Edvard Munch. A Poem of Life, Love and Death exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay - Our pictures

Have you heard about Edvard Munch? I bet you have, you know, he painted “The Scream”! The artist is most often reduced to this very famous painting, considered as an icon, and yet, he has a very interesting collection of little-known work. But the musée d'Orsay will rectify it with an exhibition running from September 20, 2022, to January 20, 2023, and called “Edvuard Munch, "A Poem of Life, Love and Death"”

This exhibition – co-curated with the Munch Museum in Oslo – is to make you discover the whole range of Munch’s art production, exploring “his journey – sixty years of creation – in all its duration and complexity”. All in all, over 150 pieces of work are displayed including about sixty paintings and a major collection of drawings, engravings and photographs. Works displayed alongside documents and manuscripts about “his incursions in the field of literature”.

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This is not the first incursion of the artist at the musée d'Orsay… in 1991, the Parisian institution already provided a dive into the artist’s singular universe through an exhibition, “Munch et la France”, focusing on the relationship between the artist and France, particularly focusing on his years in Paris. The latest exhibition to date in Paris was in 2011 at the Centre Pompidou that shone a light on the “modern eye” of Munch. It took ten more years to see the Norwegian painter again in Paris.

This new aside with the artist will enable “a global reading of his work shining a light on his great coherence” instead of opposing “symbolism from the late century to expressionism anchoring Munch in the modern scene”, as we could think. This is why the exhibition provides a themed route around cycles, “notion eminently symbolist that played a key part in his thought and art” around life, death, rebirth and so on, elaborating an “exclusive iconography, mostly inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Henri Bergson’s vitalist philosophies”.

Save the date, friends!