The Dance of Life, by Edvard Munch. Oil on canvas, 1899-1900.

Well I feel guilty about giving my man Munch the shaft yesterday, since there's so much more than The Scream that he should be known for. So today I'm doing something I swore I'd never do, and writing about the same artist two days in a row. Sorry to all you kids out there who aren't Munch fans, but the last thing I want is the mad ghost of Edvard Munch stalking me.

Munch is really the epitome of the tortured artist. His mother died when he was 5, and his beloved oldest sister died when he was 15 - both from TB. Another of his sisters spent most of her life in a mental hospital. Munch's fragile state of mind was worsened by his father's religious fanaticism and hellfire-and-brimstone attitude. Munch famously wrote, "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies - the heritage of consumption and insanity - illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle." Throughout his life Munch struggled with alcoholism and, possibly, bipolar disorder.

You might say he was doomed from the start to have horrible relationships with women. His first real relationship was with Millie Thaulow, the wife of a distant cousin - the affair lasted two years, and when she ended it, Munch was crushed. His only other serious romantic involvement was with Tulla Larsen, the daughter of a wealthy wine merchant who sort of forced Munch into a relationship. For a year he traveled all across Europe trying to get away from her, but this woman was born to stalk - once she'd found Edvard again, she would beg and beg to see him until he finally relented. She bullied Munch into proposing to her, but at the last minute before the wedding he fled the country. She found him a year later, and she and Munch had a violent argument during which Edvard somehow shot off one of his fingers. Well Tulla somehow got the crazy notion that maybe Munch didn't like her, so she married a different artist a short while later. I'm not sure whether or not she had to stalk him first.

The Dance of Life is really all about Munch's ideas of romance. The dancers in the background seem to be swooping in on one another, almost attacking their partners. (In another of Munch's paintings, Vampire, a woman with long red hair bends over the neck of a man and looks like she could be sucking the life-blood out of him.) Some believe that the couple dancing in the foreground is Munch and his first real love, Millie, who both look stiff and dispassionate. The two women at the sides are thought to both be Tulla Larsen, who can be at once bright and lovely and at other times the female Grim Reaper.

Munch never did marry or find love. In retrospect, I really should have saved this painting for next Valentine's Day.