The Musée d’Orsay is devoting a retrospective until January 22 to the painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944), too often reduced to a single work, “The Scream”, painted in 1893. The exhibition “Edvard Munch – A poem by life, love and death” intends to dive into the work of the Norwegian artist over the course of his 60 years of creation, through a hundred works, including 50 major paintings. Here are five of them to fully understand the style of the artist.
Madone – 1895-1896
The Madonna is one of Edvard Munch’s best-known works, of which he gave five versions, painted between 1894 and 1897. It represents a woman in a lascivious posture, taking up the codes of religious iconography that the painter ” often associated with the macabre”, notes the exhibition, which reveals a lithograph printed in black and colored by hand (photo).
Despair. Sick mood at sunset – 1892
Qualified by Edvard Munch as the “first Cry”, this canvas baptized “Despair. Sick Mood at Sunset”, painted in 1892, contains all the ingredients that the artist exploited a year later in his best-known work. As in The Scream, he paints a glowing sky there and already announces the composition of his masterpiece: a character located in the foreground on a pontoon whose rail crosses the canvas.
Vampire – 1895
The feeling of love and suffering often coexist in the work of Edvard Munch, who regularly showed a vision of women that was both sensual and dangerous. In 1895, he notably signed “Vampire”. A paint originally titled “Love and Pain”, featuring a female figure holding a man in her arms, which he renamed “Vampire”, taking up the interpretation of one of his friends who saw in this representation. the image of “the woman-vampire who sucks the life force from man”, underlines the exhibition.
The Sick Child – 1896
Between 1885 and 1926, Edvard Munch gave five versions of “The Sick Child”. A painting inspired by a tragic episode in his life, the death of his sister Sophie from tuberculosis at the age of fifteen, when he himself was only thirteen years old and his mother also died of consequences of this disease nine years earlier, in 1868.
Presented to the public in 1886, the first version of this painting caused a scandal.
Young girls on the bridge – 1927
The image of young girls evolving on a bridge is one of the recurring themes of Edvard Munch, of which he signed many variations between the end of the 1890s, until 1935. Characters that the painter notably made evolve in age at the through his creations, placing them in the cycle of life and death, another theme dear to the artist.
