Scandinavian Artists In Stockholm

By Alma Luise Olson. Stockholm.

A very significant exhibition of work by Edvard Munch is being held at Konstakademien, here in Stockholm. In addition to many of the old favorites by this Norwegian artist appear several canvases from his own studio home, Ekeby, in Oslo. There was one period when he was the painter of death as something familiar and friendly, indeed of death as life’s own familiar. In this collection we detect striking exuberance and rhythm – in majestic forest trees, in the surf, in the pounding of horses’ feet. All his years as an artist he has been thinking in terms of a "Life Frieze" and, curiously, as he has grown older he has turned from themes of sickness and death to the very radiance of existence, accentuated by superb blue-green effects and by some exhilarating subjective qualities that profoundly moves the onlooker.
Edvard Munch himself is so much the hermit and recluse, so indifferent to his public, that perhaps American initiative is needed just now to claim this exhibition for New York before it is sent back to museums, to Ekeby and to the many private collectors. Taken together with his other work that is not here represented, it becomes the sort of showing that is a landmark in modern art history.

New York Times. Apr. 18, 1937.

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