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SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010 Edvard Munch’s singular obsessions get detailed scrutiny art reviewfrom E1
(Munch suffered much agony over an affair with a married woman.) The man, respectably dressed in a suit, rests his head in the lap of a beautiful nude, who leans over and buries her face in his neck as her hair falls over his shoulders. It is a tender, poignant image of shared sorrow — until Munch decides it shouldn’t be. Swedish playwright August Strindberg had seen the painting and decided that the man was the victim of a female predator, and he suggested the new title of “Vampire.” (Or so says a wall text. The exhibition’s thorough cata- logue, by curators Andrew Robi- son and Elizabeth Prelinger, at- tributes the change to a Polish friend of Munch’s.) Munch, always happy to raise the stakes and the emotional pitch, bought the work’s new title and reading. In the four versions in this show (others exist), we see the original black-and-white litho from the Epstein collection, and then the full Draculette treatment it gets a year or so lat- er, in a hand-colored impression from the gallery’s own holdings: Munch prints his litho onto ghoulish green paper, then brushes the woman’s hair in or- ange-red so that it can drip bloodlike down her victim. The artist even adds some varnish on top of the hair, just to give it a liq- uid gloss.
About six years later, in an- other National Gallery image, Munch decides to make a print- able version of that painted varia- tion: He takes his black-and- white litho, then makes a wood- block image of the hair alone to be printed on top in red. Another decade or so goes by and, in an- other Epstein version, Munch goes even more complicated. Now he’s double-printing the lithograph in red and black be- fore adding a wood-block layer in blue, green and beige.
Scanning all these versions, you see the image go from being a remote and sober recollection of a moment in the past to becom- ing almost cinematic in its imme- diacy, thanks to its lurid effects of light and color. This is the Munch way — try
something, change it, then change it again. Sometimes he seemed to be aiming at a definitive version: The final state of the “Vampire” print became the one he issued in quantity. Sometimes there is only
COPYRIGHT MUNCH MUSEUM/MUNCH ELLINGSEN GROUP/ARS, NY 2009 EVOLUTION: Edvard Munch’s “Vampire II,” first printed in 1895, went through several iterations before he chose the final version. World class opera at the Kennedy Center Single Tickets Now On Sale!
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change for variation’s sake, with each print existing as a different kind of work of art, scoring dif- ferent points — and selling as a separate edition. (Munch was no neurotic screamer when it came to the business side of things. By- passing the galleries, he handled the distribution of his prints.) On at least one occasion — ex- plored in detail in the online ver- sion of this package — Munch wanted the whole series to be the work of art, the way Bach could ring the changes on a single sub- ject in one of his grand fugues. Over a span of at least two dec- ades, Munch had returned again and again to an image of a young beauty and a crone by the shore. Records tell us that in the years around 1930 he assembled a set of six or seven of the most varied of those prints, as a gift or sale to aNorwegian collector who would hang them all together. In that series — which the National Gal- lery bought in 1978, as its most expensive purchase of prints to that date — it was as though the high-pitched subject itself took second place to Munch’s meticu- lous exploration of it: Just mar- veling at the old woman’s death’s- head face seems to have been less compelling than watching Munch craft its features over time.
gopnikb@washpost.com
Edvard Munch: Master Prints
runs through Oct. 31 in the East
Building of the National Gallery of Art, on the north side of the Mall at Fourth Street. Call 202-737-4215 or visit
www.nga.gov.
MORE PHOTOS Trace the evolution of some of Edvard Munch’s iconic works with a photo gallery at
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Plácido Domingo photo by Greg Gorman.
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