Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
Through 12 September 2010
The exhibition Warhol After Munch has a selection of Edvard Munch’s four major print works in various versions and 30 of Andy Warhol’s large, colourful versions of them.
It may seem the strangest choice of all: to place Edvard Munch, whom most people view as the painter of the innermost reaches of the soul, alongside Andy Warhol, who is normally classed as the apostle of the surface. But there are three good reasons to do so.
First, in 1984 Warhol actually made a long series of prints that are copies or rather versions of four major subjects by Munch – the iconic The Scream, Madonna, Self-Portrait and The Brooch.
Secondly, Warhol and Munch both worked intensively with the print medium, with the concepts of quantity and repetition as guidelines. Both made an endless number of prints, and both were preoccupied with varying details from sheet to sheet.
Thirdly, the juxtaposition of Warhol and Munch makes an assertive curatorial point, since the exhibition wants to modulate the image we have of the two artists by showing that Warhol is less superficial than he is normally viewed and Munch correspondingly more a painter of the surface than we think. They are both artists who knew the power of a clear artistic idiom that almost has the impact of the advertising aesthetic, but who knew at the same time that this does not preclude content.
WHARHOL AFTER MUNCH
4 June - 12 September 2010
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13 - 3050 Humlebaek , Denmark
