Edvard Munch works on display at The Art Insitute
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch at first blush seemed a man with many mood swings. He is best known, of course, for his often-parodied 1893 painting The Scream. Death, anxiety and suffering were often his themes. But so were calm landscapes and soft colors.
Then who was Edvard Munch? The exhibition of his work at The Art Institute of Chicago, Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth, opens the window on this odd Symbolist painter who actually marketed himself as a tortured soul. Born in 1863, he became the forerunner of expressionistic art. Munch died in 1944.
Included in the exhibition are 150 works — half of them paintings; half, works on paper by Munch and his peers. Most have never been seen in the United States. Works on exhibit include Self-Portrait in Moonlight, 1904–06; Anxiety, 1894; Moonlight, 1895; and Madonna, 1895.
While the exhibit contains an 1895 black-and-white lithograph of The Scream, the 1893 oil painting is not part of the display. Munch reproduced the now iconic image many times, including a 1910 oil version and another in pastel.
Although he was mentally unstable, Munch’s reputation was more myth than fact. The main influences on his work weren’t his French and German contemporaries; rather they were his European peers — James Ensor, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet.
Themes explored in this popular exhibit are Munch’s take on the street, loneliness and solitude, love and sexuality, the bather, landscape, and death and dying. “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow,” Munch once wrote, “and that is eternity.”
Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth is on exhibit at The Art Institute of Chicago through April 26.
Posted by Lori Rotenberk
