Munch By Himself

Published to accompany the exhibition held at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 19 February - 15 May 2005, Munch, Museet, Oslo, 11 June - 28 August 2005, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1 October - 11 December 2005.

The biography of the artist who created the most haunting icon of the twentieth century

Scandinavia's most famous painter, the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944), is probably best known for his painting The Scream, a universally recognized icon of terror and despair. (A version was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, in August 2004, and has not yet been recovered.) But Munch considered himself a writer as well as a painter. Munch began painting as a teenager and, in his young adulthood, studied and worked in Paris and Berlin, where he evolved a highly personal style in paintings and works on paper. And in diaries that he kept for decades, he also experimented with reminiscence, fiction, prose portraits, philosophical speculations, and surrealism. Known as an artist who captured both the ecstasies and the hellish depths of the human condition, Munch conveys these emotions in his diaries but also reveals other facets of his personality in remarks and stories that are alternately droll, compassionate, romantic, and cerebral. This English translation of Edvard Munch's private diaries, the most extensive edition to appear in any language, captures the eloquent lyricism of the original Norwegian text. The journal entries in this volume span the period from the 1880s, when Munch was in his twenties, until the 1930s, reflecting the changes in his life and his work. The book is illustrated with fifteen of Munch's drawings, many of them rarely seen before. While these diaries have been excerpted before, no translation has captured the real passion and poetry of Munch's voice. This is a translation that lets Munch speak for himself and evokes the primal passion of his diaries. J. Gill Holland's exceptional work adds a whole new level to our understanding of the artist and the depth of his scream.

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch’s painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer. Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a brilliant and personal examination of the legacy of one of the world’s most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself.

Ce catalogue d'exposition exxplore la relation entre les artistes Jasper Johns et Edvard Munch.

This fascinating exploration of the life and art of Edvard Munch draws from the artist's copious journal entries, notes, letters, literary exercises, and photographs to present a groundbreaking approach to understanding one of the most compelling Expressionist painters. Like many artists, Munch did not limit himself to visual expression. For much of his career, he wrote almost as much as he painted, and many of his major art works began as literary sketches. However, as this gorgeous and unusual volume makes clear, Munch did not write to explain his art, but as an extension of it. Poul Erik Tojner's careful and insightful analysis of Munch's writings, many of which have been preserved in the Munch Museum in Oslo, reveals the deep connection between writing and painting in Munch's life. Ingeniously organized by themes, the book presents beautiful reproductions of paintings, prints, and journal excerpts as they deepen our understanding of this compelling artist and provide interesting clues to the themes he returned to again and again.

Edvard Munch is Norway's most important painter and graphic artist and the only one to exercise a decisive influence on European art. A forerunner of Expressionism, his works were influenced by an early life tortured by sickness, insanity, rejection and