By Carol Vogel
When people think of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, they think of “The Scream,” his celebrated depiction of angst and existential dread that has been endlessly reproduced, and made even more famous when a version of it sold for nearly $120 million at Sotheby’s in New York last month, becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.
But there is a whole other side to Munch that Nicholas Cullinan, curator of international Modern art at the Tate Modern, has been exploring with colleagues from the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Their findings are chronicled in the exhibition “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye,” which opens at the Tate Modern here on Thursday.
That the exhibition does not include one image of “The Scream” is deliberate, Mr. Cullinan said. All but the one that sold at Sotheby’s are in Norwegian museums and do not travel. “It’s kind of like a Norwegian Mona Lisa, and there was no Mona Lisa in the Leonardo show,” Mr. Cullinan said, referring to the blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery in London that closed in February. “We are looking at Munch’s career as a whole, examining the artist’s paintings and drawings made in the first half of the 20th century and his interest in the rise of photography, film and innovations in theater.”
While Munch is seen mostly as a 19th-century painter, he produced much of his groundbreaking work in the early years of the 20th century. The show will include some 160 works.
“Many people don’t realize that Munch died in 1944, the same year as Kandinsky and Mondrian, and those are his peers,” Mr. Cullinan said. “It’s a slightly anachronistic idea that his work is confined to the late 19th century.”