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The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is recognized as having been one of the most important pioneers of modernism. His Symbolist-influenced art from around 1900, for example, was crucial to the development of the Expressionism of the ‘Brücke’ artists in Germany.
Munch had already created major works such as the Symbolist paintings Madonna and The Scream by the time he took up graphic work in 1894. Within a very short space of time he had experimented with available techniques, new materials and printing surfaces, varying the type of paper, line and coloration used. In this way he was able to produce completely different moods with a single motif. Initially his graphic works reproduced themes from his paintings; his subject matter was the modern life of the soul: man and woman, existential fear, melancholy, death. With these works he revolutionized the art of printmaking.
The Hamburger Kunsthalle’s Department of Prints, Drawings and Photography holds a rich store of almost 200 graphic works by Edvard Munch from every important stage of the artist’s career. The highlight of these extensive holdings is a pastel study for the famous painting of The Sick Child. This extraordinarily large collection of Munch prints can only rarely be put on public display due to their sensitivity to light, and will now be the central focus of the exhibition.
Private collectors in Hamburg discovered Munch’s work at a very early stage. Extensive holdings were acquired in this way, above all by Gustav Schiefler, a district court judge (Landgerichtsdirektor) who in December 1904 decided to compile and publish a catalogue raisonné of Munch’s graphic works. By the 1920s, a Hamburg merchant, Heinrich Hudtwalcker, had already amassed a substantial collection of paintings and an almost complete collection of prints. Before the 1937 purge of ‘degenerate art’, Munch’s work was represented in the Kunsthalle collection by two paintings and a large number of prints. After the Second World War, Carl-Georg Heise, the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle from 1945 to 1955, succeeded in building a Munch collection that is now one of the most important collections outside Norway. Key works such as Madonna, 1894, Girls on the Pier, c. 1900, or Girls by the Sea from 1903/04, which were created as part of the Frieze of Life for Max Linde in Lübeck, testify to the high quality of the Hamburg collection.
The works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s own holdings are supplemented in the exhibition by further paintings and a number of outstanding prints from private collections.