Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed

Garrels, Gary, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff, editors; preface by Karl Ove Knausgaard; essays by Patricia G. Berman, Allison Morehead, Richard Shiff, and Mille Stein (2017)

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Description

In Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed, the elderly Edvard Munch stands like a sentinel in his bedroom/studio surrounded by the works that constitute his artistic legacy. A powerful meditation on art, mortality, and the ravages of time, this haunting painting conjures up the Norwegian master’s entire career. It also calls into question certain long-held myths surrounding Munch—that his work declined in quality after his nervous breakdown in 1908–9, that he was a commercially naive social outsider, and that he had only a limited role in the development of European modernism.

The present volume aims to rebut such misconceptions by freshly examining this enigmatic artist. In the preface, the renowned novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard considers Munch as a fellow creative artist and seeks to illuminate the source of his distinctive talent. The four groundbreaking essays that follow present numerous surprising insights on matters ranging from Munch’s radical approach to self-portraiture to his role in promoting his own career. They also reveal that Munch has been an abiding inspiration to fellow painters, both during his lifetime and up to the present; artists as varied as Jasper Johns, Bridget Riley, Asger Jorn, and Georg Baselitz have acknowledged his influence.

More than sixty of Munch’s paintings, dating from the beginning of his career in the early 1880s to his death in 1944, are accompanied by a generous selection of comparative illustrations and a chronology of the artist’s life. The result is an intimate, provocative study that casts new light on Munch’s unique oeuvre—an oeuvre that Knausgaard describes as having gone “where only a painting can go, to that which is beyond words, but which is still part of our reality.”

Table of contents

Directors’ Foreword

Acknowledgments

Lenders to the Exhibition

Preface: On Edvard Munch
Karl Ove Knausgaard

Introduction
Gary Garrels, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff

The Untimely Face of Munch
Allison Morehead

Patterns in Munch’s Painting Technique
Mille Stein

The Business of Being Edvard Munch
Patricia G. Berman

Munch on the Periphery
Richard Shiff

Plates

Chronology
Michèle Wijegoonaratna

Notes

Works in the Exhibition

For Further Reading

Index

Photograph Credits

About the authors

Gary Garrels is Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Jon-Ove Steihaug is Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Munch Museum, Oslo.

Sheena Wagstaff is Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is the author of the best-selling series of novels My Struggle.

Patricia G. Berman is Theodora L. and Stanley H. Feldberg Professor of Art, Wellesley College.

Allison Morehead is Associate Professor, Queen’s University Department of Art History and Art Conservation.

Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and Director of the Center for the Study of Modernism, The University of Texas at Austin.

Mille Stein is Paintings Conservator and Senior Researcher Emerita, Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU).

Press reviews

Format magazine

"Takes a fresh look at the work of Edvard Munch, attempting to challenge previous views of the Norwegian artist’s work."

New York Review of Books

“a useful essay by Mille Stein on Munch’s technique...will help visitors to understand the extent and significance of his lifelong experimentation in various media.”

Publishers Weekly

“informative essays…offer insight into Munch’s career…abundant reproductions of Munch’s paintings”

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Exhibition

Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed

November 14, 2017–February 4, 2018

Although Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) attained notoriety early in his career for his haunting depictions of human anxiety and alienation that reflected modern experience, he believed that his artistic breakthrough occurred much later in life, beginning at age 50. Throughout his career, Munch regularly revisited subjects from his earlier years, exploring them with renewed inspiration and intensity over time. Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–43)—with its themes of desire, mortality, isolation, and angst—was one of the final such works and it serves as a lens through which Munch's oeuvre can be reassessed.

This exhibition will feature approximately 45 of the artist's landmark compositions created over a span of six decades, including 16 self-portraits and works that have never before been seen in the United States. More than half of the works on view were part of Munch's personal collection and remained with him throughout his life.

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