Original subtitles

- Hello, and welcome to Oslo,

to a new exhibition, Munch 150.

It's been a century and a half since the birth

of Norway's most famous artist.

To celebrate, two museums here in Oslo,

The National Gallery and the Munch Museum,

have come together to create the most comprehensive

and ambitious exhibition of the art of Edvard Munch

ever staged.

Munch 150 is the largest overview

of Edvard Munch's work ever displayed,

a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see all of his

major paintings gathered together in one

extraordinary exhibition.

The event is part of a year-long celebration of

Edvard Munch happening in Oslo and across Norway

to coincide with the 150th anniversary

of the artist's birth.

Perhaps the most celebrated Norwegian that ever lived,

the name Edvard Munch is, for many people,

synonymous with his most famous work, The Scream.

One of the most memorable images in

the entire history of art,

The Scream is a rare example of the work whose fame

seems to transcend the period from which it emerged.

In 2012, one of the versions of The Scream sold

for just under $120 million, setting the all-time

record at public auction.

It was an event that furthered the reputation

of the image itself, and, of course,

of its creator, Edvard Munch.

Now I'm joined by two of the curators of the exhibition,

Mai Britt Guleng and Nils Olsen here in the first room

of the National Gallery.

Mai Britt, he's such a prolific artist, Munch,

with over 1,000 paintings in that career.

So, on how on earth do you decide what you want to show?

Are you going for a comprehensive exhibition or are you

looking at different facets?

- At both.

We would like to show a comprehensive presentation of Munch.

We started with the main works from the whole of his career,

and then we had a lot of discussions,

what is a major work,

but we ended up with our selection,

and we also ended up with some certain themes

that we wanted to investigate.

We couldn't just have major works because then

it might be--

- To obvious, perhaps, but at the same time,

we must remember that we are very spoiled

at the Munch Museum and the National Museum

because we have the major works.

- For us, also, besides the works, the choice of works,

the structure was very, very important.

If you have 270 main works, you need a very

strong structure, you need a kind of choreography

for the exhibition.

The main idea for us was chronology, so we started

with 1882 and we finish with 1944,

but inside or under this structure,

this temporary line,

we have a lot of different themes,

a lot of different angles and perspectives.

- The exhibition begins with Munch's self portraits,

the most interesting of which are these two,

painted when he was just 19 years old.

The first is a precisely rendered image,

a self-contained and rather confident young man,

with a sense of self drama because of the strong

contrast in light.

Now this one is more experimental.

It's softer dabs of paint,

and a gaze which, perhaps, captures something

of the vulnerability of a young man.

Just a year earlier, in 1881, Munch had begun

at the Royal School of Drawing in Oslo,

an institution that had been, in part, founded by a

distant relative, Jacob Munch, who was also an artist

back in 1818.

Munch had first displayed an artistic leaning

at the age of seven, and encouraged by his Aunt Karen,

had continued to draw and paint through the rest

of his childhood.

Now this is one of Munch's first publicly exhibited works.

In its subject matter it shows Munch's engagement

with the idea of realism, a depiction of ordinary

people in ordinary situations or settings.

Both in his treatment of light and color,

we see a young artist's awareness of Impressionism.

Critics in Oslo, though, unfamiliar with the latest

innovations in modern painting, attacked the image,

calling it slapdash and insipid.

Munch considered himself as much a writer as a painter.

Throughout his life, he kept diaries and journals.

These give us a fascinating insight into the artist's

interior world, and they're a huge illuminating complement

to his artistic output.

But in the tension between what his art depicts

and the reality of the life he led,

Munch did as much as anyone to blur the distinction

between the two.

Edvard Munch was born on December the 12th, 1863

in the village of Loten, to Christian and Laura Munch.

An army doctor, Christian Munch was prone

to bouts of deep depression, and Edvard would later claim

his own mental problems stemmed from his father.

The family moved to the capital, Christiania, later

renamed Oslo, when Edvard was one year old.

But his childhood was marked by tragedy.

Laura Munch died of tuberculosis in 1868,

and Edvard, himself, suffered frequent attacks

of the disease, often coming close to death.

Sickness, madness and death

were like the black angels

surrounding my crib.

My mother died prematurely.

From her I inherited the disease of consumption.

Following his mother's death,

he and his siblings, Sophie, Andreas and Laura and Inger,

were cared for by their maternal aunt, Karen Kjolstad.

But another tragedy was to mark Munch's early life.

He lost his elder sister, Sophie, also to tuberculosis,

in 1877.

Her eyes became red.

It was certain, then, that death was coming.

Unfathomable death.

Evening came and Sophie lay burning up on her bed.

Dear, sweet Edvard, take it from me.

It hurts so much.

But I could not take it away from her.

The angels of fear, sorrow and death have stood by my side

since the day I was born.

They follow me when I pray,

followed me everywhere.

Followed me in the spring sun and the glory of summer.

They stood by my side at bedtime when I shut my eyes.

They threatened me with death, hell and eternal damnation.

The Sick Child shows a gravely ill young girl

sitting up with her head against a pillow,

her face turned towards the gardens on the far, right

of the scene,

whilst her companion already seems bowed in grief.

The theme of the dying child was a common subject

in late 19th century art.

But Munch also drew on this own experience and memory.

He wrote later in life that the traumatic experience

of the death of his sister, Sophie, was the primary

source of the painting.

He describes in vivid detail how he rekindled these

painful memories as he struggled to create the image.

But it was another more fleeting episode in his life

that seems to have provided the more immediate

impetus for The Sick Child.

- Munch painted The Sick Child after he had seen

this girl called Betsy Nichten, who was a patient

of his father's.

He wanted to capture the first vision of her head,

her pale face against the white pillow and her red hair.

And he wrote about it several years later,

that he wanted to recapture this inner image,

this memory, of the child.

- It's quite an old-fashioned theme.

There were a lot of other artists from this time

that were painting sick, young girls with

tuberculosis and so on.

It was quite fashionable.

But the form is absolutely revolutionary.

It took Munch over a year

to complete the painting,

through a process of applying layers of paint

and scratching them off again.

He built up a complex tapestry of color and texture.

- We can see how he gets terribly frustrated

with the canvas, and he scratches it

with the end of his paintbrush.

You can see, he leaves that, he leaves the scratches in.

They're sort of like scars, adding to the imperfections

and the emotion of the painting.

- He allows the paint to drip and run down the canvas,

altogether a more expressive sense,

not of what he saw,

not of what the eye captured at the time,

but what the mind and the emotions recall of that,

so he can revivify and bring that thing back to life

for us in the way that he felt it.

While Impressionists were attempting to capture

light or movement with their radical technique,

here Munch seems to be trying to realize in paint

something deeper about memory and experience,

and it's this fact that sets The Sick Child apart.

- Munch exhibited the painting with the designation Study,

so it seems he accepted the fact that this was an

experiment, that the reception was very polarized,

and the critics were very harsh.

- One of the critics said, it looked like a dirty

sheet hung out to dry on the washing line.

Another critic said it looked like an abortion.

Well, this was incredibly hurtful for Munch,

as you can imagine.

- But the genius of it was also acknowledged by those

who knew more than the conservatives critics

and newspapers of the broad public.

It becomes a pivotal work, and he says himself that

"a lot of what I did later had its beginning in this work."

- In the years following The Sick Child,

Munch continued to experiment with different styles

and techniques.

And the next few rooms of the exhibition show the results.

Before he could move forward, Munch, in a sense,

took a step back.

Stung by the criticism of The Sick Child,

Munch produced this monumental work.

Here, he took on the very same subject,

but realized it in a more acceptable academic style,

as if to show he could do it if he wanted to.

The painting was a great success,

and led to Munch receiving a three-year state scholarship,

part of which included a bursary to study in Paris.

So, in the autumn of 1889, the 25 year old

made his first extended visit to the French capital.

The city was the undisputed center

of the European art world.

Here, Munch began an engagement both with

Impressionism and also with the newer, more radical

forms of art that were emerging.

Night in St. Cloud owes a debt to the art

of the American painter, James McNeill Whistler,

who lived in Paris before him.

It also borrows something of the visual language

of Impressionism, particularly in its brush work.

But the brooding figure staring out of the window,

set within a dark interior, comes entirely

from Munch's visionary imagination.

His father, Christian, had died at the end of 1889,

just after he'd arrived in Paris,

and some scholars have suggested that here

Munch is working out his grief in paint.

Love and its consequences became the focus for

a monumental undertaking that came to dominate

Munch's life and work, and which takes over

the next few rooms of the exhibition.

A series of thematically grouped paintings

exploring life and death became Munch's central project,

which he called the Frieze of Life.

The Frieze is exhibited at different times

in various formations, but there's no unified

style or format, no definitive Frieze that

Munch declared complete,

but rather a changing assembly of works

that emerged over time.

And so, here, in this first room, we're presented

with a reconstruction of Munch's first version

of the Frieze exhibited in 1893 in Berlin,

under the title, Study for a Series Called Love.

But the most complete and unified version of the Frieze

was shown in 1902, again in Berlin,

and it's this that forms the centerpiece of the exhibition.

The Frieze is broken into four sections,

starting with the Seed of Love,

which shows the coming together of a man and a woman,

not least subsumed in Munch's amazing image

of a passionate embrace.

Then comes the second section,

Love's Blossoming and Demise, where guilt and remorse

start increasingly to play a role.

The third section is Angst, with its extraordinary

crescendo, building up to Munch's celebrated work,

The Scream.

And then, finally, and inevitably,

Death, but with a rather meek and surprising post script,

which brings everything full circle

in this extraordinary painting, Metabolism.

This painting, Red and White shows two women standing

at the tree-lined shore of Åsgårdstrand.

On the left, the female in figure in white

stares out at the water.

Her innocence contrasts with the red figure,

who turns to confront the viewer,

the embodiment of passion and sexuality.

This, for Munch, is a moment of sexual awakening.

The attraction is then consummated in this

version of The Kiss.

And then, in the Madonna, Munch presents an

extraordinary image of a climactic female figure,

her eyes half closed, her body arched in pleasure.

Here is a sexually powerful woman

lost in her own world, making no appeal to the viewer.

But her sallow skin is akin to that of a corpse.

Here, too, perhaps, are the two extremes

of human existence, sex and death.

- Just the fact that he was painting a woman making love.

It was scandalous.

She's not depicted in a way that

only makes her an object of desire.

It's not, she's not really desirable

in the way she's painted.

She's not painted inviting or something.

It's more like she's included in her own experience.

In Ashes, Munch's pessimistic take on

male-female relations is laid bare.

The man seems lost and defeated,

the woman almost triumphant,

and yet morally compromised.

In another lithographic version of the work, Munch wrote,

"I felt our love lying on the earth like a heap of ashes,"

thereby giving the painting its title.

Female power over men is further emphasized

in this work, Vampire, in which a woman

is at once consoling and consuming the male figure

in her embrace, her tentacle-like red hair

enveloping his form.

And then in this work, the Dance of Life, in which

the figures dance under the sun of the Nordic summer night,

Munch seems to present stages in a woman's life.

- Munch used many symbols that are easily recognizable

and understandable,

like the white dress for innocence,

like the red dress for desire,

and perhaps also guilt,

and the black dress for sorrow.

The central couple appear lost

in their own embrace.

And, again, as with the Madonna, in this moment of love,

their skull-like faces remind us of demise

and the inevitability of death.

- He's really a master of reduction.

He doesn't want to tell a story, he's focusing

on the woman, the child, the man, the night,

and so on.

And, of course, then he is coming to elements,

elements and strong tension and very strong relations,

so men and women, of course, suffering, jealousy,

of this very fundamental emotion.

- At the same time that the Frieze is beginning

to take shape in the early 1890s,

Munch was becoming increasingly anguished.

He'd been profoundly affected by the death

of his father in 1889,

and from 1892, was living in Berlin.

His personal life became more turbulent,

and his alcohol consumption more excessive,

all of which exacerbated a deepening sense of depression.

I live with the death of my mother,

my sister, my grandfather,

my father.

Every day is the same.

My friends have stopped coming.

And laughter disturbs me,

tortures me.

The fire in the fireplace is my only friend.

The time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace

gets longer and longer.

At its worst, I lean my head against the fireplace,

overwhelmed by the sudden urge,

kill yourself and then it's all over.

And then a huge shadow springs across half the wall,

clear up to the ceiling and the mirror over the fireplace.

I see the face of my own ghost.

Munch spent the early 1890s

shuttling between France, Norway and Germany.

On a fleeting trip back to Christiania, he had an experience

that would inspire his most celebrated work of art.

It happened while on a walk in Ekeberg,

overlooking the city.

It was a time during which life

had ripped open my thoughts.

The colors in nature broke the lines in nature.

The lines and colors vivid with movement.

I felt a huge scream welling up inside me.

And I really did hear the huge scream.

I was left trembling in fear.

- The Scream is something you do when you're born,

maybe when you die,

when you're hurt,

so it's something that you can immediately relate to.

- The one reason why The Scream is so well known

is definitely that it is so easily recognizable.

It is such a simple image.

- He's always stopping, telling a story at a certain point,

and leave us alone with a lot of questions.

And with The Scream, it's probably much more

questions than answers.

This is the first version

of The Scream that Munch made.

He created it initially as the final image in the

original version of the Frieze of Life.

He presents a figure flat against the picture plane,

mouth open, ears covered.

- We cannot say is this a man, a woman or a child.

It's just like a form, like an iconographic sign

for a being, for a human being.

And then, again, its the eye contact between the viewer

and this like mask in the painting coming onto us.

And I think this is one of the most strongest

rhetoric elements in his art.

That we can never like sit on a sofa and viewing

the story in front of us.

We are always forced to think of it at least,

or to react or to reflect about our own feelings

and emotions in similar situations.

- It's an image which has this visceral contact

directly with human experience.

The Scream is this blank piece of paper,

which all of us will project onto.

And Munch understands that.

For him, it may be something exceedingly personal,

but for the rest of us, I think that its iconic status,

its universal status, is that it touches

something very raw, very basic,

almost primeval in all of us.

In that sense, we will project onto that

what our scream is.

Behind the figure, the turbulent sky

and the landscape of the harbor of Christiania far below

are rendered through a series of fluid, undulating strokes

of almost pure color.

- If you look at the surface of the canvas,

it's full of diagonal and converging and moving

and twisting lines.

He's got a whole series of these very close-knit

lines that whirl and connect with other things.

It's agitated, it's febrile.

The surface of the work would seem to

have its own life, its own scintillation.

And then, of course, the color scheme

is deliberately chosen in relation to what

he says he experienced.

Red, and the connotations with blood and death,

and this notion of the scream that passes

right in the way through nature, right in the way

through the core of all of us.

The Scream is painted on cardboard,

using a mixture of egg tempura and crayon.

These more delicate materials, combined with considerable

damage sustained while still in Munch's possession,

means that The Scream is a challenge to conserve.

- At that time, he was interested in the new,

tempura paint that you could have in tubes.

It gave a very different lustre, a very different

surface from the more fat, oil paint.

This is a meager, lean paint,

which dries up very matte.

He probably wanted to see what he could get out of it,

experiment with the paint,

and then he enhances the whole thing by

drawing out the outlines with the crayons.

Munch was well known for his so-called

horse cure, which involved leaving his paintings

out in the open,

believing that the exposure to the elements

would help soften the bright colors

of some of his images.

- There are spots of candle wax, tallow,

and even bird droppings.

But strangely enough, he didn't want to remove it,

so all traces from Munch's time is still on the painting,

even damages that he retouched himself.

- It's a very good example of where Munch

had to find a different way of painting.

He doesn't abandon figurative, but he had to abandon

naturalistic painting in order to somehow

communicate the things of the mind

rather than the things of the eye.

- What has made the image famous is not only

the image itself but it's all the variations

that you find in magazines and caricatures, et cetera,

in films and all over the place.

It's become an ubiquitous image.

- I think The Scream has certainly obscured

a more diverse, nuanced and sophisticated view of Munch.

He's not atypical, he does play into the hands

of some stereotypes about Nordic fatalism

and the doom and gloom of the Scandinavian countries,

but I don't think it's done him any harm.

The Scream is sort of Munch's calling card,

it's his business card, if you like.

It's introduced him to the world.

It's made him an exceedingly famous, almost household name.

And finally we come to the last image

in the Frieze cycle.

Munch presents a fecund couple,

a kind of secular Adam and Eve.

They stand naked, avoiding each other's gaze.

Between them stands the tree of life,

its roots growing out from the skeleton buried below.

Here, then, is the Frieze cycle brought to its completion.

A new life springs from death.

- I don't think when you look at the Frieze,

it's about a narrative.

I think it's more about a structure of the things which,

between birth and death, we will all,

in one way or another, experience,

and have to come to terms with.

The ambition here is massive, it's total,

it's to somehow pin down the essence

of what it means to be a human being.

- In the rooms following the Frieze of Life,

the exhibition explores several other facets

of Munch's art through the end of the 19th century

and into the 20th.

We see portraits of friends, patrons and acquaintances

from his time in Berlin and elsewhere.

But perhaps the most striking image is this

self portrait from 1895.

The painting is presented in a special packing case

that was used to transport it around Norway

as part of the Munch 150 celebration.

The 1890s would see Munch pursue an exhausting

cycle of exhibition and tours around Europe,

and by the end of the century,

he was beginning to enjoy a degree of success.

We've now traveled across Oslo to the Munch Museum,

where the exhibition continues.

And, just as the exhibition at the National Gallery

begins with self portraiture,

so it does here at the Munch Museum.

But the earliest, from 1886,

showing Munch using that scratchy, layered style

he first used in The Sick Child, which he painted

just before this work,

and here showing himself as a young, emerging artist

very much trying to make his mark.

Then, in a later self portrait, in 1926,

Munch appears as an assured but scowling presence

in an otherwise intensely coloristic experiment.

And then, finally, in a portrait from 1906,

which is very much the entry point to the second

half of the exhibition, we see a melancholy Munch,

sitting alone in a cafe,

a bottle of wine for company,

with this strange, devil-sided apparition in the background,

seemingly evoking the idea of inner turmoil.

In the summer of 1907, Munch opted to forgo

his annual visit to Åsgårdstrand,

and traveled instead to the German coastal town

of Warnemünde.

While by day, he enjoyed the rejuvenating effects

of swimming, good food and sea air,

at night, Munch was a regular visitor

to one of the town's brothels.

His experiences there became the subject

for his series of paintings that showed

Munch's continued preoccupation with the troubled

relationship between the sexes.

He presents a disturbing vision of life inside the brothel,

the green patterned walls form a claustrophobic backdrop

to the sordid interactions between clients and prostitutes.

This was a time called his inferno period,

during which his mental health reached crisis point.

Five years before, he'd been trapped in a

disastrous love affair with Tulia Larsen.

Wealthy and obsessive, she was intent on marrying Munch.

After many attempts to escape the relationship,

it finally ended in dramatic fashion.

Munch's tumultuous relationship with Tulia

reached a climax during an encounter

at his Åsgårdstrand cottage in 1902.

Shots were fired and the artist's left hand

was badly wounded.

It's not known who fired the gun,

but it left Munch permanently maimed,

and embittered for years to come.

He had offered his hand

to a female thief

and she had bitten it off.

Help, help, she had cried, I am drowning.

Yet she had run away, and it was he who had drowned.

Munch spent the next few years

struggling with anxiety and depression

before he finally admitted himself to

the Copenhagen clinic of Dr. Jacobson in 1909.

He spent eight months there and started a journal

regularly as a form of therapy.

It was a practice he would continue

for the rest of his life.

Munch's journal entries are difficult to date,

but there was one person who would appear repeatedly,

even years after their relationship ended,

Tulia Larsen.

The smile of a mistress,

that grimacing smile.

The actress in the theater of life

has become the terrifying image of the head of the Medusa.

I was afraid of her face the first time I saw it.

But she knew how to use pity, tears and reproach

to keep me at heel.

It almost felt like a duty,

allowing her to torture me.

The breakdown in 1909 was in many ways

a turning point for Munch.

On leaving the clinic in Copenhagen,

he returned to Norway, where he settled in the small

town of Kragero, down the coast from Åsgårdstrand,

on the Oslo fjord.

Here, he re-engaged with the Norwegian landscape,

producing a series of dynamic images.

Having been largely shunned through the 1890s,

Munch was now slowly gaining acceptance within Norway.

Some of his works had been bought by the National Gallery,

and he was increasingly recognized as a key figure

in Norwegian cultural life.

As if to underline Munch's newfound confidence,

he began work on a series of large-scale paintings

in response to a competition to decorate the Aula,

the festival hall of Christiania University,

of which these are part of Munch's elaborate process

of study.

It was a commission at the highest national prestige,

and although his designs weren't universally popular,

his paintings were eventually accepted.

The first stages in the Aula mural series

were produced in Kragero.

But a year later, in 1910, Munch purchased a property

across the fjord in Hvitsten called Nedre Ramme.

Inspired by the idyllic setting,

Munch continued to work on the Aula commission there,

a series of work he said celebrated the perpetual

forces of life.

It would be proved to be a project full of challenges,

and frustrations.

I had to work in a more objective

way with the Aula paintings and with a particular motif.

It would have to be executed on a different level

than the Frieze of Life, which would, for me,

always be my most important business.

But, it took time.

At Nedre Ramme, I could set up the models

for Alma Mater and the children bathing on the beach,

with fjord against the blue, hazy hills in the background.

To paint Alma Mater, I occupied 100 meters

of Norway's long coastline.

This caused great envy.

It should only be used for bathing.

As long as I have painted in this country,

I have had to fight every inch of the way

with clenched fists for my art.

I suppose there are not so many years left for me

to annoy my fellow countrymen with my work.

- This is Munch's final major self portrait,

and for me, among the most powerful and moving works

he ever produced.

In 1940, Norway had been invaded by Germany,

and found itself under occupation.

And although he'd been previously condemned

as a degenerate artist by the Nazis,

Munch was, by and large, left alone,

although he continually feared for the fate of his works

in the National Gallery.

Instead, he retreated even further into isolation in Ekely.

And it was during that time that he painted

this intensely powerful image of himself.

- The figure between the clock and the bed

has, in my mind, a ceremonial character,

where Munch, via the old, wretched

body stands there erect, as if departing,

taking a final farewell,

with the public, with the beholder

confronting him again.

- You see him positioned between the clock and the bed.

The bed has inferences of both birth and death,

as Edvard eventually, he knows he will die.

The clock measuring time, and the clock has no hands

in this instance.

And we see him between the temporal and what will become

the infinite.

- And there he stands.

So old, so sunken.

So brave, with his tune still up,

even though there's not much strength in his body.

It was very important to Munch that he should be

conscious when he died.

He didn't want to die asleep,

and I'm here to say he did die on that bed,

fully conscious.

He experienced it.

- It's a very self conscious, but also a very,

very characteristic image of himself,

poising himself ready for what is inevitable,

and to some extent, something he's been almost

rehearsing through even his younger pictures.

The life is a process of preparing for death,

it's something which runs through all his work.

- The end finally came for Munch

on the 23rd of January, 1944.

A month before, a Germany ammunition dump had exploded

in Oslo Harbor, the force of the blast

shattering windows as far as Ekely.

The trauma of the experience brought on a bout

of pneumonia, from which he never recovered.

He died in his bed, in the presence of his housekeeper.

He was 80 years old.

Now I'm joined for the final time by Mai Britt Guleng

and also by the curator Jon Ove Steihaug.

Mai Britt, you put the exhibition on.

Jon Ove, you've considered these objects

probably for most of your scholarly life,

but it's never quite the same as seeing them

on the wall.

Is it possible for people like you to have

your opinion of Munch change as a consequence

of this exhibition?

What does it reinforce what you already knew

and felt about him?

- To me, it's really interesting to see Munch's

whole life work shown in two places,

in two houses, because the National Gallery,

is like his 19th century house,

his 19th century museum quality,

and here, at the Munch Museum, it's more,

kind of modern, modernist.

So it kind of emphasizes also the wide span in his career.

- So it reinforces, then, what you were saying at

the beginning, of his looking backwards,

looking forwards.

Is that the strongest feeling you're getting

at the end of this survey?

- Yes, I think that is one very important

aspect of it.

But, at the same time, it's always very different

to see the works in real life,

and we hope that this exhibition will generate

new research on Munch.

Because there are so many questions to be asked.

- Jon Ove, he's a very interesting figure.

I mean, we've said about him struggling in two centuries.

By the time he died, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism

were long gone, Abstract Expressionism was developing,

or about to develop in New York,

and yet he's still seen as a singular figure.

Are you finding now as a consequence of this exhibition

or, more broadly in your scholarship,

there are ways of locating Munch or is that his

position in our history.

He is an artist attached to various movements

but he's always a singular, isolated figure.

- I'm definitely missing stuff in terms of new research.

What should be maybe be done more is to

discuss Munch in relation to Modernism

and the Modernist canon,

and also in relation to post-war tendencies

in New York, like Abstract Expressionism.

Because in this room, where we are standing now,

you see that his way of painting,

it's really, really very close to what you found

after the second world war in Abstract Expressionism.

- But he's also an artist whose concerns,

the body, the human condition,

seem to strike a chord, and have struck a chord,

among artists for the last two decades,

in the mainstream of art.

So there's still this kind of ongoing relevance

or resonance.

- Definitely.

I think many artists and the general public feel that

his work is still very relevant.

It's not historic, it's not dated,

it's not like something that is close

but it's still very vital.

- I fear I must leave you.

Thank you both, and congratulations.

And we come to the end of our time here in Oslo.

So, from the Munch Museum, thank you and goodbye.