation which he describes correctly.
Johnson deputy faces inquiry over alleged financial wrongdoing
· Fresh blow to London mayor’s administration
· Aide had been banned from working as priest
* Matthew Taylor and Dave Hill
* Friday July 4, 2008
Boris Johnson, London mayor, launched an independent inquiry last night into allegations of financial irregularities and inappropriate behaviour against his deputy mayor, Ray Lewis.
The move followed a Guardian investigation and a series of questions tabled by the newspaper on Wednesday.
It became the second blow to Johnson’s administration in the past 10 days after one of his senior advisers, James McGrath, quit for telling an interviewer that African-Caribbean migrants should go home if they did not like London.
Hunt Oil, whose chief executive Ray Hunt has been a major backer of George W. Bush, signed the agreement with the Kurdish government on September 8, 2007 to explore and develop oilfields in the region.
No national law on the division of oil revenues had been passed at the time (and still has not been), and the agreement outraged Iraqi government officials fearful that Baghdad would be cut out of its share of lucrative oil profits by such arrangements and that the country might well break up under centrifugal pressures. At the time Iraq’s oil minister, Hussein al-Shahristani, called the deal “illegal.”
It is not unusual for Ethiopia and Somalia to be hit by drought and food shortages, but this year the rise in food costs makes an already disastrous situation worse.
In Ethiopia, the area affected is in the triangle of land in the east and southeast bordering Kenya and Somalia, comprising the Somalia, Oromiya and Amhara regions. According to Reuters, a NASA earth observatory picture taken from space shows the “eastern half of the country withered in drought.”
Around 4.5 million Ethiopians are in need of food aid, with as many as 75,000 children facing acute malnutrition and illness.
Ken Caldwell, international operations director for the charity Save the Children, explained, “Hunger hits children first and hits them hardest. Ethiopian children, who are going hungry because their parents can’t afford to feed them, will be among the first victims of the global food price rises.” …
