The Modern Eye

The exhibition highlights how Edvard Munch’s fascination for photography, film and stage design influenced his paintings. The artist’s own works of photography and film are featured as well, and illustrate how Munch treated the same motif through drawing, photography, painting and sculpture.

“Art is our lifeblood”

Edvard Munch was a pioneer of expressionism, an artistic movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that put the artist’s own feelings at the centre of the work. In her opening remarks this evening, Crown Princess Mette-Marit quoted Munch’s statement about his own approach to art:

“I don’t believe in art that doesn’t force its way to the surface through man’s need to open his heart. All art, literature and music must be created from the artist’s lifeblood. Art is our lifeblood."

Munch made his international breakthrough with what came to be known as the “scandal exhibition” in Berlin in 1892. The highly subjective form of expression clashed dramatically with the dominant artistic direction in Germany at the time, and Munch gained notoriety overnight.

“120 years later,” said the Crown Princess, “we are gathered here today at Schirn Kunstalle. We are celebrating a painter who put the individual at centre stage, who showed us what it means to be human in all our complexity. A painter who has inspired artists all over the world with his timeless work.
This 120 year-long journey is worth bearing in mind when we look at, and judge, contemporary art.”

Cooperation with Pompidou

The exhibition is a cooperative effort with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it was on display until 9 January of this year. Now the exhibition will be shown in Schirn Kunsthalle until 13 May.

Her Majesty The Queen is the patron for the exhibition, and she attended the preview to the exhibition in Paris on September 2011.