Word: munches
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Today "Madman" Munch is recognized as Scandinavia's most powerful artist, one of the key founders of German expressionism, second in power only to Vincent Van Gogh, and on a par with Toulouse-Lautrec as a graphic artist. His work was first shown on a major scale in the U.S. seven years ago (TIME, May 1, 1950) ; the second major retrospective has already been an outstanding hit at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and Minneapolis' Institute of Arts, will travel over the coming twelvemonth to Chicago, Cincinnati and San Francisco...
Love & Death. In his early days everything that Munch did only served to reinforce the opinion that he was a madman, a Bohemian, a dangerous freethinker. He was obsessed by two great themes, love and death, and chose to depict them in terms of man's paralysis and anxiety when faced with them as raw forces in nature. Much of his anxiety had its roots in his early semi-invalid youth. His mother died when he was five; his father, a military surgeon, gave way to morbid religiosity and insane outbursts at his children. Recalled Painter Munch bitterly...
When Edvard was 14. his elder sister Sophie died of tuberculosis. The delayed impact of his sister's death showed in Sick Child (opposite), a theme Munch first sketched when he was 22, continued obsessively in lithographs and oils. Owing some of its quality to the impressionist colors he had seen in Paris, it captures what he bore indelibly in his memory: "the pale head with bright red hair against the white pillow, the trembling lips, the transparent skin, the tired eyes...
Jealousy & Sensuality. Munch's development of his other theme-man's impotence before the power of ferocious womanhood-would seem ludicrous if it had not so obviously wrung anguish from the painter, driven him close to madness. The exact identification of the woman who so long tantalized Munch has never been officially revealed, but art historians now believe that the redhead who appears as a flaming, enigmatic image throughout Munch's work was a young Norwegian girl named Dagney Juell. She was Munch's model in Berlin before she moved over to live with Swedish Dramatist...
...While Munch's two obsessions drove him to greatness, he never learned to live with them. Shortly before his death at the age of 80, after he had won both honors and renown, he wearily told his doctor: "The last part of my life has been an effort to stand up. My path has always been along an abyss...