Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

10/04/19

Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

Edvard Munch: love and angst

British Museum

11 April – 21 July 

Although best known today for his paintings, it was through his graphic works that Edvard Munch made his international name. This exhibition at the British Museum, London – the largest of his prints in 45 years and compiled in collaboration with Norway’s Munch Museum – brings together some of his most iconic images, and reunites a number of prints with their matrices, elucidating the various processes involved in their making. Norwegian Arts looks at the artist’s experimental use of lithography, etching and woodcut.

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s inscription at the foot of an 1896 black-and-white lithographic print of his iconic painting The Scream (1893) – ‘I felt the great scream throughout nature’ – is almost as soul-wrenching and shudder-inducing as the world-famous image itself. According to Giulia Bartrum, the curator of the British Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, ‘Edvard Munch: love and angst’ (11 April to 21 July), the wide-mouthed figure shown covering his or her ears, long assumed to be screaming, might, in fact, be hearing the scream rather than uttering it. The full title of the work, The Scream of Nature, similarly supports this standpoint. Either way, the very fact that such discussion is still ongoing, 126 years after the painting of the picture, shows the enduring appeal and intrigue of the Symbolist artist’s work. This lithograph will be one of more than 80 works on display, primarily comprising prints, from the period between 1894, when Munch first began experimenting with graphic media, and the first decade of the 20th century. During this time, Munch travelled a lot between Kristiania (modern-day Oslo), Paris and Berlin. It was in Berlin that he made his first print, aged 30. 

Read the full feature on the Norwegian Arts site

Review of Munch : Van Gogh at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

04/01/16

Munch : Van Gogh
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
25 September 2015 – 17 January 2016
 
“During his short life, Van Gogh did not allow his flame to go out. Fire and embers were his brushes during the few years of his life, whilst he burned out for his art.” – Munch, 1933
 
From 1900 onwards, works by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) were increasingly shown together. An exhibition in Cologne in 1912 heralded the two artists as the fathers of modern art. Despite being in Paris around the same time and frequenting many of the same places, it is not thought that Munch and Van Gogh ever met. Their lives and works, however, display uncanny parallels, both setting out to be painters in 1880 and both struggling with and injuring themselves during periods of depression and mental ill health. This thorough exhibition put together by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Munch Museum in Oslo is the first to explore these overlapping trajectories in any depth.

The exhibition opens with a self-portrait by each artist. Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait as a Painter (1887-88) is almost pointillist in style, with thick strokes and vivid colour. Munch, on the other hand, in Self-Portrait with Palette (1926), uses much thinner paint and allows patches of canvas to show through. Both artists portray themselves with the tools of their trade and a heavy frown. Throughout the exhibition, the key current is one of emotions and expression, with each artist taking a rollercoaster ride through life, exploring new techniques for sharing these experiences with the world. We see them develop in terms of freedom of style and choice of colours, from their early paintings, such as Van Gogh’s caricature-like The Potato Eaters (1885) and Munch’s impressionist Morning (1884), through depictions of trees, sunsets, starry nights, wheat fields and couples promenading. Intimate renderings of their bedrooms draw the main comparison to a close, before a final “symphony”, intended to create an impression of each artist’s most significant series of works, through short slide shows and reproductions: Van Gogh’s Décoration (August-October 1888) and Munch’s Frieze of Life (1893-1944).

Read the rest of this review here