Past Exhibition

Edvard Munch: A 150th Anniversary Tribute

The image shows the upper body and face of a woman in the center. Her shoulders appear slightly raised, and her arms are not visible. She has large eyes, a subtle nose, and a slightly open mouth. Her dark, wavy hair flows outward, surrounding her head. The woman's skin looks pale against the dark background, and she is unclothed. A reddish-brown halo-like band is around her head. In the bottom left, there is a small, ghostly figure with wide eyes and folded arms. The background has swirling dark blues and blacks, enclosed by a reddish-brown wood-grain pattern.
Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895, printed 1913/1914, color lithograph, The Epstein Family Collection, 2015.5.1

Details

  • Dates

    -

  • Locations

    West Building, Ground Floor, East Outer Tier Galleries
The image shows the upper body and face of a woman in the center. Her shoulders appear slightly raised, and her arms are not visible. She has large eyes, a subtle nose, and a slightly open mouth. Her dark, wavy hair flows outward, surrounding her head. The woman's skin looks pale against the dark background, and she is unclothed. A reddish-brown halo-like band is around her head. In the bottom left, there is a small, ghostly figure with wide eyes and folded arms. The background has swirling dark blues and blacks, enclosed by a reddish-brown wood-grain pattern.
Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895, printed 1913/1914, color lithograph, The Epstein Family Collection, 2015.5.1

This 150th birthday tribute to Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Norway’s most famed painter and printmaker, includes more than 20 renowned works from the Gallery’s collection, such as Geschrei (The Scream) (1895), Madonna (1895, printed 1912/1913), and a unique series of six variant impressions, Two Women on the Shore (1898, printed 1906–c. 1917 or later). Munch is today revered for his passionate visual expression of intense human experiences. “Art is your heart’s blood,” he said. His most famous image—a screaming figure, its eyes wide with horror—is an icon of anxiety, alienation, and anguish. Attraction, love, jealousy, and death were also recurring themes. In addition to these dramatic subjects, Munch made many telling portraits, tender visions of women, as well as sensitive studies of lovers, children, and adolescents. However, the real power of his art lies less in his biography than in his ability to extrapolate universal human experiences from his own life. In recent decades the National Gallery of Art has presented three major exhibitions of Munch’s work, the last in 2010.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Sponsor: The exhibition is made possible by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art.

Schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, May 19–August 11, 2013.

Attendance: 84,687

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