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Saturday, July 29, 2017

Edvard Munch in San Francisco

Organized by SFMOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Munch Museum, Oslo, this exhibition includes treasured paintings from the artist’s own collection, six of them never before exhibited in the United States.  I thought it was an astounding collection of his works.  I have seen some Munch in my past.  I saw the Museum of Modern Art exhibit in New York in 1978 twice and I love the Ernest Thiel collection of Munch's work in Stockholm.
There are enough paintings in this exhibit to really get a good idea of the painter himself.  He is deeply affected by both anxiety and death, and that leaps out of his work in every one of the multiple rooms throughout the exhibit.
Here is what the museum says about this exhibition:
A master by the age of 30, Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was among the most celebrated and controversial artists of his generation. But, as he confessed in 1939, his true breakthrough came very late in life. Featuring 44 landmark compositions about art, love, mortality, and the ravages of time, Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed uses the artist’s last significant self-portrait as a starting point to reassess a lifetime of painting. Together, these profoundly human and technically daring artworks reveal Munch as a tireless innovator and an artist as revolutionary in his maturity as he was in his breakthrough years.  This is definitely worth a trip to San Francisco to see.  Really spectacular.

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