“Becoming Edvard Munch”

Munch, Anxiety, 1894.

Why would the Art Institute, of all places, mount a huge retrospective of Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist (1863–1944) whose Scream launched a thousand inflatable tchotchkes? We can answer the question in one word: prints. They’re the most fascinating pieces in this show, and many come from the Art Institute’s own collection. (The museum borrowed most of the other paintings and works on paper from Norway; there are about 150 in all.)

Munch’s interest in sex and loneliness, his use of flat, vivid areas of color, the puzzle-like way he fits his woodcuts together and his incorporation of the wooden blocks’ grain into some of his images make his prints seem innovative for today—not just the turn of the 20th century.

The ways in which disturbing works like The Scream (on view as a lithograph) have warped our perceptions of Munch inspired the show’s subtitle, “Influence, Anxiety, and Myth.” Curator Jay Clarke demonstrates that the artist’s supposed “neurasthenia” was to some extent a marketing ploy: He studies in Paris and makes serviceable Impressionist paintings until he taps into darker themes, reinventing the cheerful urban flaneurs he borrowed from Caillebotte as the staring, green-faced procession in Anxiety (pictured).

We admit that Madonna—a mesmerizing lithograph of a femme fatale encircled by swimming sperm and accompanied by a pissed-off fetus—is bizarre. But the works by Munch’s French, German and Scandinavian contemporaries whom Clarke includes in the show prove the artist and his peers addressed the same theme: fear that rapid social change leads to decadence and alienation. Munch just did it better.

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