Munch’s pictorial worlds – the initial impetus for modernism

Edvard Munch’s radical modernity in painting was a challenge for his contemporaries. This applied in particular to the art scene in Berlin around 1900 which the Norwegian Symbolist artist influenced profoundly. In return, he received support there and was able to continue to develop his work. The publication is lavishly illustrated and describes knowledgeably the story of Munch and Berlin.

In 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists invited the still-unknown Edvard Munch (1863–1944) to an exhibition. The public was shocked by the colourful, sketch-like pictures. The artist enjoyed the furore and moved to the city on the Spree, where he repeatedly sojourned until 1908. Here he learned the techniques for printed graphics and presented for the first time paintings in several continuous series which would become central to his oeuvre. In Berlin, before long, the concept of the “Magic of the North” (Stefan Zweig) was no longer associated with romantic or naturalistic fjord landscapes, but with Munch’s psychologically concentrated pictorial worlds.

About the Authors:

Thomas Köhler has been the director of the Berlinische Galerie, the State Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture in Berlin since 2010.

Stefanie Heckmann has been the head of the fine art collection at the Berlinische Galerie since 2014 and is the curator of the exhibition.
 

A fascinating examination of Munch’s prints, which were central to his creative process and established his reputation as an artist

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is best known today as a painter, but his reputation was in fact established through his prints, which were central to his creative process. His printmaking was experimental and innovative, and he continually revisited the subjects of his paintings in striking prints, in which he evoked a wide range of emotion and mood through the use of varied techniques.

Munch’s early life in the industrial town of Kristiania (renamed Oslo in 1925) was marked by sickness and poverty. His first works centred on the expression of deep emotional experiences, specifically the deaths of his mother and teenage sister, as well as passionate yet unhappy love affairs of which his deeply religious father disapproved. Encouraged by his encounters with a Bohemian society of artists, writers and poets, he developed a visual landscape that was a radical deviation from the slick society portraits and grand Scandinavian landscapes then so much in vogue. His efforts attracted considerable attention and much criticism, and he practised with little financial success as a painter for ten years before he started to gain his reputation as a profoundly innovative printmaker.

Written by a team of experts, and with an interview by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, this book will shed new light on the production of some of Munch’s most remarkable works.

Contents List:

Foreword by the directors of the British Museum and the Munch Museum; Sponsor’s foreword • Introduction • 1. Transfigured continent: Impressions from Munch’s Europe • 2. The inner soul of an artist: Munch’s background and the development of his Frieze of Life • 3. Munch and the world of printmaking • 4. Munch and the theatre in Paris • 5. ‘Is art influenced by too much business?’: Cultural capital and the market for Munch • 6. Plates, stones and blocks: Munch’s printing matrices • Reflections on Edvard Munch: an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard • Checklist of works in the exhibition • Chronology; Checklist of exhibited items; Notes; Selected bibliography; Prints by Munch in UK public collections; Acknowledgments; Picture credits; List of contributors; Index

About the Authors:

Giulia Bartrum is Curator of German Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author, known for six autobiographical novels titled My Struggle.

In dialogue with Edward Munch — discover the many ways the expressionist painter’s work has influenced modern and contemporary artists.

While Munch’s pessimistic, melancholy worldview crucially defines our understanding of his work, many important postwar and contemporary artists have drawn inspiration from several aspects of his oeuvre. This richly illustrated book explores how nine such artists — Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, Miriam Cahn, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol — engaged with Munch’s work at different points in, or throughout, their careers. It features elaborate reproductions of sixty works by Munch juxtaposed with those inspired by him.

Readers discover how Baselitz cunningly pays tribute to his artistic hero; how Tracey Emin’s practice, like Munch’s, is autobiographical, both drawing from their personal torment to create their unnerving works; how Marlene Dumas was drawn to the expressiveness of Munch’s portraits; how Louise Bourgeois’ works are illustrative of Munch’s fixation on fear and isolation; how Francis Bacon modeled “Screaming Pope” after Munch’s most renowned painting; and how Peter Doig draws on Munch’s radical treatment of pigments and materiality.

Essays by leading scholars detail each artist’s unique preoccupation with Munch and offer a focused exploration of the ways women artists in particular were inspired by his examinations of loneliness, fear, and trauma.

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Пролистать книгу Munch In Dialogue

A beautiful new gift art book all about Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist behind the first truly Expressionist picture The Scream. Absorbed by such motifs as love, life, death and anguish, Munch’s paintings captured the psychological feelings evoked by man. Beginning with a fresh and captivating introduction to Munch’s life and art, the book showcases several of his works in all their glory.

Psychodrama. The reverberating power of an Expressionist icon

Take in the dark, compelling visions of Edvard Munch, artist of lurid colors, strange distortions, and a haunting Mona Lisa for modernity: The Scream. This essential introduction surveys Munch’s staggering capacity for psychodrama and the echo of his artistic wail through the work of Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger, Tracey Emin, Marlene Dumas, and beyond.

A hairless, ghostly figure on a bridge. The sky orange-red above him. His hands raised to his ears, his mouth wide in a haunting wail. In painting The Scream, Edvard Munch (1863–1944) created Mona Lisa for our times. The shriek of his iconic figure reverberates around the world, its echo resounding in the work of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Martin Kippenberger, Marlene Dumas, and Tracey Emin.

This introductory book surveys Munch’s staggering capacity for psychodrama in The Scream and beyond. With rich illustration, it looks at the lurid, dark, and deeply modern visions that made up the artist’s response to relationships and emotions. These compelling images, regarded by the artist himself as a means of “free confession,” remain as magnetic today as they were on the brink of modernism.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series features:
 - a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
 - a concise biography
 - approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Fear, desperation, and death. Painting as an act of self-liberation

For Edvard Munch (1863-1944), painting was an act of self-liberation. His treatments of fear, desperation, and death still exert a powerful visual and psychological effect on modern viewers. Of all Munch’s paintings, "The Scream" (1893), representing a figure tortured by horror, is the most well-known-and certainly one of the most expressive.

The artist reflected his innermost feelings in his work: "In reality, my art is a free confession, an attempt to clarify to myself my own relation to life..." Although Edvard Munch cannot be clearly identified with any single movement, he is deemed a pioneer of Expressionism.

Посмотреть русскоязычное издание книги Munch -  Мунк
About the Series:
Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art Series features:

• a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
• a concise biography
• approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

The Scream of self-liberation. Paintings by one of Expressionism's pioneers

For Edvard Munch (1863-1944), painting was an act of self-liberation. His treatments of fear, desperation, and death still exert a powerful visual and psychological effect on modern viewers. Of all Munch’s paintings, "The Scream" (1893), representing a figure tortured by horror, is the most well-known-and certainly one of the most expressive.

The artist reflected his innermost feelings in his work: "In reality, my art is a free confession, an attempt to clarify to myself my own relation to life..." Although Edvard Munch cannot be clearly identified with any single movement, he is deemed a pioneer of Expressionism.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:

• a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
• approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
• a concise biography

The early masterpieces of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, pioneer of modern art, who developed a Nordic variant of modern painting.

The long-awaited Edvard Munch Catalogue Raisonné has now been published, thanks to the collaboration between Faurschou, Kaare Berntsen and Munch-museet. The catalogue, that has taken five years to complete, offers for the first time ever, a complete survey of Edvard Munch’s paintings.

Edvard Munch is acknowledged globally as one of the greatest artists in the Twentieth Century. During his long artistic career, Edvard Munch created approximately 2000 paintings, more than 1100 of which belong to the Munch-museet. The remaining works are included in museums and private collections all over the world. The catalogue is divided into four volumes and contains a chronologic representation of Edvard Munch’s paintings in colour and with matching details.

The catalogue is based on the knowledge and research that has been gathered at the Munch-museet over the past 40 years and each volume contains essays by Munch experts. The author and editor is Gerd Woll who has previously written numerous articles and exhibition catalogue texts on Edvard Munch. Gerd Woll was the author of the comprehensive catalogue on Munch’s graphic works that was published in 2001.

The Catalogue Raisonné serves as an indispensable tool for international research on Edvard Munch's works at museums and universities globally for both art historians and students alike. The catalogue will simultaneously serve as a platform to expand the knowledge of Munch’s work with art interested people in general.

Edvard Munch’s images of love, alienation, jealousy, and death - universal human experiences but filtered through events in his own life - are explored through several print series in this catalogue to an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Renowned for such powerful paintings as The Scream and Madonna, Munch continually reworked his monumental themes in the graphic arts. This publication brings together nearly sixty of Munch’s most important prints, from the National Gallery of Art and two exceptional private collections, demonstrating how the artist’s experimental impulses and virtuosic handling of intaglio, lithography, and woodcut over the course of his lifetime endowed his haunting motifs with new meanings. Stunning reproductions reveal Munch as a master printmaker, manipulating materials and color in the service of his artistic concepts. Scholars and general readers alike will gain a much richer and more nuanced appreciation for this great Norwegian artist.

For one of the most important pioneers of Expressionism, the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), the pulsating, modern city of Copenhagen was a bridge to Europe and an occasional refuge. In his lively exchanges with Danish artists and authors, Munch not only had intensive encounters with Paul Gauguin’s art, but also with Impressionism, Symbolism, and Synthetism. During a difficult existential crisis, which began around the turn of the century and lasted until 1908, Munch time and again returned to Denmark.

Rich in material, this book is the first to take a comprehensive look at Munch’s relationship to this Scandinavian country. It shows how much his Danish contacts influenced his reception of contemporary French painting as well as his early oeuvre. Generously illustrated, the volume presents some relatively unknown works created in and around Copenhagen and during Munch’s seven-month stay in a psychiatric clinic.

258 color ills.

A profound portrayal of Edvard Munch’s radical and individual modernism, giving new insights into seemingly familiar work.

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was one of the pioneers of modern art. His works revolve around the great human tragedies of love and death, which the intrepid founder of Expressionism varied with a previously unseen psychological immediacy in his visual language.

Книга о норвежском живописце, гравере, скульпторе, экспрессионисте Эдварде Мунке (1863–1944).

Он был очень популярен еще при жизни. Писал картины на темы: любовь, смерть, отчаяние. После 1914 года больше не обращался к этой тематике. Много работал над портретами, пейзажами, сценами повседневного рабочего и крестьянского быта.

Большое впечатление на художника произвела в Париже живопись импрессионистов. Постепенно творчество Мунка приобрело сугубо индивидуальный характер и неизменно присущую ему обостренную чувствительность. Сторонник пленэрной живописи, он писал сначала реалистические пейзажи. В 1890-е годы его стиль стал более декоративным. Отходя от натурализма, он обратился к фантастическим сюжетам, почерпнутым из норвежского фольклора, баллад и сказок.

Гравюры Мунка столь же значительны, как и его живопись, особого мастерства он достиг в гравюре на дереве (иллюстрации к «Цветам зла» Бодлера, литография на программке «Пер Гюнта» Ибсена). Творчество Мунка, духовно близкое Ван Гогу, оказало влияние на развитие живописи в Германии, Австрии и Чехословакии.

Посмотреть англоязычное издание книги Мунк - Munch