Edvard Munch and the painting lost at sea, at Harvard Art Museums

Boston Globe

13-03-2025

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Edvard Munch, 'Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),' 1899, printed circa 1917. Woodcut.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums
The truth, likely, is a bit more complicated. Munch, Norway's most famous export, was himself an expert self-promoter, leveraging his melancholic biography into a keystone of his renown ('sickness, anxiety and death were the dark angels that guarded my cradle,' he once wrote with great flourish, a reference to losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis as a child). It worked, to be sure. 'The Scream,' his absurdly famous 1893 calling card aside, Munch's tense, melancholic oeuvre made him not just an art-history icon, but during his own lifetime, a genuine star.
There's no separating the artist — any artist — from lived experience, though 'Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking,' just opened at Harvard Art Museums, does its best. A showcase for the museums' own remarkable collection — and specifically,
Edvard Munch, 'Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),' 1899, printed circa 1917. Woodcut.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums
That may sound dry, and it might even be, but for the preternatural force of Munch himself; the exhibition's wealth of technical information enhances but can't overtake its visual experience, irrepressibly haunting and dire as it is. But the show is also an intriguing lesson in prototypical branding; Munch's material experiments reveal an artist attuned to the reputational — and commercial — power of images everywhere all at once. He was Modern in many ways, and his devotion to reproducing his work was surely one of them.
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'The Lonely Ones' is emblematic of Munch's material enthusiasm and marketing savvy. When the original painting was lost in 1901, Munch was well aware of its potential. It's the centerpiece of the exhibition's first gallery, and in so many forms that it's almost on its own. In 1894, not long after the painting was finished, Munch made a copperplate etching of it, which is here; the plate itself sits in a vitrine nearby, ghostlike with the silver sheen of the steel facing Munch fitted to it.
The Harvard Museums' exhibition displays the steel-faced copperplate for Edvard Munch's 'Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),' 1894.
© Munchmuseet / Halvor Bjørngård
An array of woodcut prints made between 1899 and 1917 followed, five of which are here; the same image is repeated with stark and dynamic differences: One with a black beach riven with the dramatic contrast of bright white seaweed and stone set against a deep teal sea; two more with pale waters, one lavender, the other chartreuse. (The woodblock itself is here, too, giving the contact high; rough gouges in its surface anchor the inkiness of the prints in the visceral act of Munch's labor.)
Made before and after the accident at sea, the breadth of their timing pokes holes in an otherwise compelling narrative of quixotic obsession to reclaim what was lost. More likely, Munch just liked the piece — and so did audiences. Either way, it was a gift that kept on giving. A 1906-08 painting recreates the scene again, with Munch's heavy strokes almost like an anchor to something definite; another, from 1935, is light enough to almost be an outsize sketch, like a partly remembered vision. In this one, Munch flips the figures, putting the woman on the right — a dissonant gesture that upended expectation and might have fed his by-now well-developed brand as an experimental free spirit.
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Edvard Munch, 'Train Smoke,' 1910.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums
Munch's incessant fiddling beguiles. 'The Lonely Ones' was surely special to him, but 'Technically Speaking' crafts a broader take of an artist given to spontaneous explorations. A central gallery focuses on Munch's technical curiosity, and perhaps too much. One print, 'Vampire II,'
Sacrificed in this, maybe, is a discussion of the artist's choice to title an image that to me appears to be of a tender and consoling embrace — a woman cradles a man's head in her arms — as one of emotional trauma. (The painting is of one of the artist's unrequited loves, Dagny Juel, the wife of his friend Stanislaw Przybyszewski; they were among the many members of the Berlin avant-garde Munch palled around with in the 1890s..)
Edvard Munch, 'Vampire II,' 1902 or later. Lithograph and woodcut.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums
'Technically Speaking' isn't about such things, though; its take-home is a handy pamphlet with a glossary of a few dozen technical terms. Laser-focused as it is on the artist's virtuoso skills, you can think of it as another element in the recent effort to broaden Munch's legacy beyond 'The Scream,' a worthy effort that's opened a window into the artist's wider mastery. It follows '
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Inevitably, there's plenty of Munch-iness, technical focus or not. 'Vampire,' whatever he chose to call it, is haunting, oblique, and morose, despite its hue; 'The Kiss,' 1897, appearing here as a series of prints on unconventional surfaces like the grainy face of raw board, goes beyond intimacy to consumption, as the lovers' faces merge into one.
Edvard Munch, 'Winter in Kragerø,' 1915.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums
A handful of paintings, presented as examples of the artist's impulsive, exuberant flow of ideas, all but vibrate with bursts of his personality; 'Train Smoke,' 1910, a murky green landscape simmering with nervous vitality, carries blots and squibs of paint in odd places — simple studio accidents, maybe, that Munch embraced. A pair of icy seascapes hang close to one another; they depict the same scene, but are ruptured in entirely different ways. In Winter in Kragerø,
1915, an inchoate mass of pale paint simmers at the center of the frame — likely a mistake roughly painted over, though Munch highlights it with a slash of bright green. In 'Old Fisherman on Snow-Covered Coast' 1910-11, the nominal figure is in the foreground; roughly blotted out is the obvious outline of another figure beside him that Munch barely bothers to conceal. It's like watching him think his way through the composition in real time.
His 'Melancholy' series — I, II, and III; examples of each are here — is a case in point, and 'Technically Speaking' has the remarkable woodblocks used to make them, which Munch did backward, forward, and in whimsical departure. In at least one strange permutation, the central figure, a glum-looking fellow in the corner with his head slumped in his hand, is swallowed by a shoreline and obscured with another figure, a woman in a red dress, long hair draped in a thick veil. The lasting impression is of an artist for whom a thought never really needed to be finished, and continuum, not completion, was the most compelling thing about making art.
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EDVARD MUNCH: TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
Through July 27. Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge.
Murray Whyte can be reached at