Edvard
Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul
MoMA Exhibition explores Edward MUNCH's compelling
artistic achievement,
surveying his career in its entirety.
Until
May 8, 2006
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery,
sixth floor
Major Retrospective Is the First to Be
Held in An American Museum in Three Decades
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Edvard
Munch Ashes, 1894
Oil on canvas 47 7/16 x 55 1/2"
(120.5 x 141 cm) The National
Museum of Art, Architecture, and
Design/National Gallery, Oslo.
(c) 2006 The Munch Museum/The
Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
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New York, February 14, 2006 - Edvard Munch:
The Modern Life of the Soul is the first
retrospective devoted to the work of Edvard
Munch (1863 - 1944) "the internationally
renowned Norwegian painter, printmaker,
and draftsman" to be held in an American
museum in almost three decades.
Featuring 87 paintings and 50 works
on paper, it showcases Munch's artistic
achievement in its true richness and diversity,
surveying his career in its entirety,
from 1880 to 1944.
Beginning with the artist's early
portraits and genre scenes, the exhibition
charts Munch's move away from Norwegian
naturalism and towards an exploration
of modern existential experience. Following
each phase of his career, the exhibition
shows Munch's struggle to translate personal
trauma into universal terms and, in the
process, to comprehend the fundamental
components of human existence: birth,
love, and death. The exhibition is organized by Kynaston
McShine, Chief Curator at Large, The Museum
of Modern Art.
MoMA is the only venue for the exhibition,
which will be on view in The Joan and Preston
Robert Tisch Gallery on the sixth floor
from February 19 to May 8, 2006.
Munch's primary source of inspiration was his
own life, which was marked by heartbreak,
physical illness, emotional instability,
and the deaths of some of his closest
family members. Mr. McShine says, "The narrative
of Munch's life and work, rooted in the
nineteenth century, somehow transforms, through his own will and force,
his personal experiences into an extraordinary
examination of what he terms "the
modern life of the soul --birth, innocence,
love, sexual passion, melancholy, anger,
jealousy, despair, anxiety, illness, and
death."Munch was born in 1863 on a farm outside Kristiania
(now Oslo).
His mother died in 1869, followed
by his sister Sophie, in 1877, both from
tuberculosis.
As a young artist in the 1880s,
Munch was an eager participant in the
bohemian intellectual circles of Kristiania.
He was inspired by the art of the Norwegian naturalists,
including his mentor, Christian Krohg,
and he worked in the academic traditions
of portraiture and genre painting. Munch quickly looked for more evocative
aesthetic models and began to develop
his unique, expressionistic style while
in Paris and Berlin in the 1890s and early 1900s.
In Paris, Munch was introduced
to Symbolist philosophy and aesthetics
and was inspired by the innovation of
such artists as Vincent van Gogh and Paul
Gauguin. Later, in Berlin, he became a part of
an avant-garde group involved in various
types of mysticism and the occult.
Munch was an active member of a
vital artistic community, and, in addition
to painting and creating graphic work,
he illustrated books of poetry and designed
programs and sets for the stage.
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| Edvard
Munch, Night in St. Cloud, 1890
Oil on canvas 25 3/8 x 21 1/4" (64.5
x 54 cm) The National Museum of
Art, Architecture, and Design/National
Gallery, Oslo. (c) 2006 The Munch
Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York |
Edvard
Munch, Self-Portrait 1886
Oil on canvas 13 x 9 5/8" (33 x
24.5 cm) The National Museum of
Art, Architecture, and Design/National
Gallery, Oslo. (c) 2006 The Munch
Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York |
Many of Munch's best-known motifs are featured
in his Frieze of Life, a cycle of pictures
made up mostly of his work from his time
in Paris and Berlin.
Focusing on the themes of love,
angst, and death, this cycle drew largely
on Munch's personal memories, including
the deaths of
his mother and sister, as well as his doomed
love affair with Milly Thaulow, a married
woman. The Frieze of Life was first shown at an exhibition
in Berlin in 1902, with Summer Night's Dream
(The Voice) (1893) opening the narrative.
Many of his other motifs are included in
this cycle, as seen in The Kiss (1897),
Vampire (1893-94), and Madonna (1894-95).
In Despair (1891-92), which Munch
referred to as "the first Scream,"
he depicts the experience of seeing the
sky turn "a bloody red" while
walking on Ljabroveien, the road between
Kristiania and Nordstrand. Capturing the incident as it actually
happened, the painting shows Munch's featureless
alter ego leaning over a railing while his
two companions continue along the path. Later, in The Scream, the melancholic
figure of Despair is transformed into an
amorphous creature personifying terror.
In this exhibition, two lithographs
of The Scream will be shown, both from 1895.
The exhibition includes the newly discovered
Young Girl with Three Male Heads (c. 1898),
which was long hidden behind another canvas.
The painting was found in the summer
of 2004 when conservators from the Kunsthalle
Bremen in Germany removed The Dead Mother
from its frame.
Young Girl with Three Male Heads,
on view for the first time in the United
States, depicts an adolescent girl seated
protectively with her legs and arms pressed
closely together while three male heads,
which represent the girl's inner fears,
hover above her. The highly abstracted heads are vaguely recognizable as Munch
on the left, Krohg in the center, and the
Norwegian playwright Gunnar Heiberg on the
right.
In The Dance of Life (1899-1900), the last
of the artist's contributions to the Frieze,
Munch documents the transition from burgeoning
love to inevitable death by means of three
female figures: a blonde innocent touching
a flower; a dancing, red-haired temptress;
and a mourning woman dressed in black.
Death is also addressed in the monumental
painting Death in the Sick Room (1893),
which depicts Munch's dying sister amidst
a crowd of mourners including himself, his
father, brother, and sisters. "The mutable Frieze of Life, along
with Munch's many other related paintings and the large body
of graphic work, assure him an essential
and even fundamental place in the canon
of modern art," says Mr. McShine.
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Edvard
Munch, The Dance of Life, 1899-1900
Oil on canvas, 49 3/16 x 75 3/16"
(125 x 191 cm)
The National Museum of Art, Architecture,
and Design/National Gallery, Oslo.
(c) 2006 The Munch Museum/The
Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Prints played an essential role in Munch's
oeuvre.
He realized that the production
of multiple impressions of his important
themes enabled them to be widely disseminated,
communicating his philosophy to many people. He reworked many of his paintings into
graphic form --lithographs, woodcuts,
and etchings-- using the same motifs made
famous in the Frieze of Life.
Instead of copying the paintings,
Munch derived fresh interpretations of
his motifs, transforming them into new
creations. For instance, The Sick Child theme, which depicts the illness
of his sister, was one that he obsessively
reworked in paintings, etchings, and colored
lithographs. He also produced graphic versions of The Scream, The Kiss,
and Madonna, among many others.
After several years of travel and illness,
many spent in and out of sanatoriums,
Munch returned to Norway in 1909. By this time, he was well established
and received many important commissions.
He moved away from the Frieze and
into more traditional imagery such as
portraits and landscapes, including Spring in the Elm
Forest III (1923), while never abandoning
his interest in the human psyche.
While Munch's self-portraits punctuate
his entire career, they feature more prominently
from the early 1900s until his death. Mr. McShine says that Munch's self-portraits
"afford a key avenue through his
work, together making up a history of
self-perception matched in completeness
by few other artists outside Rembrandt."
Throughout his career, Munch intimately
traces his every psychological and physical
shift.
In his early portraits, Munch portrays
himself as a worldly bohemian; in his
later ones, he becomes a private, insulated
modern existential man.
Munch's first Self-Portrait (1881-82), one
of his earliest surviving paintings, was
painted when he was around 18 years old.
Self-Portrait (with Skeleton Arm)
(1895) shows the artist's disembodied
head floating on a black background with
a skeletal arm at the bottom edge. His
name at the top evokes a tombstone, yet
Munch created this lithograph when he
was just 31 years old.
In one of Munch's most violent
self-representations, Self-Portrait in
Hell (1903), he shows himself engulfed
by the flames of hell with a dark, threatening
shadow behind him. In this painting, Munch
seems to be sentencing himself to eternal
damnation. Self-Portrait: Between the
Clock and the Bed (1940-42), his last
major self-portrait, which was painted
when he was in his early seventies, shows
the artist in his bedroom. Behind him
is his studio, with his paintings and
sketches on the walls.
To his left is a clock without
hands, a reference to a scene from Goethe's
play Faust in which Mephistopheles announces
Faust's death with the words, "The
clock has stopped"; to Munch's right,
an empty bed awaits him.
Munch died in 1944, having spent
his final years in relative seclusion.
PROGRAMS:
Views of Edvard Munch
On April 26 at 6:00 p.m., experts present lectures
on special topics related to the exhibition.
Speakers include Patricia G. Berman, Professor
of Art, Wellesley College; Richard Brilliant,
Professor of Art History and Archaeology,
Columbia University; and Reinhold Heller,
Professor and Chair, Department of Art
History, University of Chicago. See separate
press release for more information.
Edvard Munch and His Time
From March 10 to April 19, MoMA's Department
of Film and Media presents a small survey
of films by and on Munch, as well as films
based on the writings of Munch’s
equally famous fellow Scandinavian iconoclasts
Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Knut
Hamsun. Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film and Media,
with grateful acknowledgment to the Norwegian
Film Institute.
Public Information:
The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd
Street, New York, NY 10019
For more information, please visit> http://www.moma.org
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