{"id":26262,"date":"2025-03-30T15:21:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-30T19:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=26262"},"modified":"2025-03-31T19:41:27","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T23:41:27","slug":"munch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2025\/03\/30\/munch\/","title":{"rendered":"The Techniques Behind Edvard Munch\u2019s Anxious Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In \u201cEdvard Munch: Technically Speaking\u201d<\/a>\u2014at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge from March 7 to July 27, 2025\u2014people 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s best known for his psychologically-charged images\u2014most famously his 1893 composition \u201cThe Scream\u201d (not here).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His 1896 lithograph \u201cDeath in the Sickroom\u201d (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\u2019s artworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fellow holds his head in his hands along a seashore in Munch\u2019s 1896 woodcut \u201cEvening. Melancholy.\u201d A hollow-eyed couple face to face along a shore under cloudy skies in his 1986 lithograph \u201cAttraction.\u201d Other titles include \u201cThe Kiss,\u201d \u201cAngst\u201d and \u201cDesire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Munch\u2019s 1894 painting \u201cMadonna\u201d (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 \u201ca woman\u2019s sexuality with violence and fear. \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Melancholy III,” 1902, printed later. Woodcut printed in four colors of ink on tan wove paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cVampire.\u201d \u201cThe trope of women as monsters was hugely popular at the turn of the century,\u201d the curators inform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the point of \u201cEdvard Munch: Technically Speaking\u201d is that Munch often explored the same subjects in paintings and prints, with different colors and different tones, \u201cto investigate their distinctive possibilities,\u201d write the curators\u2014the Harvard museum\u2019s Elizabeth M. Rudy and Lynette Roth with assistance from curatorial fellow Peter Murphy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019d often paint a copy\u2014\u201csometimes over decades.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” 1906\u20138. Oil on canvas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” 1894. Etching and
drypoint printed in black ink on white wove paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” 1899, printed c. 1917.
Woodcut printed in four colors of ink on tan wove paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones,”
1899. Jigsaw woodblock.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” 1899, printed c. 1917.
Woodcut printed in at least four colors of ink with additions in oil paint on cream
wove paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The opening gallery evidences the extent of this with multiple paintings and prints of \u201cTwo Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)\u201d that Munch created over more than four decades\u2014 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). \u201cIn 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,\u201d the curators write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibit draws on loans from the Munchmuseet in Oslo and from the Harvard museum\u2019s 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), \u201cone of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the United States,\u201d they say<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Winter in Krager\u00f8,” 1915. Oil on canvas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The curators write, \u201cMunch\u2019s reputation as an innovative printmaker was due in large part to his use of the jigsaw technique in woodcut\u201d\u2014cutting up a single board into pieces to allow him to ink different parts of the image in different colors and intensities\u2014and his \u201ccombination prints,\u201d printed from multiple woodblocks or lithographic stones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before we read too much meaning into Munch\u2019s 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 \u201cindividual authorship in much of his work into perpetual question.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2025 or the respective creato<\/em>rs.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait,” 1911\u201312. Woodcut printed in black ink on cream Japanese paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Munch
Munch exhibition at Beyer & Sohn in Leipzig, 1903.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” 1906\u20138, oil on canvas, in “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” at the Harvard Art Museums. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Inger in a Red Dress,” 1894. Oil paint, oil pastel, and watercolor on board.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Vampire II,” 1895, from the portfolio “Speilet (The Mirror).” Lithograph printed in black ink on cream wove paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Vampire II,” 1895\u20131902. Lithograph and woodcut printed in five colors of ink on cream Japanese paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Madonna,” 1895-1902. Lithograph printed in black ink with blue and red watercolor on thin cream wove paper mounted on cardboard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Death in the Sickroom,” 1896. Lithographic stone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Evening. Melancholy I),” 1896, jigsaw woodblock.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Boys Bathing,” 1896. Mezzotint and drypoint printed in four colors of ink on cream laid paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, Printed by M. W. Lassally, “Old Fisherman (Hans Dalen),” 1897, printed later. Woodcut with gouges printed on Japan paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Melancholy II,” 1898. Woodcut printed in at least four colors of ink on tan wove paper. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Woman’s Head against the Shore,” 1899. Woodcut printed in turquoise-green and pale and dark orange inks on off-white wove paper<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Fertility, or Man and Woman under an Apple Tree,” printed 1900\u20131901(?), hand colored 1943. Woodcut printed in black ink with additions in watercolor on cream Asian paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Train Smoke,” 1910. Oil on canvas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “The Girls on the Bridge,” 1918. Woodcut and lithograph printed in blue, dark blue, red-orange, green, and yellow ink on buff wove paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Edvard
Edvard Munch, “Birgitte III,” 1930-1931. Woodcut with hand coloring on wove paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In \u201cEdvard Munch: Technically Speaking\u201d\u2014at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge from March 7 to July 27, 2025\u2014people 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26304,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[1321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26262"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26310,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26262\/revisions\/26310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}