Claire Bernardi – författare

An authoritative new publication that revisits Munch’s work in its entirety. Edvard Munch occupies a pivotal place in artistic modernity. His work is permeated by a singular vision of the world, with a powerful symbolist dimension that goes beyond the masterpieces he created in the 1890s, and which gives his art a great coherence. For Munch, humanity and nature were united in the cycle of life, death and rebirth, which is reflected in the unending recurrence of certain motifs and colour combinations in his work. He wrote: ‘These paintings, which are, admittedly, relatively difficult to understand, will be […] easier to grasp if they are integrated into a whole.’ Published to accompany the major exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Edvard Munch: A Poem of Life, Love and Death presents about a hundred works – paintings, drawings, prints and engraved blocks – reflecting the diversity of Munch’s practice. Seven essays explore the artist in his philosophical and scientific milieu and the places that shaped the man and his art, as well as offering a rare glimpse of Munch’s attempts at creative writing. They also examine the historical evolution of his monumental Frieze of Life series and the world-famous Scream. This publication invites readers to revisit the painter’s work in its entirety by following the thread of an ever-inventive pictorial thinking: a vision that is both fundamentally coherent, even obsessive, and at the same time constantly renewed.

“I’ve always been crazy about Soutine – all of his paintings,” said the Dutch-American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) in 1977. How much de Kooning’s approach was due to the influence of Lithuanian artist Chaim Soutine(1893–1943) is examined in this exhibition catalogue, in which the two artists are dramatically juxtaposed.This book accompanies an exhibition organized by the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, dedicated to the affinities between the work of Chaim Soutine and Willem de Kooning. It was Dr Alfred Barnes who had made Soutine’s career by buying the bulk of the unknown artist’s available work in Paris in 1923. The exhibition and accompanying publication will show how the work of Soutine had a decisive influence on the development of de Kooning’s art, especially following Soutine’s posthumous retrospective held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1950.The expressive force of Soutine’s painting, coupled with his image as an ‘accursed’ (maudit) artist struggling with the vicissitudes and excesses of bohemian life in Paris during the interwar years, exerted a particular influence on a new generation of post-war painters in the United States. In 1977 de Kooning emphatically declared: “I think I would choose Soutine [as my favourite artist] ... I’ve always been crazy about Soutine – all of his paintings”. Of all the Abstract Expressionists, de Kooning was the only one who continued to praise Soutine throughout his career and to credit him with an influence on his work. De Kooning very likely first discovered Soutine’s work before the Second World War in the New York galleries. Indeed, his figure paintings of the 1940s with their distortion and sense of compression already shared characteristics with Soutine’s figures painted of two decades earlier. A significant turning point in de Kooning’s work, evident in his celebrated series of Women paintings of the early 1950s, coincides with his in-depth study of the artistic world of Soutine at both The Modern’s retrospective and his visit to the Barnes Foundation with his wife Elaine de Kooning in June 1952. It was during these years that the Dutch-American artist matured his own personal form of expressionism, which, with its visceral brushstrokes and heavy impasto, lies somewhere between figuration and abstraction.