In “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking”—at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge from March 7 to July 27, 2025—people face away from us on bridges, at the shore, in a forest. The Norwegian artist focuses on couples or pairs in anxious, lonely, isolating places. You can feel chilly breezes wafting through.
Munch (1863-1944) began painting in Kristiania (now Oslo), but also spent time in Berlin and Paris. His style was modern and blunt, rough-hewn, with expressionist colors, sometimes with a dreamy blurriness, edging into abstraction, in his nearly 1,800 paintings, mainly portraits and landscapes. But he’s best known for his psychologically-charged images—most famously his 1893 composition “The Scream” (not here).
His 1896 lithograph “Death in the Sickroom” (printed c. 1906-17) depicts the young Munch and his stunned family gathered around his 15-year-old sister Johanne Sophie, who had just succumbed to tuberculosis in 1877. Loss seems to haunt Munch’s artworks.
A fellow holds his head in his hands along a seashore in Munch’s 1896 woodcut “Evening. Melancholy.” A hollow-eyed couple face to face along a shore under cloudy skies in his 1986 lithograph “Attraction.” Other titles include “The Kiss,” “Angst” and “Desire.”
Munch’s 1894 painting “Madonna” (not here) depicted a haloed nude woman, turning the mother of Jesus into a sexy lady. Munch revisited the motif in lithographs from 1895 and 1902 here, which add a frightened-looking fetus in the bottom corner and a border swimming with sperm. Curators argue that Munch is linking “a woman’s sexuality with violence and fear. … It is unclear why Munch added these features to the print, but they reflect a growing misogyny in European art and culture that erupted in response to progressive shifts in gender roles.”
You get the sense of a guy following a parallel track to the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, an artist boiling with sexual desire but repressing it as gothic tales. Munch was not above giving his audience what it wanted, as in his 1895-1902 prints of a lady “Vampire.” “The trope of women as monsters was hugely popular at the turn of the century,” the curators inform.
However, the point of “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” is that Munch often explored the same subjects in paintings and prints, with different colors and different tones, “to investigate their distinctive possibilities,” write the curators—the Harvard museum’s Elizabeth M. Rudy and Lynette Roth with assistance from curatorial fellow Peter Murphy.
Munch usually developed his ideas first in paintings, then made prints reproducing them. But he would adjust, revise, rework the printing woodblocks, etching plates and lithographic stones (several of which are included in the exhibition), then make a new painting, then design new prints, back and forth between media. Munch would return to locations to repeatedly paint the same landscapes. When he sold paintings, he’d often paint a copy—“sometimes over decades.”
drypoint printed in black ink on white wove paper.
Woodcut printed in four colors of ink on tan wove paper.
1899. Jigsaw woodblock.
Woodcut printed in at least four colors of ink with additions in oil paint on cream
wove paper.
The opening gallery evidences the extent of this with multiple paintings and prints of “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)” that Munch created over more than four decades— beginning with an 1892 painting, an etching two years later, woodcuts beginning in 1899, and two more paintings, the last created in the mid-1930s. The exhibit focuses on the formal experimentation (and the loss of the initial painting when it was destroyed in an explosion on a ship bringing his art to an exhibition). “In his painting practice, as with his prints, these variants allowed him to revisit a favored subject while continuously exploring new technical paths to express it,” the curators write.
The exhibit draws on loans from the Munchmuseet in Oslo and from the Harvard museum’s own collection. Over the years, Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus have gifted and assisted with the purchases of 117 Munch artworks for the Harvard museum, culminating with a 2025 gift of two paintings and 62 prints, so that the museum now owns 142 Munch artworks (8 paintings, 134 prints), “one of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the United States,” they say.
The curators write, “Munch’s reputation as an innovative printmaker was due in large part to his use of the jigsaw technique in woodcut”—cutting up a single board into pieces to allow him to ink different parts of the image in different colors and intensities—and his “combination prints,” printed from multiple woodblocks or lithographic stones.
But before we read too much meaning into Munch’s printmaking variations, the curators note that the majority of his estimated 30,000 prints were made by professional printers, frequently by long distance via correspondence, rendering “individual authorship in much of his work into perpetual question.”
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