Edvard MunchCríticas

No doubt, art starts with a drawing. Often science too starts with a drawing! A drawing is, in fact, a bridge between Art and Science. Learning to draw well puts students of science and Maths on a firm pursuit of learning (I speak from personal experience). I have not seen another teacher who can draw a perfect circle before a class on a black (white)-board, instantly, like my Math school-teacher did back in the day. He taught us fourteen theorems of trigonometry in final-year of our school, with elan. He always started the class by drawing a perfect circle on blackboard, effortlessly in one shot, without lifting the chalk piece. The level of his confidence in doing so inspired the students to learn not only the subject of trigonometry but also to draw!

Some Art teachers become an inspiration for young students to take up painting. Some have a penchant for making colored-pencil drawings of famous monuments of our metropolis - old Gothic buildings, driveways, and other inspiring architectures. He recently held a full-fledged exhibition of all his paintings in an art gallery. Dr. Homi J. Bhabha, the architect of Indian nuclear energy program, was an accomplished artist too, who drew pencil drawings (portraits) of several celebrities, among them two famous Nobel laureates - Sir C.V. Raman and Prof. P.M.S. Blackett. The layout of the beautiful gardens maintained at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, both in Mumbai were all planned by Bhabha after sketching them at his drawing board. The famous painting Starry Night (1889) by van Gogh drew inspiration from the depiction of a spiralling whirlpool galaxy by the astronomer, W. Parsons in 1845. Neuroscientists are giving profound meanings to what goes on in our minds when we look at drawings/paintings made by celebrated masters, such as the Woman in Gold, a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, by Klimt in 1907. Eric Kandel, the 2000 Nobel Laureate, proposed that as we walk and forth in front of this painting, the eyes of Adele seem to follow us because our visual systems convert a 2D image into a 3D portrait in our minds. Though the picture that forms in our visual and cerebral cortex, when we look at a sketch or a painting, is same for all individuals, the way it is processed, analyzed, resolved visually and emotionally, and reconstructed in our brains based on our past experiences and lifestyles, makes each person see a different view. In fact, the boost that each one of us gets in the number of synaptic contacts between our nerve cells is specific to the individual, and that alone decides the capacity of an individual to think and feel about what he/she makes out of the sketch/paintings. That also largely explains why different onlookers make out the extent of the hidden smile of 'Mona Lisa' to different levels when they are looking at it in The Louvre Museum in Paris. Similarly, it is up to the onlooker to decide whether it is a human figure shrieking or an inverted Edison's bulb in The Scream, the 1893 painting by Edvard Munch.

A great display of mesmerizing, powerful paintings that touch on the nature of human experience and what it means to encompass that. The brief biographical information is also extremely well-written and relevant to what you view. Even though I've read, and seen, another collection of Munch paintings, this one stands tall as a great addition to get a better glimpse into Munch's life and work.

5 stars!

Mostra c/o Palazzo Reale - Palazzo Bagatti Valsecchi, Milano

an old book. art books are so much better now. colour, paintings all facing the same way. discussion of individual paintings with the painting.½

Publsihed on the occasion of Edvard Munch Exhibition held at The Vancouver Art Gallery 31 May - 4 August 1986

The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth by Edvard Munch
4:50 pm 29 May 2014
The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth - Edvard Munch,J. Gill Holland,Frank Hoifodt

bookshelves: film-only, spring-2014, art-forms, norway, mental-health, medical-eew, autobiography-memoir, epistolatory-diary-blog, history, lifestyles-deathstyles, oslo, palate-cleanser, philosophy, plague-disease, slit-yer-wrists-gloomy, teh-brillianz, tragedy, women
Recommended for: Don, Laura, Susanna, Fionnuala
Read on May 29, 2014

Watch the Full Film (3:32:03)

La Belle Epoch Norwegian style.

From wiki: Hans Henrik Jæger (2 September 1854, Drammen, Norway – 8 February 1910, Oslo) was a Norwegian writer, philosopher and anarchist political activist who was part of the Oslo (then Kristiania) based bohemian group Kristianiabohêmen. He was prosecuted for his book Fra Kristiania-bohêmen and convicted to 60 days' imprisonment in a supreme court ruling in 1886. He and other bohemians tried to live by the nine commandments Jæger had formulated in the Fra Kristiania-bohêmen.

The following year, he was forced to flee Norway. He had been sentenced to 150 more days in prison after the Norwegian government learned that he had sent 300 copies of Fra Kristiania-bohêmen to Sweden under the auspices of a volume of Christmas stories. He was a friend of Edvard Munch, and was the subject of one of Munch's paintings.

And so to Paris...

And now Berlin, where he meets up with August Strindberg

Dagny Juel-Przybyszewska (8 June 1867 – 5 June 1901) was a Norwegian writer, famous for her liaisons with various prominent artists, and for the dramatic circumstances of her death. She was the model for some of Edvard Munch's paintings. She had relationships with Munch and briefly with August Strindberg. In 1893, she married the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski. Together they had two children. She was shot by a young lover in a hotel room in Tbilisi in 1901, three days before her thirty-fourth birthday. See also The Legs of Izolda Morgan

How I feel for you, Munch, what with your poor health and existential angst.