SFMOMA Presents A Career Retrospective on Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch professed to a kinship with Vincent Van Gogh, “to paint until the end.” Luckily for him, and us, his career spanned 60 years. His paintings last showed in San Francisco in 1951, so the opportunity to see him is rarer than an eclipse – and lasts longer. Arranged thematically in themes like Love, Nocturnes, Around the Bed, and Hallucinations, it’s memoir and mirror, and it's at the SFMOMA through October 9, 2017.––Gwynn Vitello

Featuring approximately 45 paintings produced between the 1880s and the 1940s, with seven on view in the United States for the first time, this exhibition uses the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s last significant self-portrait as a starting point to reassess his entire career. Organized by SFMOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Munch Museum, Oslo, Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed brings together Munch’s most profoundly human and technically daring compositions of love, despair, desire and death, as well as more than a dozen of his self-portraits to reveal a singular modern artist, one who is largely unknown to American audiences, and increasingly recognized as one of the foremost innovators of figurative painting in the 20th century.

“When you consider that Munch felt that he didn’t really hit his stride until his 50s and that his career doesn’t map against traditional paths of art history, then the latter part of his career warrants a closer look,” said Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. “Munch’s influence can be felt in the work of many artists such as Georg Baselitz, Marlene Dumas, Katharina Grosse, Asger Jorn, Bridget Riley and particularly Jasper Johns, who became fascinated by the cross hatch patterns in Munch’s Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed

“Munch really presents an alternative to the traditional school-of-Paris-driven history of modernism that has long been dominant, but tells an incomplete account of the art of the past century,” added Caitlin Haskell, associate curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA.