Edvard Munch: Master Prints

National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Through Oct. 31

This exhibit of Edvard Munch’s lithographs and prints is “a fascinating look into the mind of an artist struggling with insanity,” said Sophie Gilbert in Washingtonian.com. Among the masterworks are several versions of the artist’s most famous image, The Scream, which Munch claimed was inspired by an anxiety attack he suffered in 1895. “It’s the expression of horror that’s famous, but the vertical lines in the work seem to draw the eye down toward an imaginary hell.” In the background, two uncaring figures walk in the other direction. A “persistent obsessive,” Munch often reworked the same image in multiple prints. “Darker than van Gogh and more visceral than Caravaggio,” Munch’s bleak visions reflect both the artist’s omnipresent angst and his compulsive attempts to come to grips with it.

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Actually, even works that seem like “effusions from a tortured soul” may have been carefully crafted to create that effect, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. Munch often used prints to systematically experiment with the expressive options of a given image. One wistful black-and-white 1895 lithograph, based on his painting Love and Pain, “shows a couple collapsing in the throes of a hopeless romance.” In later versions, though, he heightened the “emotional pitch” through such lurid effects as turning the woman’s hair a blood-like red. Over time, we see the scene “go from being a remote and sober recollection of a moment in the past to becoming almost cinematic in its immediacy.” Besides letting Munch experiment, such prints also gave the artist new material to sell to collectors. “Though we tend to think of Edvard Munch as the Neurotic from Norway,” that may have been, in part, a public persona created by a savvy salesman.