Art History Professor Elizabeth Prelinger Curates Exhibition at the National Gallery of Art
October 1, 2010
Professor Elizabeth Prelinger's recent exhibition and lecture at the National Gallery of Art demonstrates that even for ageless works of art, sometimes timing can be everything.
In “Edvard Munch: Master Prints,” co-curated by Andrew Robison, Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings for the National Gallery, prints by the Norwegian painter—best known for his primal painting, “The Scream”—demonstrate that while Munch returned to the themes of life, death, love, and loss over the years, his development as an artist can be traced through variations on these images.
Prelinger, the Keyser Family Professor of Art History at Georgetown, has studied Edvard Munch for nearly thirty years, and it was important to her that this show provide a new perspective on his work. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it—the curator and I discussed it for about two years,” Prelinger explains. “Then we discovered something that was unique. Munch kept all his print matrices, so that he pulled impressions from them not just in 1896 when he would have carved it for the first time, but in 1902, in 1913, in 1925, maybe even up towards his death in 1944. So what we hit upon is to try to figure out the sequencing of these prints.”
The exhibition itself presents an argument, Prelinger explains, that a print by Munch in his earlier years can vary greatly from the same image later on, as he responds to life events or influences of the art world. She suggests, “It would distort how one thinks about Edvard Munch and his career if we were to date them from the same year. Because it shows him at a very different point in his career, and in that sense, as a very different kind of artist.” Many of the haunting images on view—from the collections of the National Gallery, the Epstein Family, and Catherine Woodard and Nelson Blitz, Jr.—are organized as series of the same image, with the variations in color, texture, and mood highlighted by their proximity. Others are grouped according to their proposed dating, so that Munch’s preoccupations with certain colors or styles are evident in the similarly styled prints.
Prelinger and Robison dated the works with clues ranging from sale records, to stylistic influences, to a viewer’s sketch of Munch’s “Madonna” in the margins of a program from the 1913 New York Armory show. “As we were working on this we laid out the objects, and put them on the living room floor of the Epstein family home, and we were on our knees saying, ‘Well what about this tiny little piece? This one is missing the tiniest bit of wood, therefore we know it must date from after that impression,’” Prelinger recalls. “And all of the sudden, the constellation of images began to make sense. And we could see it hanging on the walls.”
While Munch is known today primarily as a painter, he was an active printmaker. Prelinger notes that the Munch Museum in Oslo houses some 17,000 of the artist’s prints, and even the method of their production communicates ideas that he explored throughout his lifetime. The woodblock image of “Two Women on the Shore,” for example, features an old woman and a young woman looking out to sea. During the printing process, the block was cut into three pieces, with the two women joined on a single block. For Prelinger, this method conveys a symbolism beyond the printed image. “Youth and age, death and life, are both on the same block,” Prelinger explains. “In other words, these different ideas are linked together forever and inextricably on the same piece of wood.”
Prelinger hopes that visitors to the exhibition will take away not only a new understanding of a familiar artist, but a stronger experience of the ideas he was trying to depict. “Each project that I’ve done has opened up a new aspect of an artist whom you never tire of. His work is so rich, and the themes so universal. We’ve all lost someone we care about, we’ve all loved, we’ve all been hurt by love, we’ve all pondered the issues of death and loss, and those are all the things he captures in his work in ways that everyone can understand.”
--Jessica Beckman
“Edvard Munch: Master Prints” is on view until October 31, 2011 at the National Gallery of Art. For more information, visit: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/munchinfo.shtm
Photos by Kuma Hamad
