Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth

Two potent myths have traditionally defined our understanding of the artist Edvard Munch (1862–1944): he was mentally unstable, as his iconic work The Scream (1893) suggests, and he was radically independent, following his own singular vision. Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth persuasively challenges these entrenched perceptions. 
In this book, Jay A. Clarke demonstrates that Munch was thoroughly in control of his artistic identity, a savvy businessman skilled in responding to the market and shaping popular opinion. Moreover, the author shows that Munch was keenly aware of the art world of his day, adopting motifs, styles, and techniques from a wide variety of sources, including many Scandinavian artists. By presenting Munch’s paintings, prints, and drawings in relation to those of European contemporaries, including Harriet Backer, James Ensor, Vincent van Gogh, Max Klinger, Christian Krohg, and Claude Monet, Clarke reveals often surprising connections and influences. This interpretive approach, grounded in Munch’s diaries and letters, period criticism, and the artworks themselves, reintroduces Munch as an artist who cultivated myths both visual and personal. 
Becoming Edvard Munch features beautiful color reproductions of approximately 150 works, including 75 paintings and 75 works on paper by Munch and his peers.

Arts & Photography

Clarke, Jay A.

History & Criticism

Art Institute of Chicago

This group of 40 prints from the exceptional Daniel Cowin Collection captures the tumultuous aesthetic and political climate of the years surrounding World Wars I and II. An essay by Jonathan Black addresses the impact of World War I on two notable British printmakers, Edward Wadsworth and C. R. W. Nevinson. A text by Jay A. Clarke delves into the linocut movement of the 1920s and ’30s, investigating how the role of style and politics impacted this movement as well as the previously unexplored position of women printmakers and the interplay between gender, craft, and decoration. Influences of Futurism, Cubism, and the short-lived but vibrant abstraction of the Vorticist movement saturate the powerful color images, which are accompanied by artist biographies. This publication illuminates the struggle of these radical printmakers as they navigated a conservative market and the harsh economic and political realities of their time.

Machine Age Modernism: Prints from the Daniel Cowin Collection

Black, Jonathan

Clark Art Institute

Although Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is often thought of as a solitary genius, his career was fueled by the inspiration he drew from both personal and collegial relationships. Picasso practiced printmaking throughout his career—an interest that inherently fostered collaboration, as it brought him in contact with numerous printers and publishers. At the same time, his many famous muses—Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, and others—influenced both his techniques and his imagery. This book features thirty-five of Picasso’s most important prints that showcase the artistic exchange vital to his process. It includes his first major etching from 1904, portraits of his lovers and family members, and prints that transform motifs by Rembrandt, Manet, and other earlier artists, such as an interpretation of Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo from 1970. Picasso | Encounters considers the artist’s major statements in printmaking throughout his career.

Picasso | Encounters: Printmaking and Collaboration

McCully, Marilyn

A thought-provoking volume on Edvard Munch’s often neglected pictures of nature, exploring the Norwegian artist’s landscapes, seascapes, and existential environments in light of his own time and ours\nThis richly illustrated catalogue provides a multifaceted perspective on the pictures of nature and landscape by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This important topic has been neglected in scholarship on Munch, despite the fact that it is a major motif in his oeuvre. This volume is the first to explore the theme in its full breadth throughout Munch’s corpus, including his paintings, lithographs, watercolors, and woodcuts. His depictions of forests, farmland, and the seashore, as well as paintings of sea storms, snow, and other extreme weather, present us with undulating forms that animate nature. They likewise provide an example of Munch’s preference for liminal spaces where transformations take place, often celebrating human interaction with nature in its many manifestations. The book also considers Munch’s less conventional landscapes, and particularly those where his famous Scream motif occurs. These environments depict nature in an existential way, suggesting that the artist held a deep concern for nature’s destruction by humans—a concern no less relevant today. A complementary look at his writings as primary sources alongside his images shows how Munch mixed a scientific perspective on nature with metaphysical and spiritual notions of rebirth that permeate other parts of his corpus. The book also includes a engaging short story by award-winning author Ali Smith that was inspired by Munch's work.\nDistributed for MUNCH\nExhibition Schedule: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA 
(June 10–October 15, 2023)\nMuseum Barberini, Potsdam 
(November 18, 2023–April 1, 2024)\nMunch Museum, Oslo 
(April 27–August 24, 2024)

Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth

Nielsen, Trine Otte Bak

Lloyd-Peppiatt, Jill

MUNCH

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Books by Clarke, Jay A.