The exhibit unfolds in eight thematically-focused galleries that explore Munch’s long-term engagement with particular subjects that recur throughout his career, especially his own. The paintings on view, many deeply personal works from Munch's own collection now held by the Munch Museum, as well as loans from institutions and private lenders demonstrate Munch's liberated, self-assured painting style and technical abilities including brushwork, innovative compositional structures, the incorporation of visceral scratches and marks on the canvas and his exceptional use of intense, vibrant color.
Edvard Munch, Starry Night, 1922-24, oil on convas; Munch Museum, Oslo
The exhibition begins with a gallery of self-portraits featuring works created between the 1880s and 1940s that followed the artist's path from a self-conscious young man with the future ahead of him to an elderly painter whose time is nearing an end. But for all of their confessional qualities, the paintings are not simply documentary. Perhaps more than any artist of his time, Munch also uses the self-portrait to fictionalize his personal narrative. In Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu (1919), a painting that appears in a later gallery, Munch depicts himself as suffering from the illness though later research suggests that he may never have had the flu and instead sought to ingratiate himself with the Norwegian public.
From this opening gallery, the exhibition progresses through galleries devoted to inner turmoil, jealousy, scenes of the artist in his studio, illness, death and romantic love.
The works in the exhibition also demonstrate the progression of Munch's technique from an early Self-Portrait (1886) with its thick impasto and chipped away dry paint, to Self-Portrait with Cigarette (1895), an example of a 'turpentine painting' in which Munch uses heavily diluted oil paint and a flat brush to create an ethereal, smoky glaze that allows the white ground of the canvas to become part of the painted surface. This technique, not typical to the 1890s, incorporates some of the strategies of watercolor painting, using the canvas color as a constructive element and part of the composition.
"Munch was an artist who never stopped looking. Never stopped feeling. Some people think the first part of his career is the classic Munch, and the best. But he's, in a way, challenging these kinds of simple conclusions. He never stopped processing his own art and often did new versions of some of his most central motifs, referencing his own art into his late years," explained Jon-Ove Steihaug, director of exhibitions and collections at the Munch Museum.
Illustrating Munch's restless revisiting of themes and his skill as an observer of human nature, the final painting in the exhibition, The Dance of Life (1925), reworks a picture of the same title from 1899–1900 that was part of the monumental cycle The Frieze of Life. In total, the exhibition contains seven scenes from this series, which offers visitors a metaphoric dance across many of Munch’s key themes — attraction, love, jealousy, rejection — and culminates in a poetic meditation on the joys and sorrows that define a life.
Self-Portrait With Cigarette, 1895; courtesy of National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
Venues and Dates
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 24–October 9, 2017; The Met Breuer, New York, November 14, 2017–February 4, 2018, Munch Museum, Oslo, May 12–September 9, 2018
Exhibition Organization and Support
Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Munch Museum, Oslo.
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