Exhibitions
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst British Museum to 21 July Hammershøi Musée Jacquemart-andré, Paris to 22 July
Vilhelm Hammershøi and Edvard Munch were born five months apart, in 1863 and 1864, and have come to be regarded as the foremost Danish and Norwegian artists of their generation.
I can find no evidence that they met, but surely they must have done, in Copenhagen, Berlin or Paris, where they moved in the same artistic circles. However, their work could not provide a greater contrast; Scandi lumineux to Scandi noir, perhaps.
Where Hammershøi is the painter of empty landscapes, silent interiors and gentle melancholy, Munch declared, ‘One shall no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They will be people who are alive, who breathe and feel, suffer and love.’ And he created The Scream, The Vampire and The Sick Child.
About 40 years ago, large prices were paid at auction for Munch prints, but it was an unstable market, as a Christie’s specialist explained to me after he had sold a fine copy of The Sick Child. Apparently, until then, the top of the market had depended almost entirely on two rich individuals who each wanted a first-rate example of every print. Just before that last sale, one collector announced that he had achieved his ambition, and the other was known to be very close. Assuming their interest, The Sick Child had been highly estimated and, without them, it would probably have been unsold, signalling the end of the boom. However, by chance a passer-by came in to the view to shelter from the rain and fell in love with the print. He had never heard of Munch, but was rich and hooked. The market continued to rise.
Since then, The Scream, with its quaking, sperm-like figure aghast at nature’s shriek, has become one of the world’s most recognisable images. There are two painted versions, two pastels and about four dozen lithographs, some coloured by Munch. There are emojis, and it has appeared in The Simpsons. If not as universal, several other prints, including the orgasmic Madonna and The Sick Child, are now widely known.
Munch did not like parting with his
creations and, on his death in 1944, he left 1,150 paintings and some 18,000 prints to the city of Oslo. Fifty prints, more than half this exhibition, have been lent to the BM by the Munch Museum, which will reopen next year in a new 13-storey building next to the Norwegian National Gallery. The show is a marvellous taster.
Hammershøi was largely forgotten outside Denmark from his early death in 1916 to the 1990s but, since his rediscovery by Jane Abdy and Christopher Wood, he has become greatly loved. The calm interiors, often with his wife Ida in back-view, are now familiar, but the Jacquemart-andré show also gives us portraits and landscapes. Fittingly, it is in a series of small, intimate rooms and, if Munch speaks very loudly to our current situation, Hammershøi offers us muchneeded balm.