'Edvard Munch: The Modern Life Of The Soul' At The Museum Of Modern Art

NEW YORK CITY

:The intense, angst-filled and often perplexing images of Edvard Munch, the troubled and enigmatic Norwegian painter and printmaker, have long fascinated Americans. Best-known for his Symbolist masterpiece, "The Scream," an icon of world art that many feel epitomizes Twentieth Century anxiety and tension, he produced a large body of other work that deserves greater recognition and understanding.

"Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul," the first American retrospective devoted to his art in nearly 30 years, features 87 paintings and 50 works on paper that document the wide range of memorable images in Munch's oeuvre.

Organized by Kynaston McShine, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the exhibition will be on view at that museum through May 8. A scholarly catalog accompanies the show. In it, McShine concludes that Munch's paintings and graphic work "assure him an essential and even fundamental place in the canon of modern art."

Interesting and rewarding print exhibitions that underscore Munch's mastery of etching, lithography and woodcut are on view at New York's Scandinavia House (through May 13) and Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center (through June 25), complementing the MoMA blockbuster.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall mounted an exhibition of 25 works relating to the museum's recently acquired "Mermaid," a large oil based on Nordic mythology depicting a sensuous maiden emerging from the sea. It is on loan to the current exhibition.

The MoMA show documents personal traumas that shaped Munch's art, and his struggles to translate his experiences into universal terms that would be comprehensible to wide audiences.

Much emphasis is placed on the fact that Munch's primary source of inspiration was his own life, which was marked by personal and family illnesses, deaths of close relatives, emotional instability and heartbreak and worse resulting from complicated relationships with women. As McShine puts it, "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."

The son of an army doctor, Munch (1863-1944) grew up in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, in a home overshadowed by the death of his mother when he was 5 and of a beloved sister when he was 14, both of tuberculosis. "Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that hovered over my cradle," Munch recalled. He was convinced that he would eventually go insane. Nevertheless, by his late teens he had decided to become an artist.

His father, a devoutly religious man, had a complicated relationship with Edvard. Following Dr Munch's death in 1889, his son painted the haunting "Night in Saint-Cloud," 1890, which shows a lonely man seated by a window in a hazy blue room that is actually one Munch occupied in Paris. It is three portraits simultaneously - the artist's father as he recalled him resting in a chair at home, a friend who posed for the painting and Munch himself, grieving for his deceased parent.

Some of Munch's most wrenching images, such as "The Sick Child," evoke traumatic childhood memories. Painted in two versions, in 1886 and 1896, this unusual composition focuses on the profile of his dying sister, Sophie, while blurring the other figure (modeled by his aunt) and the background. As Munch's biographer, Sue Prideaux, writes, "Nothing like 'The Sick Child' had been seen before, either inside or outside Norway." Although roundly criticized, Munch regarded it as the foundation for his future art.