Edvard Munch. Love, Death and Loneliness

Edvard Munch is one of the most influential protagonists of Modernism. His art marks a pinnacle of the fin-de-siècle. In the 1880s, he left Impressionism, only a recent import to , behind as swiftly as he did the naturalism of his teachers and mentors Christian Krohg and . Even Munch’s encounter with the revolt of the Symbolist avant-garde only prompted his turning away from the external visible world and toward the commotions of the soul. Nothing in Munch’s pictures is illustrative, anything anecdotal is eliminated.

Munch’s oeuvre straddles between Symbolism and Expressionism. His pictures are expressions of archetypal situations in life. Very quickly, Munch developed his own vocabulary: shapes molded into symbol figures of existential sensibilities. It is fundamental human issues – love, death, and solitude – which, topical today as ever, are the central themes of his work.

The Albertina exhibition presents Munch’s masterpieces of printmaking, many of which are extant in a single copy only, including Munch’s most famous subjects such as The Scream, Madonna, The Kiss and Melancholy. Born out of radical subjectivism, their shapes and colors are crystallizations of personal experience into icons of Modernism.

It was no later than 1894, following a stay in Paris, that Munch discovered for himself the expressive range of the color lithograph, the etching, and the woodcut as equivalent to that of painting. In the 1890s, Paris was the mecca of avant-garde printmaking. Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis around Édouard Vuillard were revolutionizing color lithography; Gauguin and Vallotton were reviving the artist’s woodcut which, over the nineteenth century, had sunk to a brilliantly handled but shallow illustration medium in the employ of the daily and weekly press. Under the impression of French printmaking, Munch came to see the potentials of visual condensation, summarization, and the expression-heightening simplification of motifs. The exhibition acknowledges Munch’s untiring endeavor to not only explore new themes and motifs, but to revolutionize artistic production processes through experimentation – regardless of academic convention. Like Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya, Munch counts among those artists whose printmaking oeuvre is absolutely equal to their painting.

All exhibits in the show are from the largest and most important private collection of masterpiece prints by Edvard Munch worldwide. We wish to thank Galleri K, , for their kind assistance and support.