Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking @ Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

March 7 - July 27, 2025

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1894

Etching and drypoint

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.559 

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human  Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1899 

Woodcut, printed in four colors of ink

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.602

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

EDVARD MUNCH

Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1906–8.

Oil on canvas 

Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, 

The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.551

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

The Harvard Art Museums present an exhibition of works by Edvard Munch that examines the artist’s innovative techniques and the recurring themes across his paintings, woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and combination prints. Highlighting the collaborative partnership between curatorial and conservation experts at the museums, the exhibition reveals new and ongoing technical research into Munch’s practice and shares recent discoveries about his materials and highly experimental methods. 

The exhibition showcases 70 works, primarily from the Harvard Art Museums collections. Thanks to a transformative gift from Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus, the museums now house one of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the United States—a collection that is also distinctive for its technical variety. Key loans from the Munch Museum in Oslo include two paintings and eight examples of the artist’s materials used for printmaking, seven of which have never before been on display in the United States. 

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is well known for his innovative experiments in painting and printmaking. He often rendered the same subject matter in both mediums—repeatedly over decades—to investigate their distinctive possibilities. His highly expressive work deals with psychological themes of isolation, separation, anxiety, illness, and death, but also attraction and love. Technically Speaking explores Munch’s fascination with materiality, uncovers new avenues for thinking about his work, and delves into his unconventional techniques and the various themes he returned to again and again over many years.

“This exhibition showcases an exciting selection of Munch’s paintings and prints from a career that spanned more than 60 years,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy. “We are thrilled to present his work through a lens that is perfect for a university museum—one that reinforces our teaching and research mission—by sharing the results of our recent investigations into his techniques and materials.”

The exhibition begins with several iterations of Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), depicting a man and a woman standing at a shoreline, side by side yet isolated from one another. First painted by Munch in 1892 (a work later destroyed in an accident at sea), the motif is repeated in an etching from 1894 that depicts the original painting and five subsequent woodcuts that Munch produced between 1899 and 1917. The prints reveal the various intriguing woodcut and etching techniques the artist utilized and also show how he manipulated his jigsaw woodblocks to print different parts of a single work in different colors. They are displayed in the exhibition with the original steel-faced copperplate and jigsaw woodblock that were used to produce the prints. Two paintings on display continue the motif: the artist’s 1906–8 version from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection is based on his woodcuts, and a later (final) version from around 1935, on loan from the Munch Museum, reverts to the composition of the couple used by Munch in his 1892 painting.

“Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) remains one of Munch’s most well-known subjects, and we are extremely fortunate to be able to trace his engagement with it over a period of more than 40 years and through nine works in our collections, supplemented by the generous loan of his last painting of the motif and two related matrices from the Munch Museum,” said Lynette Roth. “Together, they demonstrate the close relationship between painting and printmaking in Munch’s practice, his dedication to certain motifs over time, and his embrace of chance effects.”

Several other groupings highlight additional recurring themes in Munch’s work and how he experimented with their representation. Three woodcuts from the Woman’s Head against the Shore series show how Munch selectively printed his jigsaw woodblocks, omitting one of the pieces (the water) in one of the impressions. Four prints from The Kiss series—an etching and three woodcuts—portray a couple embracing in front of different backgrounds. Prints from Melancholy I and Melancholy III, on display with a rare example of Melancholy II, which Munch printed himself with his small hand-crank press, are shown with five of the artist’s original carved woodblocks. Four variations of Vampire II demonstrate how Munch sometimes combined lithographs with hand coloring and used woodblocks to add color as well. Also on display are three versions of Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, including one used by Munch as a poster advertising an exhibition of his work at Diorama Hall in Kristiania (now Oslo).

Over the last several months, the works in the exhibition from Harvard’s collections have undergone technical study, including pigment analysis, selective treatments such as cleaning and varnish removal, and most of the prints were rematted and reframed. The painting Two Human Beings (1906–8) was varnished at some point in its history, which is not consistent with Munch’s practice of leaving his canvases without a unified glossy surface; this varnish has been removed. Train Smoke (1910) needed paint stabilization and cleaning to remove atmospheric grime, and Winter in Kragerø (1915) had its varnish removed to reveal a more vibrant snowy scene. This work was carried out by staff from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, including Ellen Davis, Associate Paintings Conservator; Abby Schleicher, Assistant Paper Conservator; and Kate Smith, Senior Conservator of Paintings and Head of the Paintings Lab, and their findings are presented in the exhibition. Additionally, all six paintings on display from Harvard’s collections were reframed with new, historically accurate frames.

“Munch’s deep experimentations in painting and printmaking meant that he was constantly reworking his canvases and layering many different types of print techniques, which can become complicated to describe,” said Peter Murphy. “As research was underway and our conservators and curatorial team were deciphering how he created many of his works, I set out to break down the technical terms we were using in a friendly, digestible way. We hope that visitors will find the glossary useful, not only in the exhibition, but as something that can be kept and referenced beyond the show.”

The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, and Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum; with Peter Murphy, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. This is the first major presentation at Harvard to examine Munch’s techniques and materials through the lens of the Strauses’ collection in 30 years, following the 1983 exhibition and publication Edvard Munch: Master Printmaker (organized by Charles W. Haxthausen and written by Elizabeth Prelinger) and Norma S. Steinberg’s 1995 exhibition and catalogue Munch in Color.

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

harvardartmuseums.org

Future Minded: New Works in the Collection @ Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

Future Minded: New Works in the Collection

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

March 1 – July 21, 2024 

Noriko Saitō, Japanese 

Sunbeam, 2002 

Ink and color on paper; drypoint with aquatint.

Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 

Purchase through the generosity of 

the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation 

in memory of Sylvan Barnet and William Burto, 2018.200 

© Noriko Saitō 

Future Minded highlights a selection of works acquired in recent years that exemplify the Harvard Art Museums’ collecting vision and strategies. Nearly all are on display for the first time.

The museums are committed to acquiring art that expands the range of artists and cultures represented in the collections; that moves museum practice toward more nuanced understanding of both histories and contemporary issues; and that pushes boundaries and embraces experimentation. Many of the works on view are by living artists, an area of focused growth for the museums.

Staged across two adjacent galleries, the exhibition presents a range of drawings, photographs, prints, paintings, and sculptures spanning centuries and continents. The works are by roughly 30 artists, including Jean (Hans) Arp, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Willie Cole, Pietro Damini, Svenja Deininger, Jeffrey Gibson, Baldwin Lee, Ana Mendieta, Lucia Moholy, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Noriko Saitō, Melissa Shook, Jane Yang-D’Haene, and many others.

Organized by Soyoung Lee, Landon and Lavinia Clay Chief Curator; with Jackson Davidow, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography, and through close consultation with and contributions from curators and fellows across divisions and conservators in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. 

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS 

Special Exhibitions Gallery (Level 3)

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

www.harvardartmuseums.org

Corita Kent and the Language of Pop @ Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge + San Antonio Museum of Art

Corita Kent and the Language of Pop

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

September 3, 2015 - January 3, 2016 

CORITA KENT

the juiciest tomato of all, 1964 

Screenprint 

Collection of Jason Simon, New York 

© Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles

The Harvard Art Museums present Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, a special exhibition on display September 3, 2015 to January 3, 2016 at Harvard before travelling to the San Antonio Museum of Art, where it will be on view February 13 to May 8, 2016. The exhibition is curated by Susan Dackerman, the former Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums (2005–2014) and current consultative curator of prints. Corita Kent was an activist nun who juxtaposed spiritual, pop cultural, literary, and political writings alongside symbols of consumer culture and modern life in order to create bold images and prints during the 1960s. Also known as Sister Mary Corita, Kent is often seen as a curiosity or an “anomaly” in the pop art movement. Corita Kent and the Language of Pop positions Corita Kent and her work within the pop art idiom, showing how she is an innovative contemporary of Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and other pop art icons. The exhibition also expands the current scholarship on Corita Kent’s art, elevating the role of her artwork by identifying its place in the artistic and cultural movements of her time.

CORITA KENT (American, 1918–1986) was a Roman Catholic nun, an artist, and an educator. From 1936 to 1968 she lived, studied, and taught at the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, and she headed the art department at the college there from 1964 to 1968. In 1968, Corita Kent left Immaculate Heart and relocated to Boston, where she lived until her death in 1986. The screenprints she created during the 1960s are typical examples of pop art, embodying the vivid palette, focus on everyday subjects, and mass-produced quality of ephemeral objects. Corita Kent and the Language of Pop examines Kent’s screenprints as well as her 1971 design painted on the Boston Gas (now National Grid) tank, a roadside landmark in Boston.

The exhibition frames Corita Kent’s work within the pop movement while also considering other prevailing artistic, social, and religious movements of the time. In particular, the exhibition explores how Corita Kent’s work both responded to and advanced the concerns of Vatican II, a movement to modernize the Catholic Church and make it more relevant to contemporary society. The church advocated, among other changes to traditional liturgy, conducting the Mass in the local, vernacular language. Corita Kent, like her pop art contemporaries, simultaneously turned to vernacular texts for inclusion in her prints, drawing from such colloquial sources as product slogans, street signs, and Beatles lyrics.

“Because of Kent’s status as a nun, her biography has been the focus of most scholarship about her work,” said Susan Dackerman. “However, when you examine her work alongside contemporary pop artists like Warhol and Ruscha, it becomes clear that she was a critical and relevant voice in the emerging pop discourse of the 1960s.”

The exhibition grew out of conversations Susan Dackerman had with Jennifer Roberts, the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History of Art and Architecture (HAA) at Harvard, around the time that Roberts was teaching an undergraduate seminar on pop art during the Spring 2010 semester. Roberts often brought her students to examine prints in the museums’ collections, and these meetings generated discussions about Kent’s work as well as its relationship to the work of her better-known contemporaries such as Warhol, Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, among others. The following semester, HAA professors Henri Zerner and Benjamin Buchloh taught a graduate seminar on reproductive technologies in the 1960s, which ignited interest in printed pop among Harvard’s graduate students in art history. Soon after, a project group came together, providing a forum for conversations about Kent’s work that ultimately led to the development of the exhibition’s six central themes: Los Angeles, c. 1962; The Word; Salvation at the Supermarket; L.A. Traffic; The Political Landscape; and Boston, 1971: The Gas Tank. Kent’s papers, deposited at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, were an important resource to the team of scholars and students. 

“Installed in our generous new Special Exhibitions Gallery and reflecting our research and teaching mission, Corita Kent and the Language of Pop brilliantly recalibrates, recasts, reconsiders, and repositions Corita Kent’s remarkable work,” said Deborah Martin Kao, the Landon and Lavinia Clay Chief Curator and Interim Co-Director of the Harvard Art Museums. “In this enlightening special exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Susan Dackerman and her collaborators also argue for a broadening of how we apprehend pop art, cleaving it from its iconic and seemingly unassailable historic wrapper and returning it to the immediacy of the beat of the streets of 1960s Los Angeles, New York, and even Boston.”

Over 150 prints, along with a selection of films, books, and other works, are included in the exhibition. More than 60 of Corita Kent’s prints, depicting language garnered from popular culture such as product slogans and road signs, appear alongside about the same number of works by her prominent contemporaries, including Warhol, Ruscha, Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, and Robert Indiana.

Rarely shown (and newly restored) films by Thomas Conrad and Baylis Glascock that feature Kent at Immaculate Heart in the 1960s are presented in the exhibition. The films include Glascock’s Mary’s Day 1964, Mary’s Day 1965, and We Have No Art (1967), as well as Conrad’s Alleluia: Being a True Account of the Life and Times of Sister Mary Corita IHM (1967). Another screen in the exhibition is dedicated to slides taken by Corita Kent and her associates at Immaculate Heart College during the 1950s and ’60s. These slides depict their pop art projects as well as document visits to museums, galleries, and artists’ studios. The slides also include shots of magazine advertisements, supermarket goods, and street signs, many of which were incorporated into Corita Kent’s screenprints.

In 1971, Corita Kent created a bold, pop art design for the Boston Gas (now National Grid) tank located alongside I-93 south of downtown Boston. Her vivid rainbow swashes of color on the tank can be viewed as the culmination of her engagement with pop art, providing Boston with its own pop art monument, not unlike the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. A large photo mural of the tank appears in the exhibition, along with the first public presentation of the 7-inch-high wooden tank model on which Corita Kent executed her design.

A related exhibition exploring Kent’s teaching, artistic process, career, and activism, Corita Kent: Footnotes and Headlines, is on display August 24 through September 18, 2015, at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

A catalogue, published by the Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press, accompanies the exhibition. Through nearly 90 illustrated entries and four essays by distinguished scholars, the publication fills a gap in the scholarship about Kent’s work. The catalogue was edited by Susan Dackerman and features essays by Dackerman; Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley; Richard Meyer, the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University; and Jennifer L. Roberts, the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. The illustrated entries were written by Dackerman and graduate students from a variety of disciplines.

Corita Kent and the Language of Pop was organized by the Harvard Art Museums and curated by Susan Dackerman, the former Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums (2005–2014) and current consultative curator of prints.

Lenders include: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Thomas Conrad, Cupertino, California; Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; Fine Arts Library, Harvard University; Baylis Glascock, Los Angeles; Mary Anne Karia (née Mikulka), New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Grid, Boston; The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Jason Simon, New York; and three anonymous lenders.

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

www.harvardmuseums.org

David Rabinowitch, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge - Sculptures and Templates, 1968

David Rabinowitch: Sculptures and Templates, 1968

Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge

September 14, 1996 - January 12, 1997

The special exhibition David Rabinowitch: Sculptures and Templates, 1968, which is a rare presentation of this important sculptor's work in a United States museum, was conceived by David Rabinowitch and James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, and is presented in conjunction with the publication of Pacing the World: Construction in the Sculpture of David Rabinowitch, by Whitney Davis, professor of art history and director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University. 

"We are very pleased to be showing the work of David Rabinowitch and to be publishing the first book-length study to investigate its significance within the history of modern sculpture," James Cuno said. "For reasons I do not quite understand David Rabinowtch's work is very much better known in Europe, especially Germany and Eastern Europe, than it is in this country. It has been collected by most major European contemporary museums, exhibited widely from Prague to Paris, and published frequently in European journals and catalogues. But of course, until fairly recently, the same has been true of the work of his peers, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd. It may have to do with a European predilection for tough-minded and radically experimental art, especially of a materialist kind. We, in this country, have preferred painting to sculpture and optical to materialist art," noted James Cuno.

David Rabinowitch was born in Toronto in 1943 and has been working in New York since 1972. His work can be characterized by an intensity of thought and material and simplicity of form, and it is representative of certain concerns of minimalist sculpture. The works to be exhibited at the Fogg, which include nine solid hot-rolled steel sculptures and seventeen drawings, or templates, have been chosen from a series done in 1968 which were formative in Rabinowitch's subsequent work.Ñ"My work from 1968 was a watershed for me," stated the artist, "in the sense that after that all of my sculptures were conceived in terms of operations in extended planes of mass and their relation to vision. It was the first time I worked in terms of template construction, which just means a one-to-one plan for a sculpture. Before, I used only plans and sketches. After this period I was able to make a certain percentage of templates as drawings in their own right and was stimulated to begin to make drawings independent of sculpture.

"It is significant to note," David Rabinowitch continued, "that this is the first time that these templates, which were selected from some 500, and sculptures will be exhibited as two orders of work that make up an enterprise."

The exhibition is the first of an informal series of exhibitions to be planned for the Fogg which will explore the relationship of recent sculpture to the floor. "Sculpture has always been concerned with its base," Cuno pointed out. "That is, how sculpture relates to our world and the space in which it is experienced by us is determined in great part by whether or not it is placed on a pedestal or directly on the floor. A pedestal tends to isolate sculpture and idealize it; as if were an object of an order different from objects in our world. As early as 1932, Giacometti placed a sculpture directly on the floor. Radical at the time, this has become commonplace since the 1960s. Over the next few years, we intend to offer exhibitions which highlight and examine this relationship.

"Such concentrated exhibitions are typical of our approach to the presentation of contemporary art," Cuno explained. "We hope to offer our visitors access to works of art and issues in contemporary art that have been overlooked or left unexamined by our colleague institutions in the greater Boston area. We don't want to duplicate what is already being done so well elsewhere. Equally, we want to publish serious and scholarly publications on contemporary art. Whitney Davis's is the first such publication. A distinguished scholar of Egyptian art, and a formidable critic of contemporary art theory, Professor Davis brings a powerful mind and extraordinary insights to the examination of Rabinowitch's work. And yet, like the work, it is accessible to anyone interested in contemporary art. It is not only a scholar's work."

FOGG ART MUSEUM

Harvard University Art Museums

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

www.artmuseums.harvard.edu