18 March – 15 July 2007

The Fondation Beyeler is devoting a great retrospective to the Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). It is the first comprehensive exhibition of this pathfinder of modern art to be held in Switzerland for a good twenty years. As predecessor and founder of Expressionism, Munch must be counted among the most significant artists of all times.

Munch’s concern with loneliness, love and death is of incomparable urgency. His art reflects the crisis, transience and eclipse of the individual in the Age of Industrialization. His oeuvre was interrupted by existential caesuras, yet at the same time developed with inexorable logic.

The exhibition focuses for the first time on the question of modernism in Munch’s art, and shows him to have been a master of materials and artistic experiment. Its theme is the rediscovery of an apparently familiar oeuvre, and unites icons of art history such as The Sick Child, Madonna, Melancholy, Vampire, Puberty, and Self-Portrait in Hell with many works rarely or never shown since the artist’s death, from nearly fifty public and over fifty private collections. Munch’s highly variegated works attest to his not only idiosyncratic but seminal contribution to modern art. For the first time, an important and innovative trait of his oeuvre, the emergence and disappearance of motifs, is given thematic status in a Munch presentation.

Munch’s handling of picture support and painting materials was highly unconventional. He transcended the traditional borderlines between media such as printmaking, drawing, photography, collage and painting. This helped him to represent growth and decay, creation and destruction through a range of devices extending from the dissolution of figures and their merger with the background to strange intersections with the picture edge and scratched paint surfaces, all the way down to exposure of many works to the ravages of rain and snow. By means of what he called this “acid test,” Munch not only integrated the factor of chance in his art but made natural decomposition a component of the creative process. In his late work, he raised process and temporality, as an actual, physical disappearance of matter, to a universal expression of transitoriness in his material-based modernity. In this way, as early as the turn of the century, Munch opened the door to the development of art in the advancing twentieth century.

On view are approximately 130 paintings, and 80 drawings and graphic works from every phase of the artist’s career. The exhibition is divided into seven chapters. It begins with Munch’s early break with Scandinavian naturalism, in works like The Sick Child (1880–82), whose public presentation in 1886 caused a storm of indignation. In spite of their negative reviews and the accusation that Munch’s paintings were “roughly executed” and “half-finished designs,” the critics were forced early on to recognize his pioneering role and the

truth of his artistic visions. Munch’s involvement with painting experiments during his Berlin years (1892–95), presented in the second chapter, led to a marked change in style and incomparably expressive imagery. His previous motifs, influenced by French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, made way for evocations of the existential angst, loneliness and despair that had begun to pervade Western civilization. There emerged Madonna, Puberty,

The Kiss, and Vampire, major works that would accompany Munch throughout his life and later be combined into The Frieze of Life. The third chapter addresses the incredible experiments in printmaking Munch undertook in his Paris years, 1896–97. His paintings subsequently grew larger in scale and flatter in treatment. After unquiet years of personal crisis and wide travels in Europe, which went hand in hand with a characteristic stylistic change, Munch’s works took on a unique intensity of palette and expressive force, as the exhibition’s fourth chapter (1898–1909) compellingly shows. Even after recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1908, Munch continued his involvement with photography and motion (1909–1919), and subsequently with silent film (chapter five). His late work (1920–1944), subject of the sixth chapter, was marked by an astonishing dissolution and disappearance of material and motif, a logical continuation of his earlier work. The final chapter comprises an extensive presentation of the late graphic art.

The exhibition includes loans from numerous American and European museums, as well as a large number of previously inaccessible private loans. The exhibition was curated by Dieter Buchhart, in collaboration with Christoph Vitali, Ulf Küster, and Philippe Büttner.

The superb loans originate from the Munch-museet in Oslo; the Bergen Art Museum; the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo; the Göteborgs konstmuseum; the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen; the Ateneum Art Museum; the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Tate London; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Sprengel Museum, Hanover; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; the Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal; the Sammlung Würth, Künzelsau; the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster; the Neue Pinakothek, Munich; the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna; the Národni Gallery in Prague; the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid; the Kunstmuseum Basel; and the Kunsthaus Zürich, as well as from numerous private collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a copiously illustrated catalogue, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, containing essays by Dieter Buchhart, Øivind Storm Bjerke, Philippe Büttner, and Ulf Küster, as well as chapter introductions. 228 pages with 258 full-color reproductions. Price CHF 68.