Karl Ove Knausgaard

Richard Shiff

Sheena Wagstaff

Mille Stein

Gary Garrels

Allison Morehead

Patricia G. Berman

Jon-Ove Steihaug

In Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed, the elderly Edvard Munch stands like a sentinel in his bedroom/studio surrounded by the works that constitute his artistic legacy. A powerful meditation on art, mortality, and the ravages of time, this haunting painting conjures up the Norwegian master’s entire career. It also calls into question certain long-held myths surrounding Munch—that his work declined in quality after his nervous breakdown in 1908–9, that he was a commercially naive social outsider, and that he had only a limited role in the development of European modernism. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} The present volume aims to rebut such misconceptions by freshly examining this enigmatic artist. In the preface, the renowned novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard considers Munch as a fellow creative artist and seeks to illuminate the source of his distinctive talent. The four groundbreaking essays that follow present numerous surprising insights on matters ranging from Munch’s radical approach to self-portraiture to his role in promoting his own career. They also reveal that Munch has been an abiding inspiration to fellow painters, both during his lifetime and up to the present; artists as varied as Jasper Johns, Bridget Riley, Asger Jorn, and Georg Baselitz have acknowledged his influence. More than sixty of Munch’s paintings, dating from the beginning of his career in the early 1880s to his death in 1944, are accompanied by a generous selection of comparative illustrations and a chronology of the artist’s life. The result is an intimate, provocative study that casts new light on Munch’s unique oeuvre—an oeuvre that Knausgaard describes as having gone “where only a painting can go, to that which is beyond words, but which is still part of our reality.”

Edvard Munch Between the Clock and the Bed

Charlotte Bydler

Hanna Johansson

Art from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden

Nordic Contemporary

Tom Gunning

MaryClaire Pappas

The Photography of Edvard Munch

The Experimental Self

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Edvard Munch

Reinhold Heller

Elizabeth Prelinger

Elizabeth Kassler

This volume, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, provides a comprehensive overview of Munch's work. Its color plates illustrate the full range of his art, including his many extraordinary self-portraits; intensely emotional motifs such as The Kiss and Puberty, Anxiety and Melancholy, The Sick Child and The Dance of Life; one of the modern era's most famous and quintessential images, The Scream; and the mutable series called the Frieze of Life, in which Munch attempted to chronicle "the modern life of the soul."

The Modern Life of the Soul

Mirror Reflections

James Ensor

Patricia Gray Berman

The brash young artist James Ensor painted Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 during a period of extraordinary artistic and political fomentation in his native Belgium. It is one of the most dazzling, innovative, and perplexing paintings created in Europe in the late nineteenth century, rivaling any work of its period in audacity and ambition. Huge in scale, complex in design and execution, and brimming with social commentary, the startling canvas presents a scene filled with clowns, masked figures, and--barely visible amid the swirling crowds--the tiny figure of Christ on a donkey entering the city of Brussels. This insightful volume examines the painting in light of Belgium's rich artistic, social, political, and theological debates in the late nineteenth century, and in the context of James Ensor's exceptional career, in order to decipher some of the painting's messages and meanings.

Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889

Between 1790 and 1910, Danish painters developed a national school of art that matched the artistic centres of France, Germany and Britain. The range of outstanding works created by Nicolai Abildgaard, Jens Juel, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Christen Købke, P. S. Krøyer and Vilhelm Hammershøi reflect and refract the great stylistic tendencies of European art of the 19th century, including Classicism, Romanticism, Impressionism and Symbolism. Illustrated with over two hundred key works of art drawn from the leading Danish collections, this is the only book available in English that surveys Danish painting across the 19th century. Written by a major scholar in the field, and featuring all the icons of the Danish Golden Age, this is an essential addition to all art libraries.

Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century

In Another Light

Patricia G. Berman

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