Edvard Munch exhibition opens at the Hunterian gallery, Glasgow
It was painted in 1893, but, more than 100 years later, Edvard Munch’s The Scream still manages to convey the anxiety, loneliness and alienation of modern life more succinctly than any other image, or the most gloomy Leonard Cohen song.
Few images have acquired such iconic status as the agonised, wailing figure standing on a road by the bay against a blood-red skyline. Along with the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, it is one of the only works that is instantly recognisable even to the most unenthusiastic art fan. The psychotic murderer in Wes Craven’s Scream movies wears a mask based on the figure in the painting. Macaulay Culkin’s pose in the Home Alone films is an irreverent reference to the anguished ghoul.
After the painting was stolen and damaged in a 2004 heist — it was recovered two years later — the Munch Museum in Oslo vowed never again to lend it out. Increasingly, prints of the picture, which are extremely sensitive to light, are also being safeguarded by the museum.
Visitors to an exhibition of Munch’s prints at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow will be the last to see one of the Oslo museum’s few lithographs of The Scream. The century-old print will not travel with the rest of the exhibition to its next date in Dublin. In future, those who want a dose of Munch melancholy will have to travel to Norway.
“It’s a great honour for Glasgow,” says Peter Black, curator of the exhibition.
“You get to see Munch’s prints so rarely because there are so few in British collections, but he was one of the finest printmakers of his generation.
“The interesting thing about him as a printmaker is that he was established as a painter before he turned to making prints. This means the imagery we see in his first prints in the mid-1890s is fully formed and mature — we don’t see any tentative early works.”..
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Few images have acquired such iconic status as the agonised, wailing figure standing on a road by the bay against a blood-red skyline. Along with the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, it is one of the only works that is instantly recognisable even to the most unenthusiastic art fan. The psychotic murderer in Wes Craven’s Scream movies wears a mask based on the figure in the painting. Macaulay Culkin’s pose in the Home Alone films is an irreverent reference to the anguished ghoul.
After the painting was stolen and damaged in a 2004 heist — it was recovered two years later — the Munch Museum in Oslo vowed never again to lend it out. Increasingly, prints of the picture, which are extremely sensitive to light, are also being safeguarded by the museum.
Visitors to an exhibition of Munch’s prints at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow will be the last to see one of the Oslo museum’s few lithographs of The Scream. The century-old print will not travel with the rest of the exhibition to its next date in Dublin. In future, those who want a dose of Munch melancholy will have to travel to Norway.
“It’s a great honour for Glasgow,” says Peter Black, curator of the exhibition.
“You get to see Munch’s prints so rarely because there are so few in British collections, but he was one of the finest printmakers of his generation.
“The interesting thing about him as a printmaker is that he was established as a painter before he turned to making prints. This means the imagery we see in his first prints in the mid-1890s is fully formed and mature — we don’t see any tentative early works.”..