Word: munch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Painter Edvard Munch wrote these words in Paris, in 1890, he was a slick, gloomy art student of 26 with the whole world still to conquer. By the time he died at 80, Munch's unabashedly emotional art was revered throughout northern Europe. Last week, for the first time, it got a comprehensive showing...
...exhibition of 171 paintings and prints had been sponsored by the government of Munch's native Norway. Split last week between Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, it will later tour the country for a year. The pictures deal mostly with sex and death, and some mid-century sophisticates may find them overdramatic. But others will take off their hats to them...
More Weight. The son of an aristocratic, violent, and fanatically religious father, Munch grew up in an atmosphere compounded of love, pride and fear. Illness continually interrupted his schooling until, at 17, he went to art school. A few years later he had put on weight and assurance, become the biggest, best and hardest-drinking young painter in Oslo's equivalent of Greenwich Village...
...skillful academic portraits and genre paintings (which looked rather like illustrations for Emile Zola) won Munch a government grant to study in Paris for three years. There he learned to paint sunlight almost as eloquently as the impressionist Pissarro, and to handle line and color with something like Gauguin's fluid grace. When he decided to forget the fashionable philosophy of art for art's sake and paint "living beings" instead, Munch was as well equipped for the job as any artist in Europe...
Less Brilliance. Realistic detail was the first thing to go: in painting a sick child, Munch began with a version showing the bed and the sickroom. His final version accented only the patient's waxen profile and the bowed head of her mother. Next Munch ditched the literary symbolism of the '90s which had encrusted his early works. The early Munch implied death's universality by showing a skeleton embracing a nude. Later he was satisfied to suggest the same theme by painting three girls on a bridge at evening, staring down into the dark, still water...