The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch: The Vivian and David Campbell Collection

by Elizabeth Prelinger, Edvard Munch, Michael Parke-Taylor

Book Overview

Edvard Munch is one of the twentieth century's greatest printmakers, and his works--particularly The Scream and Madonna--have made their way into the popular culture of our time. This handsome book considers Munch's graphic work through the lens of an extraordinary private collection that includes outstanding impressions of virtually every one of his major prints, along with alternate versions and early states. The book underscores the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300069529
• ISBN13: 9780300069525
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 3.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 10.1" x 10.4"

Customer Reviews

La douleur, la couleur et le criard

Il montrait sa soeur Sophie qui mourait jeune, entouree de toute la famille. Mais il montrait chacun a l'age qu'il avait a l'epoque de la peinture, et non pas a la mort de la jeune fille. Car la douleur durait a jamais et unifiait toute la famille pour toujours. Puis avec des tetes d'une femme et d'un homme, gravees et multicolorees, il cessait de suivre le style repandu des japonais de faire une seule couleur d'un seul troncon de bois. Son prefere de tout son oeuvre etait Sick Child II, en tant que sa premiere lithographie en couleur. Mais son Scream est le plus reconnu, en tant que l'image la plus frappante du 20eme siecle.

The Print and the Darkness

He was bound determined not to paint people reading and women knitting, but instead to show people who breathed emotions into his darkly suggestive prints. "Death in the sickroom" showed family members at the ages when they were painted, not when his sister Sophie died; it expressed unity in grief as one of death's longlasting effects by seemingly overlapping planes flowing together across bleakly empty areas, starkly B & W contrasts, and stiffly posed mourners frozen in misery. "The mirror" heads of a disembodied man and woman was his first woodcut to give up the Japanese method of printing each color with a separate woodblock; instead, he jigsawed blocks into pieces according to compositional design, linked each piece with a different color, and put everything back together into a multicolored print. He considered his "Sick child II" his most important print: his first color lithograph, it focused on the diseased upper chest and the head in profile facing right against a large pillow in order to gaze with tragically meditative resignation into the flatly patterned looming void on the far right. However, his "Scream" became the most compelling image for the late twentieth century: it expressed terror before the universe by powerfully decorative lines reverberating through the starkly opposed black lines and bleakly white voids of pulsing land and sky. Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor have applied reader-friendly illustrations and text to their catalog of the Vivian and David Campbell exhibition. Their SYMBOLIST PRINTS OF EDVARD MUNCH goes down good with PROGRESSIVE PRINTMAKERS by Warrington Colescott and Arthur Hove, PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING by Antony Griffiths, EDVARD MUNCH by Josef Paul Hodin, and THE PRINT IN THE WESTERN WORLD by Linda C Hults.