Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul
by Patricia Berman
from The Museum of Modern Art, New York
In an exploration of modern existential experience unparalleled in the history of art, Edvard Munch, the internationally renowned Norwegian painter, printmaker and draftsman, sought to translate personal trauma into universal terms and in the process to comprehend the fundamental components of human existence: birth, love and death. Inspired by personal experience, as well as by the literary and philosophical culture of his time, Munch radically reconceived the given world as the product of his imagination. This book explores Munch's unique artistic achievement in all its richness and diversity, surveying his career in its entire developmental range from 1880 to 1944. The comprehensive volume features a lavish selection of color plates, an introduction by Kynaston McShine, Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, and essays by Patricia Berman, Reinhold Heller, Elizabeth Prelinger, and Tina Yarborough, as well as in-depth documentation of Munch's art and career. It will accompany the most extensive exhibition of Munch's art in America in three decades.
Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art
by Ulf Kuster
from Hatje Cantz
Though he is more often viewed as a semi-lunatic Symbolist or proto-Expressionist, the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was in fact a forerunner of much Modern art. His works concentrate on the human dramas of love and death, and on contemporary conditions of claustrophobia and alienation--or what he called "the modern life of the soul"--frequently deploying contemporary effects to depict this condition. He worked in paint, printmaking and photography (though he once wrote that "the camera cannot compete with a brush and canvas, as long as it can't be used in heaven and hell"). Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art assesses the significance of Munch's oeuvre as a highly independent contribution to Modern art, drawing on more than 100 paintings, as well as 60 drawings and prints. In flouting the boundaries between the genres of painting and printmaking, in his work with photography and film, and through his emphasis on process--for example exposing his paintings to outdoor weather--Munch opened up a turn-of-the-century view of the future.
The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth
by Edvard Munch
from University of Wisconsin Press
Scandinavia's most famous painter, the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944), is probably best known for his painting The Scream, a universally recognized icon of terror and despair. (A version was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, in August 2004, and has not yet been recovered.) But Munch considered himself a writer as well as a painter. Munch began painting as a teenager and, in his young adulthood, studied and worked in Paris and Berlin, where he evolved a highly personal style in paintings and works on paper. And in diaries that he kept for decades, he also experimented with reminiscence, fiction, prose portraits, philosophical speculations, and surrealism. Known as an artist who captured both the ecstasies and the hellish depths of the human condition, Munch conveys these emotions in his diaries but also reveals other facets of his personality in remarks and stories that are alternately droll, compassionate, romantic, and cerebral.
This English translation of Edvard Munch's private diaries, the most extensive edition to appear in any language, captures the eloquent lyricism of the original Norwegian text. The journal entries in this volume span the period from the 1880s, when Munch was in his twenties, until the 1930s, reflecting the changes in his life and his work. The book is illustrated with fifteen of Munch's drawings, many of them rarely seen before. While these diaries have been excerpted before, no translation has captured the real passion and poetry of Munch's voice. This is a translation that lets Munch speak for himself and evokes the primal passion of his diaries. J. Gill Holland's exceptional work adds a whole new level to our understanding of the artist and the depth of his scream.
Edvard Munch: 1863-1944 (Basic Art)
by Ulrich Bischoff
from Taschen
Six Munch Cards (Small-Format Card Books)
by Edvard Munch
from Dover Publications
Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream
by Sue Prideaux
from Yale University Press
With unlimited access to tens of thousands of Munch’s papers, including his letters and diaries, Prideaux offers a portrait of the artist that is both intimate and moving. Munch sought to paint what he experienced rather than what he saw, and as his life often veered out of control, his experiences were painful. Yet he painted throughout his long life, creating strange and dramatic works in which hysteria and violence lie barely concealed beneath the surface. An extraordinary genius, Munch connects with an audience that reaches around the world and across more than a century.
Edvard Munch (World of Art)
by Josef Paul Hodin
from Thames & Hudson
After the Scream: The Late Paintings of Edvard Munch
by Elizabeth Prelinger
from Yale University Press
Expressing the anxieties of the late nineteenth century and the uncertainties of the modern world, Edvard Munch (1862-1944) often depicted in his works dangerously seductive fin de siècle women, sickly figures, and isolated characters in barren landscapes. These powerful, haunting paintings are widely recognized and revered, especially his iconic work The Scream (1893). Yet few admirers of Munch's early works realize that the artist lived well into the twentieth century and was enormously productive almost to the time of his death. This compelling book, focusing on more than sixty of Munch's later paintings, reveals the surprising, vibrant work of a fascinating man who never ceased to grow as an artist. Following decades of restless wandering among the capitals of Europe, Munch suffered a breakdown in Copenhagen in 1908 and retreated to his native Norway. In 1916 he purchased an estate near present-day Oslo where he lived and worked, mostly in his outdoor studio, for the next twenty years. Although Munch never abandoned a deeply introspective approach to image-making, in his later works he expressed a new attachment to the visible world, adopting a fresh range of subjects and a looser, brighter painting style. The pictures of this period-full of vivid color, evocative atmospheres, and visual drama-are a revelation, casting new light on one of the most complex artists of the modern era. :
Edvard Munch: Theme And Variation
by Christoph Asendorf
from Hatje Cantz Publishers
Loneliness, jealousy, love, and death. There is hardly another artist who explored the basic experiences of human life and his own personal angst so forcefully and in such unsettling images as the Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch. Munch's depictions of the crisis of the individual positioned his work as representative of modern consciousness, and the form he used to express this inner drama set him as a precursor and founder of expressionism. Munch's entire creative period is characterized by a continuous return to his central, melancholic motif of the human condition. In essays by well-known authors in the field, this volume provides a unique, complex, and expansive analysis of the emergence, development, and inner fabric of theme and variation in Munch's oeuvre. Different versions and renditions of paintings like The Scream, Melancholy, and Jealousy are presented side by side for a renewed view of these icons of modernism. Additionally, the book examines the close relationship between the artist's graphic and painterly works, acknowledging that Munch's interest in motif was not limited to painting, but that it translated meaningfully into printed media such as lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts, all documented in this book.
The Masterworks of Edvard Munch
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