Prints and Paintings by Edvard Munch @ Harvard Art Museums: Gift from the Collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus

The Harvard Art Museums announce an extraordinary gift from the collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus: sixty-two prints and two paintings by the Norwegian Master Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Left: Edvard Munch, Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1906–8. Oil on canvas. Busch-Reisinger Museum, The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.551. Right: Edvard Munch, Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1899. Woodcut printed in orange, yellow, black, and dark greenish blue on tan wove paper. Fogg Museum, The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.602. Photos © President and Fellows of Harvard College

The Harvard Art Museums announce an extraordinary gift from the collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus; the gift comprises sixty-two prints and two paintings by Edvard Munch as well as one print by Jasper Johns. The bequest is a final act of generosity from the Strauses following a relationship with the museums that began in the 1980s and that includes multiple gifts of artworks over the years; the support of a 1990s-era expansion, renovation, and endowment of the museums’ conservation center; and the endowment of specific conservation and curatorial positions. The Spring 2025 exhibition Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking will feature many of the recently gifted works.

The works by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) in the Strauses’ bequest join an important concentration of paintings and prints by the artist already at Harvard and build upon multiple past gifts and assisted purchases of Munch’s work by the couple—117 works altogether. The total number of works by the artist in the Harvard Art Museums collections is now 142 (8 paintings and 134 prints), constituting one of the largest and most significant collections of works by Munch in the United States.

Lynn G. and Philip A. Straus (Harvard Class of 1937) have been among the Harvard Art Museums’ most generous benefactors. Both were dedicated patrons of the arts and education, supporting libraries, museums, and institutions affiliated with early childhood education, civil rights, and human services. In 1969, the couple purchased their first print by Munch, Salome (1903), an acquisition that marked the start of their passion for the artist’s work. Following a commitment to a $7.5 million gift in 1994, the museums’ conservation center—the oldest fine arts conservation treatment, research, and training facility in the United States—was renamed the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The couple have also supported vital conservation positions of staff who specialize in works on paper, as well as curatorial internship and fellowship positions in the museums’ prints and drawings departments. Philip, a New York investment advisor and portfolio manager, passed away in 2004, and their bequest comes to Harvard following Lynn’s passing in 2023. In total, the couple gifted or enabled purchases of 128 works to the Harvard Art Museums over their lifetimes, including works by Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Timothy David Mayhew, and Emil Nolde.

“We are immensely grateful to Philip and Lynn Straus for their generosity and stewardship over these many years,” said Sarah Ganz Blythe, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums. “Their enthusiasm for the work of Edvard Munch ensures generations of students and visitors can experience and study his prints and paintings here in Cambridge. Through their distinct style of collecting Munch’s prints—seeking out and acquiring multiple images of the same theme—they created a collection that affords deep insights into the artist’s practice and is therefore a perfect match for a university museum with a strong teaching and research mission.” Sarah Ganz Blythe continued: “Their support of the conservators and conservation scientists in the Straus Center has had a transformative impact on the numerous fellows who have trained there, as well as provided a facility where every object in our collections can be cared for and scientifically researched.”

The Strauses’ recent bequest includes Munch’s iconic painting Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) (1906–8) and Train Smoke (1910), both of which are now in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, one of the Harvard Art Museums’ three constituent museums. These paintings join Winter in Kragerø (1915) and Inger in a Red Dress (1896), previously given to the museum by Lynn in memory of Philip in 2012.

In Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), a man and woman stand side by side yet still feel isolated from one another, facing toward the sea and away from the viewer, each embedded in a colorfully sedimented landscape. Edvard Munch first painted this subject around 1892 and returned to it repeatedly in his printmaking and painting thereafter. Train Smoke, which depicts nature disrupted but also dynamically animated by the Industrial Revolution, is a landscape unlike those by Munch already in the collection. Both paintings demonstrate Munch’s experimentation with color and surface texture, through his varied use of thick impasto, diluted paint drips, and even areas of bare canvas, a hallmark of Munch’s artistic legacy.

“It is hard to overestimate the significance of Munch’s painting Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones). Capturing the tension between proximity and distance—spatial as well as emotional—the work addresses the universal theme of the human condition,” said Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at the Harvard Art Museums. “The Strauses had generously loaned their painting for the inaugural installation of the renovated Harvard Art Museums building that opened in November 2014, and we are thrilled to be able to teach with and display it alongside the other significant paintings from their collection going forward.”

Over the course of 2024, both paintings have undergone cleaning and other treatments by Kate Smith, Senior Conservator of Paintings and Head of the Paintings Lab, and Ellen Davis, Associate Paintings Conservator, both in the museums’ Straus Center. Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) had been varnished at some point in its history, which is not consistent with Munch’s practice of leaving his canvases without a unified glossy surface. Train Smoke needed paint stabilization and cleaning to remove atmospheric grime. After careful study, removal of the varnish and grime from the paint surface, and treatment of small areas of paint loss, the paintings are now in closer alignment with their original appearance.

The 62 prints in the Strauses’ recent bequest have entered the collection of the Fogg Museum. The majority are highly prized impressions that Munch exhibited in his lifetime, and they speak to the aesthetic he preferred for the display of his prints: some of the impressions are cut to the image, and adhered to larger, heavy brown paper, which Munch signed and often dated. Also included are multiple states of single compositions. They showcase the range of techniques the artist used in his printmaking practice: drypoint, etching, lithography, mezzotint, and woodcut, and innovations through the addition of hand-applied color such as watercolor, crayon, and oil, or printing with woodblocks sawn into pieces.

“With this bequest, the Harvard Art Museums have become an important destination for the research of Munch’s prints,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy, the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums. “There are innumerable ways the collection offers opportunities for teaching, exhibition, and further study. Noteworthy for its groups of versions, states, and variations of single compositions, this collection offers wide-ranging insights into Munch’s innovative practice as a printmaker.”

Highlights from the Strauses’ recent gift of prints by Edvard Munch include:

• Six prints from the series Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), ranging in date from 1894 to 1917, join an impression that the couple previously gifted in 1991. Together, they showcase 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. Closely related to this group is the gift of Young Woman on the Beach (1896), which is a rare example of the artist’s brief exploration of the mezzotint technique.

• Three versions of Vampire II, dated 1895–1902 and all either hand colored or printed in color, join a black lithographic state from 1895 that the couple previously assisted with purchasing. These prints show how Edvard Munch sometimes combined lithographs with hand coloring and also used woodblocks to add color.

• Four impressions of Madonna, dated 1895–1902, join a black lithographic state and a drypoint from 1894 that the couple previously assisted with purchasing. The lithographic prints show a range of examples of hand-applied color (drawn/painted) and printed color.

• One impression of the woodcut Woman’s Head against the Shore (1899) joins two other impressions from the same year, both previous gifts from the Strauses: Woman’s Head against the Shore (1899), printed in turquoise-green and pale and dark orange inks; and Woman’s Head against the Shore (1899), printed in red and three different colors of green ink. These prints show how Munch selectively printed his jigsaw woodblocks, omitting a piece from one of the blocks (the water) in two of the impressions.

• Four different self-portraits are the first such representations of the artist to enter the collection: Self-Portrait (1895), lithograph in crayon and tusche printed in black ink; Self-Portrait with Cigar (1908–9), lithograph printed in black ink; Self-Portrait (1911–12), woodcut; and Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine (1930), lithograph printed in black ink.

• There are also rare examples of prints that Edvard Munch printed himself with his small hand-crank press, including Melancholy II (1898), a woodcut (sawn in three pieces) printed in black, red, blue, and yellow inks.

The Jasper Johns print included in the bequest, Savarin (1982), is a lithograph and monotype; it depicts a Savarin-brand coffee can filled with paintbrushes of various sizes. The backdrop incorporates the artist’s signature “crosshatch” work of the 1970s, which is represented in other prints by Johns in the museums’ collections. The arm shown at the bottom of the print is a reference to the skeletal arm shown in Munch’s Self-Portrait from 1895—a connection the couple noted by hanging the two prints near each other in their own home.

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

harvardartmuseums.org

Updated 06-03-2025

Christiane Baumgartner @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Wish you were here

Christiane Baumgartner 

Wish you were here 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Through 4 December 2021 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, presents a major new body of work by German artist CHRISTIANE BAUMGARTNER (b. 1967), concerned with the movement and the play of light across the horizons of land and sea.

The centrepiece of the exhibition, unveiled for the first time in the UK, is the largest and most ambitious work ever made by Christiane Baumgartner; sequential views of a cascading waterfall, measuring over nine metres in width. Christiane Baumgartner, who combines contemporary technology in the form of digital video and photography alongside time-honoured printing techniques to create monumental woodcuts, is also display her first depictions of a sunrise, and a new series of ‘reverse drawings’ featuring abstract configurations of colour.

The exhibition title originates from a new monumental print by the artist entitled Wish you were here, 2020, that in turn derives from Christiane Baumgartner’s affection for the Baltic coast of Germany, a place where she camped every summer when she was growing up. Wish you were here and related print Weststrand, 2021, which both depict the local skyline, stem from a result of Christiane Baumgartner’s still frequent visits to the coastline, areas of which have more hours of sunlight than any other location in Germany.

At the centre of the exhibition is Stairway to Heaven, 2019, which consists of five monochrome woodcuts derived from photographs Baumgartner took of a large waterfall outside Quebec City, Canada. The depictions of tumbling, cascading, and spraying water, are tightly hung with the horizon lines created by the water’s surface aligned, creating a focal point for the viewer’s eye that also conveys the potentially destructive of this ever-changing natural phenomenon. The woodblocks for this work took several months to complete before Christiane Baumgartner printed the edition, alongside others, by hand, in her studio in the famous Leipzig Cotton Mill in East Germany.

Smaller works in the show include Christiane Baumgartner’s first depictions of a sunrise in Totes Meer, 2021, and Early Morning, 2021, Promise, 2021, which captures sunlight breaking through clouds, The Visit, 2021, which illustrates a bright flash of sunlight reflected on water below, and Prometheus I - III, 2021, a series of three woodcuts that capture different views of the setting sun. Many of Christiane Baumgartner’s prints take the form of sequences of images illustrating the same scene, captured moments apart. Pink Moon, 2019, a series of six woodcuts depicting the moon on the horizon, is taken from stills of a film Christiane Baumgartner recorded whilst driving across a German island in the Baltic Sea, on a late spring evening.

A unique woodcut measuring over two metres in height, from Christiane Baumgartner’s new Contre-jour series, is also displayed in the gallery. The title of the work, which means “against daylight”, refers to a photographic technique in which the camera is pointing directly towards the source of light. This large-scale woodcut records daylight shining through a wooded landscape against a blue backdrop. Christiane Baumgartner’s recent use of colour in her woodcuts, also appears in her etchings and drawings. Over the past two years Christiane Baumgartner has been creating what she describes as ‘reverse drawings.’ To make these the artist inks small wooden blocks with a single colour, presses a piece of Japanese paper onto each surface, and draws on the versos. To make the series Französische Suiten I–VII, 2019, Christiane Baumgartner repeated this process up to twenty times, so that the resulting drawings range in colour from dark and earthy tones to vibrant colours. Französische Suiten I–VII is exhibited alongside a second suite, Ruby Tuesday, from Christiane Baumgartner's 2020 Diaries series.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

cristearoberts.com

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Helen Frankenthaler @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - Radical Beauty

Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Through 18 April 2022

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents the first major UK exhibition of woodcuts by the leading Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Shining a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts it showcases works never shown before in the UK, to reveal Helen Frankenthaler as a creative force and a trailblazer of printmaking, who endlessly pushed the possibilities of the medium.

Ranging from Helen Frankenthaler’s first ever woodcut in 1973, to her last work published in 2009, this major print retrospective brings together 30 works on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, including Madame Butterfly (2000) and East and Beyond (1973) to reveal the enormous diversity in scale and technique in her oeuvre. Challenging traditional notions of woodcut printmaking, the exhibition reveals the charge and energy behind Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘no rules’ approach, arranged thematically to spotlight the elements crucial to her unique style of mark-marking, from experimentation to inspiration and collaboration.

At the age of only 23 Helen Frankenthaler created her influential oil painting Mountains and Sea (1952), the first work produced using her signature soak stain technique - pouring thinned paint directly onto canvas from above to create broad expanses of translucent color. It was a breakthrough that would propel Frankenthaler into the spotlight of the New York art scene at a time where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning dominated. This technique went on to influence the artists of the Color Field school of painting, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and had a profound impact on her printmaking career.

Opening ten years after her death, ‘Radical Beauty’ examines Helen Frankenthaler’s revolutionary approach to the woodcut, positioning her as one of the medium’s great innovators. In the same way as she did with her earlier paintings, Helen Frankenthaler defied the limitations of what is often considered the most rudimentary of printmaking techniques; she found new dimensions to the medium, experimenting with different orientations and colourways, and a variety of new tools and methods. What resulted is an incomparable body of work, where prints appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms.

Highlights include Helen Frankenthaler’s first woodcut East and Beyond (1973) created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space. The work holds a sense of tangible colour and form, but at the same time has a fluidity that sets it apart from other artists at the time such as Jasper Johns. Other standout works include Cameo (1980) and Freefall (1993), which further demonstrate how Helen Frankenthaler accepted the challenge of woodcut printmaking and found ways to make it yield to her approach. In Cameo, Helen Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to colour and used her distinctive “guzzying” technique – where she worked her surfaces with sandpaper and in some instances, dentist drills, to achieve different affects.

A key focus of the exhibition is Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly (2000). Sharing its title with the 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini, the triptych’s light pastel colours and stained marks show Frankenthaler at her most expressive and lyrical. Created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata from 46 woodblocks and 102 colours, the work measures over two metres in length and occupies an entire room in the exhibition, along with a work proof and study to explore the complexity of its evocative title. In this print, and in others in the exhibition we can also understand Helen Frankenthaler’s working process and how each collaboration propelled her forward creatively. The exhibition includes all six woodcuts of the series Tales of Genji (1998), a highly ambitious body of work for which Helen Frankenthaler employed her soak-stain technique– this time painting with water-based colours onto sheets of plywood. Working with Tyler and his studio of printmakers once again, they embarked on a process of constant experimentation and a journey of trial and error to achieve Helen Frankenthaler’s vision.

Jane Findlay, Exhibition Curator and Head of Programme & Engagement at Dulwich Picture Gallery, said:

“This is a truly special opportunity for visitors to get up close to Frankenthaler’s phenomenal works – all of which have never been shown before in this country – in the intimate spaces of Dulwich Picture Gallery. There is something magical about how she breathes life into such a rigid medium, retaining the energy and dynamism - that born at once feeling - that you see in her painting. And with her proofs and process explored alongside we’ll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling works – revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.”

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road, London SE21 7AD

www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

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