Munch and Modernity

In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Munch Museum de Oslo, the Tate Modern in London presents a retrospective exhibition that reveals an unknown facet of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch: his love for the cinema and photography as key expressions of new technologies.

Entitled Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, the retrospective was inaugurated last June and will remain open to the public until October 14 of 2012. The goal of the organizers of the exhibition was to subtract Munch from his Nineteenth Century context and proclaim him an artist of the Twentieth Century and its modernity.

The show consists of 140 artworks—60 paintings, 50 photographs, and several films and sculptures—by the Scandinavian who was born in Løten, Norway, in 1863, and died in 1944. Each work reflects a period of experimentation in search of new ways to capture images. Cinema and photographs are present in some of his works through diagonals and moving figures that scape the plane, like in Workers Returning Home.

Munch's iconic work, The Scream, is not present in this exhibition. There are four versions of the famous image and one of them was recently sold at auction for a record USD 119,922,500.00, the highest amount ever paid for an artwork sold at auction. But the exhibition does include other great works by the Scandinavian master, like The Sick Child (1907) and The Girls on the Bridge (1927), both works created during the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In these Munch captured the deep sadness, anxiety, and spiritual turmoil that marked his life and work, as well as his interest and fascination for the passing of time and human deterioration.