EDVARD MUNCH
ANGST / ANXIETY
ARoS Kunstmuseum
Aros Allé 2 - Århus
4/10/2012 - 17/2/2013
Several years’ work to present a comprehensive and substantial Munch exhibition at ARoS in Denmark has now led to success. With EDVARD MUNCH – ANGST/ANXIETY original art works have been brought together from Rasmus Meyers Samling in Bergen, the Munch Museum and Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo along with paintings from The National Gallery of Denmark and graphics from the unique Pål Gundersen Collection. The exhibition presents almost 100 works of art and encompasses major works such as the paintings Evening in Karl Johan, Women in Three Stages, Melancholy, Jealousy and Starry Night along with graphic masterpieces such as Angst, The Scream, Vampire and Madonna.
ANGST/ANXIETY takes the visitor on a journey through Munch’s life as told through his art - from his early years in the 1880s to his hermit’s existence at Ekely on the Oslo Fjord and his death in 1944. Angst was something Munch knew from his childhood, which was filled with sickness and death in the family. Sickness first took his mother’s life, then his sister Sophie’s, and at the age of 13 Edvard Munch was himself in danger of dying from tuberculosis. Munch is not a traditional artist who paints what he sees in the visible world. It is his own experiences of the family exposed to sickness, loss, anxiety and death to which he devotes his painting. Munch himself put it this way: “I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.”
ANXIETY AS LEITMOTIF
Anxiety was a leitmotif throughout Edvard Munch’s life, and in his art we find angst when confronted with life, with human beings and with death. 2013 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The title of the exhibition, EDVARD MUNCH –Angst/ANXIETY is also a nod in the direction of Søren Kierkegaard and his work from 1844, The Concept of Anxiety, which was also included in Munch’s library. Anxiety was deeply embedded in Munch and is also expressed in his many writings with theirthoughts on life and art. He himself says, “I try to paint life’s insoluble puzzles, and the way in whichit plays with us human beings. I try to paint life itself. As it is lived, love, hatred, pain and anxietyfrom first to last. I try to give expression to my feeling of loneliness and fear, fear of living, fear ofdying, of the interplay and also the lack of interplay between people.”
MUNCH BECOMES MUNCH
Throughout the 1880s, Munch painted a large number of portraits and pictures of his family in anaturalistic indoor setting. Around 1890 he changed his scene and developed his own symbolist, expressive idiom. By introducing the vast space of nature as a stage setting, he gained the possibilityof reinforcing the psychological expression and thus escalating the entire mood of the picture.Nature is brought to life and becomes a visual echo of the mental state of the figures. It was in theyears from 1892 to his mental breakdown in 1908 that he created most of his famous life’s work.
INSISTENT, POWERFUL WORKS
Edvard Munch’s works are about our own existence and our emotions, about love, longing,melancholy, sorrow, jealousy and not least anxiety. Munch’s uncompromising expression struck thebourgeoisie of the time as provocative and repulsive, and even today Munch’s paintings areintrusively powerful in relation to the idiom of modernism and contemporary art.Munch was able to build bridges between the naturalism of the 1880s through the symbolism of the 1890s to the expressionism and more coloristic visual art of the 20th century. His life’s work hastoday achieved the status of a Norwegian cultural treasure, and Munch must be designated thegreatest and most famous of Scandinavian artists – an artist of worldwide significance with his basein things Nordic.
THE EXHIBITION
EDVARD MUNCH – ANGST/ANXIETY is an exhibition mounted in nine galleries thematising differentperiods in Munch’s anxiety-filled life; they include “Death in the Smoking room”, “The Hermit”, “TheCrisis Years”, “Jealousy” and love. In addition to taking the visitor through Munch’s oeuvre, thestaging and the nine themes also provide an insight into Munch’s life from his early years to hisdeath at Ekely.
