Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1893) – that Expressionist painting of an amorphous figure covering his ears on a rushing bridge as the whole world erupts and wails in swirls of blue, black, and blood-red sky – is the iconic image of the Modern age. The picture, a link between realism and abstraction, addresses both a lingering nostalgia for the old world and an existential anxiety toward the new. Hell-bent on conveying the depths of the artist’s tortured soul, “The Scream” is an expression of the self, rather than of the universal. The beginning of an exhibitionist art, it is painting as both emotional outburst and personal confession.

“The Scream,” which was one of two paintings stolen from Oslo’s Munch Museum in 2004, is not included among the dense grouping of 87 paintings and 50 works on paper in the Museum of Modern Art’s Munch retrospective. But a number of related works, including lithographs of “The Scream” and the two bridge paintings “Angst”(1894) and “Despair” (1892), which Munch referred to as “the first ‘Scream,’ ” can be seen in MoMA’s exhibition, which opens on Saturday, as well as in the show of 25 of the Norwegian artist’s prints at Scandinavia House. Together, these two exhibitions, the first large-scale American grouping of his works in decades, should make clear both what he is and isn’t.

Munch (1863-1944) marks the beginning of a lineage of Expressionist artists who embraced raw emotion, ugliness, and immediacy as means of getting closer to subconscious truths that are heralded as more honest and passionate than poetry, beauty, and reflection – outmoded aspirations mired in artistic deception and conceit. The feelings first lineage moves from Munch to the German Expressionism of Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, up through the American Abstract Expressionists and on to the British figure painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The faith in the personal and unattractive over the universal and beautiful can even be traced to the contemporary British artist Tracey Emin, who has made a career out of autobiographical art, exhibiting, among other confessional works, “My Bed” (1998) – Ms. Emin’s actual bed surrounded by her soiled underwear, empty vodka bottles, condoms, and used tampons.

With most art of the “confessional” vein, knowing the artist’s life story is widely believed to be essential to understanding the work. In Munch’s case, the art is often used as little more than a biographical mirror of his personal suffering; this is said, in turn, to reflect the universal suffering of modern man.

This case could be made for an artist such as Giacometti, whose penetrating and visionary paintings and sculptures beautifully reveal the inwardness of man. But it cannot be said of Munch, a minor talent whose works rarely rise above personal allegory and melodrama.

Munch’s mother and sister died of tuberculosis when he was a child, and throughout his life he suffered from illness, anxiety, loneliness, sexual romanticism, and alcoholism. He would return to all of these themes again and again, especially in his “Frieze of Life,” a cycle mostly comprised of works made while the artist was in Paris and Berlin. The themes of Munch’s art, what he termed “the modern life of the soul” (birth, love, sex, melancholy, anxiety, despair, illness, and death) are certainly not new or even Modern themes in art – and in Munch’s histrionic hands they become themes first and paintings second.

At the entrance to the MoMA show we are informed, through wall text written by curator Kynaston McShine, that Munch “is passionately emotional, perhaps more so than any other modern artist.” What this hyperbole amounts to is that you will see Munch’s “feelings” depicted in the paintings; poor draftsmanship and color are to be expected when the artist uses the canvas as a therapeutic release rather than as a structure for composing and for exploring the tradition of painting.

The best works in the MoMA show (which jumps maddeningly in and out of chronological order) are those done between 1890 and 1908, when the artist suffered a nervous breakdown. This is the period launched by “The Scream” and the powerful, cool, and fiery “Despair.” In these works, Munch is connected to the influential avant-garde circles of Paris and Berlin – the Symbolists, van Gogh, and Gauguin. And it is in these works, fueled by the Art Nouveau curve and existential angst, that Munch is on to something fresh.

Having moved through pastiches of French Impressionism and an academic realism learned from his mentor, Christian Krohg, Munch hit on a kind of uniquely gloomy Romanticism that can be compelling, as in “The Seine at St. Cloud” (1890). But even then, except in some of his prints, he rarely pulls together a completely convincing picture. Subjects are overwrought. Figures are clumsy and stiff, nudes unerotic. Faces are under-realized and cartoonish, even clownish. By 1910, Munch’s work, sometimes brightly colored, sometimes tonal and sentimental, at others dark and Expressionistic, became a pastiche of Modernism.

Munch was prolific and not without innovative talent, especially as a printmaker, but he appears to have been more concerned with quickly putting down his emotions than with mastering the business of painting. His work rapidly devolves into a formulaic, colorless fudging in which shapes are filled in and contours are manically repeated – a cliched, itchy mark-making that nervously activates shapes rather than builds form. Munch was the master of the onomatopoeia: His art believes that a confusion of agitated marks, through some kind of transubstantiation, communicates a confused, agitated soul.

In “The Day After” (1894-95), the drunken woman’s long, dangling arm, which finishes in a calligraphic shape resembling a swooping bird, is remarkable for its sense of fall and of flight. But much of the rest of the picture is muddled. Her chest and legs deflate.

Often, it’s as if Munch did not know what to do once he had put in the figures, as if much of the act of painting for him was filling in and around centrally located forms. An exception is “Self-Portrait With Cigarette” (1895), a painting in smoky, miasmic blues that dissolves the figure with a sense of forethought and intent. The same is true of “Self-Portrait in Hell” (1903), of the nude artist engulfed in a fiery wash. Likewise, the curving contours in “Madonna” (1894-95) actually weave the figure into the Medusa-like matrix of the space, something he rarely accomplishes elsewhere.

Despite, if not because of, his shortcomings, Munch remains one of the most influential and well-known artists of our time. His unique genius lay in his recognition that, in an increasingly fast-paced world, feelings come first – even if it means sacrificing drawing and painting in the process. Who has time today to ponder over Durer’s “Melancholia”? “The Scream,” a painting that telegraphs rather than explores emotion, rockets us to the heart of our anxiety and despair. Without the baggage of layered, poetic complexity, it is a picture that speaks directly to the Modern age.

At MoMA from February 19 until May 8 (53 W. 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400). At Scandinavia House until May 13 (58 Park Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets, 212-879-9779).