ART REVIEW : Edvard Munch’s Haunting Images : The Norwegian master is regarded as a key pioneer of Expressionism. A distinguished collection of 94 of his works is on view at the County Museum of Art.

Occasionally, when life gets a bit much, the desire to escape envelops us. Where to go? Once we’ve dismissed Bali and other exotic places, Scandinavia starts seeming like a good getaway. Civilized, cultured and humane, it’s just far enough off the main stem that one could live above the fray as an observer. All the advantages of Euro-American culture without the stress. Endless summer days. Cozy winters when it barely gets light. Might be nice to live among one’s imaginings of a robust and handsome people.

On the other hand, there is Edvard Munch.

Modern Scandinavian literary and artistic tradition has a dark side that stretches from Soren Kierkegaard to Henrik Ibsen and Ingmar Bergman. Every few years, a Munch exhibition materializes as a reminder of that intense, essentially moral strain. The latest today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is “Master Prints by Edvard Munch From the Epstein Family Collection.” On view to Jan. 6, it presents 94 woodcuts, lithographs and intaglio prints by an artist acknowledged as among the great masters and innovators of the medium.

Along with the older Vincent van Gogh, the Norwegian Munch holds pride of place as a key pioneer of modern Expressionism. Unlike the tragic Dutchman, Munch is not a beloved household name, although the two artists shared temperamental qualities and some oddly parallel experiences.

Both were passionate, disturbed and drank more than was good for them. Both injured themselves in sexually charged circumstances. Van Gogh severed his ear after an encounter with a prostitute. Munch accidentally shot himself in the hand during a lover’s quarrel. Both were hospitalized after nervous collapses.

Maybe Munch seems less poignant than the successfully suicidal Van Gogh because Munch recovered and lived to be 80, dying in 1944. It seems more likely that Van Gogh holds broader appeal because his work speaks of humane and healing hope, while Munch’s best-known images seem pessimistic and so clearly autobiographical that they can be dismissed as one man’s skewed view of life. Maybe Munch is simply harder to take and truer to the troubled psyche of the 20th Century. He is the one who seems like a candidate for analysis by another older contemporary: Sigmund Freud.

Once seen, Munch’s imagery is as unforgettable as it is haunted. It participates in a Scandinavian artistic tradition that views human life in large and elemental terms. The work is arranged to dramatize its brooding, heavily symbolic themes.

Raised in bourgeois Oslo (then called Christiania), Munch had lost both his mother and sister to tuberculosis by the time he was 14. Images of sickrooms such as “Death Chamber” show faces in blank-eyed grief. Figures in black dresses become abstract shapes whose undulating outlines project feelings of vertigo. Few artists have so effectively used pattern to express tension.

Munch’s many self-portraits show he grew up handsome. And, despite his stiff-backed army doctor father, he fell in with the local avant-garde crowd that included Hans Jaegger, a young anarchist who espoused free love and wrote a novel that was promptly suppressed. The ambience of these early years is caught in the etching “The Morning After.” Munch’s style was conventional then, but it didn’t stay that way.

By 1892, he’d had the first of a string of passionate, frustrating love affairs and spent time in Paris absorbing the whiplash contortions of Art Nouveau and the insistent decadence of Symbolism. Where Van Gogh had been a man of the earth, Munch was something of a dandy.

That year, his Berlin exhibition ignited outraged protest and was shut down. Munch became a hero of the underground and went on to make his main reputation in Germany.

In Berlin, his crowd hung out in an Unter den Linden cafe that boasted 900 varieties of liqueurs. Other intimates of the circle included playwright August Strindberg and the Polish poet and satanist Stanislaw Przybyszewski. The female muse of the group was Dagny Juell, who eventually dumped Munch and married Przybyszewski. In 1901, she was murdered. Munch didn’t do it, but you’d never know it from the masterpieces of the period.

“Madonna” shows the essential woman to be a kind of sainted vampire. “Jealousy” uses exaggerated depth to capture the moment a man is gripped with anxious rage as his lover stands nude before another. Munch’s use of vortex space should be counted among the great visual metaphors.

Of all his recurrent motifs, the anguish of carnal love produced the most searing images. In prints, the masterpiece is “The Kiss.” In it, a pair of lovers are united into a single black shape against a wood-grain pattern that is both a background and a prison for the figures. They are trapped in it as in their desire.

Munch’s breakdown came in 1908. After it, his work lost its intensity, a circumstance that’s caused many an artist to avoid psychotherapy. Actually, his later work has considerable merit. It grew a bit stolid but it actually pursued themes that broadened away from the neurotic absorption with sex and death that became a kind of joke in the Woody Allen era.

Among his most profound themes are variations on “The Three Stages of Woman (The Spinx).” In it, the archetypal female is seen as an innocent virgin full of hope, a wanton nude and, finally, as a widow in mourning. In variants, the virgin stands near a young man on the seashore as if waiting. It’s subtitled “The Lonely Ones.” Later, she stands in intimate conversation with the widow, staring out at the surf. It could have inspired the scene where the knight plays chess with Death in Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.”

The collection on view was started in the ‘60s by Sarah and Lionel Epstein. Now regarded as one of the most distinguished in the world, it includes not only Munch classics but less familiar prints like “Melancholy.”

Sarah Epstein writes movingly of the collection in a catalogue essay that reveals her as the mother of five, a champion of liberalism and a particular advocate of family planning. Funny, in a way, that such a person would respond to Munch’s art. There are those who see the artist and the men in his milieu as misogynists who subjugated women.

Evidently, Sarah Epstein understands Munch’s art for what it really is. It sees both sexes irresistibly subject to natural forces that drive them together willy-nilly in an eternal dance. In it, each partner holds the power of life and death. Or, at least, so it seems to the other.