Edvard Munch. A Poem of Life, Love and Death

A lecture on the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (until 22 January 2023)

With Chris Boïcos

In collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo, the Musée d'Orsay is devoting a major exhibition to the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944), whose work, in all its breadth - sixty years of creation - and complexity, remains partly unknown.

Munch's work occupies a pivotal place in artistic modernity. It has its roots in the 19th century and would find its place firmly in the next one. Moreover, his entire work is permeated by a singular vision of the world, giving it a powerful symbolic dimension that is not limited to the few masterpieces he created in the 1890s. Munch's singular creative process led him to produce many variations of the same motif, but also several versions of the same subject. Eminently Symbolist, the notion of cycles played a key role in his thought and art. For Munch, humanity and nature are united in the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Within this framework, he developed a new iconography, largely inspired by the vitalist philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson.

One hundred works, paintings, drawings, prints and engraved blocks, covering the entire career of the artist, are on show at the Musée d’Orsay, reflecting Munch’s multiple artistic practices. Visitors are invited to revisit the Norwegian painter's work in its entirety: a work that is both fundamentally coherent, even obsessive, and at the same time constantly renewed.