In Paris, an exhibition brings together a hundred works on canvas and on paper that illustrate the great diversity of the Norwegian painter, beyond his famous “CRI”.
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During his lifetime, Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was famous in Scandinavia, in Germanic countries and, to a lesser extent, in other European countries, to the First World War, after which his notoriety weakens. Today, he is universally known, but his work undergoes the sad simplification which reduces Van Gogh to the cut ear and Picasso to the Demoiselles of Avignon (1907).
In his case, it is the CRI (1893-1917), reproduced and diverted endlessly. He appears in the retrospective which is held at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, in the form of lithography by drawing the artist in 1895, without the hanging ostensibly evidenced. And for good reason: the purpose of the exhibition is to present, in a hundred works on canvas and on paper, a munch as complete as possible, far from the usual banalities.
If many of his best known works are there, such as “melancholy” (1891-1896) or evening on avenue Karl-Johan (1892), others, much less awaited, hold a place at least Equal, for example the panels of what is called the “Linde frieze”, named after the patron Max Linde who commanded it, in 1904, to the artist and that he refused when he discovered it because, according to him , it was not suitable instead of which it was to be placed, the room of her children.
Another demonstrative bias: present several versions of its recurring motifs, the vampire or young girls on a bridge, versions sometimes separated from several decades, and thus show how, even in the interwar period, Munch experiences Different ways, with inventions and stylistic back and forth that have disconcerted – euphemism – criticism and lovers of his time.
To stick to a strict chronological order would therefore not make much sense and the exhibition commissioner, Claire Bernardi, frees it, preferring her vis-à-vis and neighborhoods which are as much ‘Invitations to compare and be surprised. This attention to the creative process and its rhythms is all the more supported since sometimes several states of the same subject treated by painting, drawing, lithography and wood engraving.
From one to the other, the changes can go as well towards a purification of the form as towards the additions of additional elements. There is no other rule than that of the permanent experimentation, this until the last years and a self-portrait of 1940-1943 where Munch shows himself from the front and in profile simultaneously, working by hatching and snipes of bitter colors with Picassian brutality.
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