Pale faces and red hair

I love Munch. There's an exhibition of his paintings and photographs at Tate Modern. I can take a lot of his particular brand of brooding, introspective intensity. Combined as it is with a supreme sense of form and colour, it makes for deep and thoughtful pictures that are also, even when the scene depicted is grim, always pleasurable and intriguing to the eye.

I even like his habit of painting the same subject over and over, though I'm not sure I feel the same about the curators who saw fit to hang a whole, large gallery with variations on the same portrait. On the other hand, it gives a sense, perhaps, of being in the artist's mind, of sharing his repeated, habitual perceptions - a bit jarring at the time, but in retrospect rather interesting and provocative.

It's a big exhibition (they always are if it's a big name - you'd think a little of something big might be deemed to suffice, but it seems to be the opposite): long galleries, many paintings, many perspectives. After a while, the shapes and colours that spring so strongly from the work seem to invade the spaces in between. The people looking at the paintings, their shapes and angles and outlines, appear more and more as if they'd stepped out of them. A painted shock of red hair, a purple dress, a pale, drooping, interesting face, take the eye straight to another that is not painted.

I love Munch a lot. Weirdly, I'm enjoying remembering this exhibition more than I enjoyed being there. Perhaps the reclusive, philosophical artist would have liked that.