Of the two, I enjoyed the Tanning more. I knew very little about her (not even that she was married to Max Ernst!) apart from having seen a couple of her weird nightmare paintings from the 1940s. What seemed to come across from the display was someone well alert to the ambiguities and subtle horrors of human life, but also to its lights and joys - not a misanthrope at all. Tanning admitted to being a great fan of Gothic literature in her young life and one of the nicest pictures in the show is A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today from 1944, though its sequel, 1988's Mrs Radcliffe Called Again (Left No Message) isn't there. She references the Gothic tradition a lot. There's a lovely film of her showing off her studio in perhaps the mid-1970s: her mild, almost dreamy voice delivering what's very clearly a script pretending not to be (and signalling its own pretence) reminded me oddly of Alfred Hitchcock's infamous trailer for Psycho in which he wandered around the set giving away the plot. 'We're going to see my paintings ... But don't ask me what they mean,' muses Tanning. 'Now, I wonder what else I can show you?' she goes on as the camera pans towards another bizarre canvas. It's a complete hoot.
The hanging tassels in A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today make me think of Edward Gorey's Les Passementieres Horribles in which people are menaced by giant curtain fittings: I wouldn't be surprised if that's where he got the idea.
The Munch exhibition is subtitled 'Love and Angst' but to be honest it was mostly the latter. It's pricier than the Tanning, all prints apart from a couple of woodblocks, and, shall we say, lacks an equivalent sense of fun. I suppose, however, I shouldn't have been surprised.
Outside, the sun beat down on the mucky Thames and the plate-glass towers along it. I sat on a bench and had my sandwiches and was quite grateful for not being Edvard Munch.
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