Reviews (2)

Colorful Writing for a Monochrome Book
Often times, in the art world, pedantry and an overwrought sense of aesthetics make anything written on the subject unbearable for all but the snobbiest. Fortunately for the rest of rest, Mr. Hodin wrote this book. He is an engaging, lucid writer who has studied his subject thoroughly and actually knew Edvard Munch in his later years which enables him to offer a good deal of important personal information that other authors are simply not able to do. This additional insight is important, for Edvard Munch is one of the truly original geniuses of art and his work carries an urgent message for the dissociated psyche of modern man. My only complaint with this volume is that the publisher elected to print only about one third of the prints in color which, while unfortunate, is by no means devastating. If youre interested in this greatest of expressionists and interested in delving into the spiritual crisis of modern man, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. On the other hand, if youre an elitist art critic looking for stodgy literature, look elsewhere this is not your book.

Discover the world of Edvard Munch
An excellent and scholarly work covering all of Munch's work. Over 160 plates are discussed in depth and there are cross references to the wherabouts of each of the plates at the end of the book. The major fault is the lack of colour plates (30), and the relativly poor quality of the reproductions but all in all a valuable and comprehensive work. ... Read more

Book Description

Containing more than 1,100 breathtaking reproductions of the entire graphic œuvre of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), this unique and important book is a long-awaited and essential contribution to the literature on Munch and his accomplishments as a printmaker. Nothing this complete, beautiful, and authoritative has ever been published on this enormously popular artist; the only other book available on his graphic works focuses solely on his Symbolist prints.

The scholarly text displays the exhaustive research and enormous attention to detail that have earned author Gerd Woll renown as one of the world's most respected art historians. An indispensable tool for professionals, and a stunning art book as well, this will be the standard reference on Munch's graphic work for many years to come.
1,111 illustrations, 250 in full color, 512 pages, 111/2 x 101/2"AUTORBIO: Gerd Woll is senior curator of prints and drawings at the Munch Museum, Oslo, where this vast collection of the artist's prints is housed. She is one of the world's foremost Munch experts and has written extensively on his graphic work. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Outstanding, but expensive.
This is sure to become the definitive collection of Munch's graphic work. The plates are beautifully and accurately done (I've seen many of the original prints), and, as the title says, the collection is comprehensive - something which the non-enthusiast probably won't require (multiple prints from the same etching are included, along with all of Munch's later work, post nervous breakdown, that I personally find less appealing). Nevertheless, if you're serious about studying Munch, and money is not a concern, this is a tremendous resource. ... Read more

Book Description

"Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the recesses of the human body and dissected cadavers, I try to dissect souls." said Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Norway's greatest artist and tortured genius.In this groundbreaking new study, Munch's own soul is laid bare through the first English translation and analysis of diaries, literary sketches, and letters, presented together with his most artistic works. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

If you want to know Munch
I could not put this book down and when I finished, I felt as though I finally had some insight into Munch as a person as well as an artist. If you would like to have a better understanding of both the man and his paintings this book is for you. ... Read more

Book Description

Best known for his iconic painting The Scream, the celebrated Norwegian painter and printmaker Edvard Munch (1863-1944) had the greatest impact on Expressionism of any Scandinavian artist. His intense, evocative treatment of psychological and emotional themes exerted a major influence on the art of the entire 20th century. Often biographical, his work offers a fascinating insight into the psyche of an artist. No artist observed and painted himself throughout his life as frequently as Munch, and few have revealed their weaknesses and anxieties as frankly.

This handsome volume, which accompanies a major traveling exhibition, contains beautiful reproductions of 150 paintings, drawings, and rarely seen photographic self-portraits of startling originality. The texts set them in the context of the artist's life and career, and also examine how many of Munch's preoccupations remain relevant today. AUTHOR BIO: Iris Müller-Westermann is a curator of international art at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and a Munch specialist. ... Read more

Amazon.com

The artwork in The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch is sobeautifully reproduced that one might be tempted to tear out pages, frame them and hangthem on the wall. Munch's work, which constitutes some of the 20th century's greatestprintmaking, is presented through the lens of an extraordinary private collection thatincludes almost every one of his prints along with alternate versions and early sketches.Elizabeth Prelinger's essays provide background on Munch's life, printmakingtechniques, and the development of his symbolist aesthetic. An exciting element of thebook is an evocative essay by renowned critic, Peter Schjeldahl, who, in inimitable style,likens Munch's effect on the viewer to that of listening to the early work of a favoriterock-star. Published on the occasion of an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in early1997, this book provides excellent documentation of an artist whose work remains vitalmore than fifty years after his death. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

The Print and the Darkness
He was bound determined not to paint people reading and women knitting, but instead to show people who breathed emotions into his darkly suggestive prints. "Death in the sickroom" showed family members at the ages when they were painted, not when his sister Sophie died; it expressed unity in grief as one of death's longlasting effects by seemingly overlapping planes flowing together across bleakly empty areas, starkly B&W contrasts, and stiffly posed mourners frozen in misery. "The mirror" heads of a disembodied man and woman was his first woodcut to give up the Japanese method of printing each color with a separate woodblock; instead, he jigsawed blocks into pieces according to compositional design, linked each piece with a different color, and put everything back together into a multicolored print. He considered his "Sick child II" his most important print: his first color lithograph, it focused on the diseased upper chest and the head in profile facing right against a large pillow in order to gaze with tragically meditative resignation into the flatly patterned looming void on the far right. However, his "Scream" became the most compelling image for the late twentieth century: it expressed terror before the universe by powerfully decorative lines reverberating through the starkly opposed black lines and bleakly white voids of pulsing land and sky. Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor have applied reader-friendly illustrations and text to their catalog of the Vivian and David Campbell exhibition. Their SYMBOLIST PRINTS OF EDVARD MUNCH goes down good with PROGRESSIVE PRINTMAKERS by Warrington Colescott and Arthur Hove, PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING by Antony Griffiths, EDVARD MUNCH by Josef Paul Hodin, and THE PRINT IN THE WESTERN WORLD by Linda C Hults. ... Read more

Book Description

Of Edvard Munch's landscape paintings, Starry Night, executed in 1893, is one of the finest.It is the founding version of his later renditions wherein mood and content vary between two extremes: exultation in the beauty of a landscape he loved deeply and pessimism resulting from his sense of personal loneliness and artistic isolation. This well-illustrated monograph includes notes and bibliography as well as a color fold-out reproduction of Starry Night. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

museum for a trip at one dayes
a calander for ecibition of munch and henie-onstad museum ... Read more

Book Description

Loneliness, jealousy, love, and death. There is hardly another artist who explored the basic experiences of human life and his own personal angst so forcefully and in such unsettling images as the Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch. Munch's depictions of the crisis of the individual positioned his work as representative of modern consciousness, and the form he used to express this inner drama set him as a precursor and founder of expressionism. Munch's entire creative period is characterized by a continuous return to his central, melancholic motif of the human condition. In essays by well-known authors in the field, this volume provides a unique, complex, and expansive analysis of the emergence, development, and inner fabric of theme and variation in Munch's oeuvre. Different versions and renditions of paintings like The Scream, Melancholy, and Jealousy are presented side by side for a renewed view of these icons of modernism. Additionally, the book examines the close relationship between the artist's graphic and painterly works, acknowledging that Munch's interest in motif was not limited to painting, but that it translated meaningfully into printed media such as lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts, all documented in this book.

Edited by Klaus Albrecht Schröeder,
Essays by Christoph Asendorf, Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Dieter Buchhart, Antonia Hoerschelmann, Frank Høifødt, Iris Müller-Westermann and Gerd Woll.

Hardcover, 9.75 x 11.5 in., 416 pages, 272 color & 60 b/w illustrations ... Read more

Book Description

Madonna, Self-Portrait, Anxiety, The Death Bed, The Day After, Melancholy, The Dance of Life, The Scream. 8 others.
... Read more

Reviews (4)

An intensive exploration.
This book is short, only 48 pages, but is packed with an incredible amount of information and art. Zeri has done a phenomenal job of encapsulating Munch's life and work in a single, easily digestible package, one from which admirers of "The Scream" and art enthusiasts in general can learn a great deal. I would love to explore other books in Zeri's series.

beautiful book
I fell in love with Munch when I saw one of his prints(the scream) at the Met museum in NYC, this is an amazing man with an amazing mind and an eye for color. the prints are beautiful in this book.

Great book on tormented Norwegian
Here's the great aid for understanding the life and works of one of most underestimated genius. Great story on great Norwegian. Plentiful of color reproductions, abundant in information, great source for studying tormented painter. Worth every minute spent on reading. Looking forward to see Munch Museum in June. Nenad from Croatia.

The Best!
This is an excellent book. It explores the full spectrum of Munch's career through an interesting presentation of words and pictures. ... Read more

Book Description

Scandinavia's most famous painter, the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944), is probably best known for his painting The Scream, a universally recognized icon of terror and despair. (A version was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, in August 2004, and has not yet been recovered.) But Munch considered himself a writer as well as a painter. Munch began painting as a teenager and, in his young adulthood, studied and worked in Paris and Berlin, where he evolved a highly personal style in paintings and works on paper. And in diaries that he kept for decades, he also experimented with reminiscence, fiction, prose portraits, philosophical speculations, and surrealism. Known as an artist who captured both the ecstasies and the hellish depths of the human condition, Munch conveys these emotions in his diaries but also reveals other facets of his personality in remarks and stories that are alternately droll, compassionate, romantic, and cerebral.
This English translation of Edvard Munch's private diaries, the most extensive edition to appear in any language, captures the eloquent lyricism of the original Norwegian text. The journal entries in this volume span the period from the 1880s, when Munch was in his twenties, until the 1930s, reflecting the changes in his life and his work. The book is illustrated with fifteen of Munch's drawings, many of them rarely seen before. While these diaries have been excerpted before, no translation has captured the real passion and poetry of Munch's voice. This is a translation that lets Munch speak for himself and evokes the primal passion of his diaries. J. Gill Holland's exceptional work adds a whole new level to our understanding of the artist and the depth of his scream. ... Read more

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Scandinavian Studies, published by Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study on December 22, 2000. The length of the article is 8265 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Munch-Ibsen Connection: Exposing A Critical Myth.
Author: Joan Templeton
Publication: Scandinavian Studies (Refereed)
Date: December 22, 2000
Publisher: Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study
Volume: 72Issue: 4Page: 445

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more