[CPProt.net] Munch exhibit opens in Stockholm ; exhibit could help soothe the pain inflicted when "The Scream" and "Madonna" were snatched from the Munch Museum last August 22

[MSN and CPProt list (Ton Cremers)]

Munch exhibit opens in Stockholm 
Herve Lionnet 
Posted Fri, 18 Feb 2005 

The largest collection of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's self-portraits
ever exhibited goes on show at the Stockholm museum of modern art this
weekend, and with it a brutally honest reflection of his life as an artist
and a human being. 

The exhibit "Munch by Himself" is the first show to focus specifically on
Munch's self-portraits. It will be on view from February 19 to May 15 at
Moderna Museet in Stockholm and will move on to the Munch Museum in Oslo
this summer and to the Royal Academy of Arts in London in the second half of
the year. 

For fans of the Norwegian great (1863-1944) the exhibit could help soothe
the pain inflicted when his world-renowned masterpieces "The Scream" and
"Madonna" were snatched from the Munch Museum last August 22. 

Armed and hooded thieves burst into the museum in broad daylight,
threatening a member of staff with a gun. The paintings, which reportedly
may have been harmed in the getaway, have yet to be found, and the Munch
Museum has been closed for a security beef-up until next summer. 

Some 150 pieces, including 70 paintings, make up a pictorial retracing of
Munch's intellectual and artistic wandering through the societal
metamorphosis taking place at the beginning of the last century, as well as
of his repeated brushes with misfortune on the personal front. 

"In Hamburg I saw some self-portraits of Munch that seemed so powerful to me
that I looked for a book on the subject. Since there wasn't one, I wrote
it," Iris Mueller Westermann, a curator at the museum who is in charge of
the exhibit, told AFP. 

At the turn of the last century, Munch frequented intellectual bohemian
circles in the Norwegian capital, adhering to their main "commandments":
"Thou shalt write your life" and "Thou shalt be honest with Thyself". 

"He began by painting his own life, his feelings, and making visible
something that was not visible," Mueller Westermann said. 

"He shows his weaknesses, his anguish, his solitude, his feeling of not
being understood, his difficult relations with women, which begin becoming
socially apparent at this point," she added. 

Munch painted his first self-portrait in 1882 at the age of 19. 

His style was highly academic at first. Before long however his paintings
began manifesting suffering and anxiety, like his 1886 self-portrait in
which he cut and "scratched" his face with the sharp end of his brush. 

The deaths of his mother when he was five, and of his elder sister Sophie
when he was 14, both of tuberculosis, left eternal scars on Munch's soul and
haunted many of his paintings, including his ghostly "Sick Child" (1896). 

The artist's stormy relationships first with a married woman, whom he called
Fru Heiberg, and later with Tulla Larsen, whom he met at the age of 35, also
marked his work. 

His famous "Dance of Life" (1900), featuring a man and woman dancing in the
center as two jealous woman look on, is thought by some to be based on those
two relationships. 

Four years after meeting Larsen, Munch shot himself in the hand during a
fight with her, and his bloody handprint, along with the woman's features,
later turned up in a number of his paintings, including "Death of Marat"
from 1907. 

Plagued by alcoholism, portrayed in his 1906 "Self Portrait with Wine
Bottle", and deep depression, Munch hit rock bottom and decided to spend
some time at a clinic in Copenhagen. 

He appeared to bounce back however, and his later work consists of brighter
colors and more cheerful motifs like landscapes and horses and ploughing. 

Before depicting his own old age at his home in Ekely, near Oslo, Munch
created several paintings "out of focus", revealing how he saw the world
through his right eye, which suffered a vascular injury in 1930. 

Up until the end, Munch suffered hardship, dying in Norway in 1944 as Nazis,
who referred to his work as "depraved", continued to occupy his country. 

"With such a variety of self-portraits, we can compare (Munch) to Rembrandt
and Van Gogh, (the art world's) great visionaries and the great skeptics,"
Mueller Westermann said. 

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