Welcome to Great Art.
For the past few years, we've been filming
in the biggest exhibitions, art galleries and museums in the world,
exploring some of the greatest artists and art in history.
Not only do we record landmark shows,
but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes.
We then use this as a springboard to take a broader look
at extraordinary artists.
This week, Great Art brings you an exhibition from Oslo
that was staged simultaneously in two galleries.
Its title was "Munch 150",
and it was to mark the centenary and a half since the birth
of Norway's most famous artist, the man who painted The Scream.
Two museums, Norway's National Gallery
and the Munch Museum, came together
to mount the most ambitious and comprehensive exhibition
ever staged of the art of Edvard Munch.
There's far more to Munch
than just his four versions of The Scream.
His output was wide and varied,
and his life story dramatic and moving.
The exhibition in Norway was the ideal opportunity
for us at Great Art to look closer at this wonderful artist.
'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.'
'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 a work of art 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 Ohlsen
here in the first room at the National Gallery.
Mai Britt, he's such a prolific artist, Munch.
I mean, there's over 1,000 paintings in that career.
So how on Earth do you decide what you want to show?
Are you going for a comprehensive exhibition
or looking at different facets?
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 a selection,
and we also ended up with certain themes
we wanted to investigate.
We couldn't just have major works because then it might be...
Too obvious? Too obvious perhaps,
but at the same time, we must remember
that we are very spoilt at the Munch Museum
and the National Museum because we have the major works.
For us also, besides 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 a chronology,
so we start 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
of a self-contained and rather confident young man
with a sense of self-drama
because of the strong, contrasting light.
Now, this one is more experimental, with softer daubs 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 his 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,
he 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,
the depiction of ordinary people in ordinary situations or settings.
Whilst in his treatment of light and colour,
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,
and throughout his life, he kept diaries and journals.
These give us a fascinating insight into the artist's interior world,
and they're a hugely-revealing 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 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, Kristiania, 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.'
MAN AS MUNCH: 'Sickness, madness and death
'were like the black angels that surrounded my crib.'
'My mother died prematurely.'
'From her, I inherited the seeds of consumption.'
'Following his mother's death, he and his siblings,
'Sophie, Andreas, Laura, and Inger, were cared for
'by their maternal aunt, Karen Bjolstad.'
'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,
'and 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
'had stood by my side since the day I was born.'
'They followed me when I played... 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 darkness
'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 his own experience and memory.'
'He wrote later in life that the traumatic experience
'of the death of his sister, Sophie,
'was the primary source for 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 Betzy Nilsen, who was a patient at his father's,
and 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
at 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 colour and texture.'
You can see how he gets terribly frustrated with the canvas,
and he scratches it with the end of his paint brush.
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,
all to get a more expressive sense, not of what he saw,
not of what the eye captured at the time,
but of 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 realise in paint
'something deeper about memory and experience.'
'And it's this fact that sets The Sick Child apart.'
Munch exhibited the painting with a designation, "Study",
so it seems he accepted the fact that this was an experiment,
but the reception was very polarised and the critics were very harsh.
One of the critics said it looked like a dirty sheet
hung out to dry on a washing line.
Another critic said it looked like an abortion.
Well, this was incredibly hurtful for Munch, as you can imagine.
The genius of it was also acknowledged by those
who knew more than the conservative critics,
and newspapers, and the broad public.
It becomes a pivotal work, and he says himself that,
"A lot of what I did later had its beginnings 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.'
'But 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 realised it in a more acceptable academic style,
'as if to show that 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.'
'And so in the autumn of 1889,
'the 25-year-old made his first extended visit
'to the French capital.'
'The city was the undisputed centre 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 Saint-Cloud owes a debt to the art of the American painter,
'James McNeil Whistler, who'd lived Paris before him.'
'It also borrows something of the visual language
'of Impressionism, particularly in its brushwork.'
'But the brooding figure staring out of a 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 was 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 centrepiece of the exhibition.
A frieze is broken up 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.
Third section is Angst, with this extraordinary crescendo
building up to Munch's most-celebrated work, The Scream.
And then finally and inevitably... Death.
But with a rather neat and surprising postscript,
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 Asgardstrand.'
'On the left, a female 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 the 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 climatic female figure,
'her eyes half closed, and 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 bare 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, erm, she's secluded 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 emphasised
'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 recognisable
and understandable.
Like the white dress for innocence,
the red dress for desire, and perhaps also guilt,
and the black dress for sorrow, et cetera.
'The central couple appear lost in their own embrace.'
'But 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 women,
THE child, THE man, THE night, and so on.
And, of course, then he is coming to elements,
elements of strong tension and very strong relations.
So man and woman, of course, the suffering, jealousy,
so these very fundamental emotions.
At the same time that The Frieze was beginning to take shape
in the early 1890s,
Munch was becoming increasingly anguished.
He had been profoundly affected by the death of his father in 1889,
and from 1892, whilst living in Berlin,
his personal life became more turbulent,
and his alcohol consumption more excessive.
All of which exacerbated a deepening sense of depression.
MAN AS MUNCH: 'I live with the dead...
'..my mother, my sister,
'..my grandfather...
'..my father.'
'Every day is the same.'
'My friends have stopped coming.'
'Their 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."'
'My 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 Kristiania,
'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 soul.'
'The colours in nature broke the lines in nature.'
'The lines and colours quivered with movement.'
'I felt a huge scream welling up inside me.'
'And I really did hear a huge scream.'
A MALE GHOSTLY SCREAM
'I was left trembling in fear.'
To scream is something you do when you're born,
maybe when you die,
when you hurt,
so it's something that you can immediately relate to.
One reason why The Scream is so well-known...
..is definitely the fact that it is so easily recognisable.
It is such a simple image.
He's always stopping telling a story at a certain point,
and leaves 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 if it's a man or a woman, or a child or an adult,
it's just like a formula, like an iconographic sign
for a human being.
And then again, it's the eye contact
between the viewer and this mask in the painting coming on to us.
And I think this is one of the strongest rhetoric elements
in his art.
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,
very, almost primeval in all of us,
and in that sense, we will project onto that what our "scream" is.
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 colour scheme is deliberately chosen
in relation to what he says he experienced,
the red and the connotations with blood and death,
and this notion of a scream that passes right the way through nature,
right the way through the core of all of us.
At that time, he was interested in the new tempera 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 meagre 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 crayons.
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 things of the eye.
What has made the image famous is not only the image itself,
but all the variations that you find in magazines
and caricatures, et cetera, in films, and all over the place.
It has become an ubiquitous image.
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 others' 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
'as 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 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 celebrations.'
'The 1890s had seen Munch pursue an exhaustive cycle
'of exhibitions and tours around Europe,
'and by the end of the century,
'he was beginning to enjoy a degree of success.'
We've now travelled 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.
With the earliest, from 1886,
showing Munch using that scratchy layered style
he'd 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.
And then, in a later self portrait from 1926,
Munch appears as an assured but scowling presence
in an otherwise intensely colouristic experiment.
And then, finally, in a self portrait from 1906,
which is very much the entry point
to the second half of the exhibition,
we see a melancholic Munch, sitting alone in a cafe,
a bottle of wine for company,
with this strange double-sided apparition in the background,
seemingly evoking the idea of inner turmoil.
'In the summer of 1907,
'Munch opted to forego his annual visit to Asgardstrand,
'and travelled instead to the German coastal town of Warnemunde.'
'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 a series of paintings that show Munch's continued preoccupation
'with the troubled relationship between the sexes.'
'He presents a disturbing vision of life inside the brothel.'
'The green, patterned-walled rooms form a claustrophobic backdrop
'for the sordid interactions between client and prostitute.'
'This was a time Munch 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 Tulla 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 Tulla reached a climax
'during an encounter at his Asgardstrand 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.'
MAN AS MUNCH: '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 severe 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...
Tulla Larsen.'
MAN AS MUNCH: 'The smile of a mistress.'
'A grimacing smile.'
'The actress in the theatre 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 Asgardstrand on the Oslofjord.'
'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 recognised as a key figure
in Norwegian cultural life.
As if to underline Munch's new-found confidence,
he began work on a series of large-scale paintings
in response to a competition to decorate the Aula,
the festival hall of Kristiania University,
of which these are part of Munch's elaborate process of study.
It was a commission of 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 works he said celebrated
'the "perpetual forces of life".'
'But it would prove to be a project
'full of challenges and frustrations.'
MAN AS MUNCH: '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 the fjord against the blue hazy hills in the background.'
'To paint Alma Mater, I occupied 100m
'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.'
This is Munch's final major self portrait,
and for me, amongst 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
at the National Gallery.
Instead, he retreated even further into isolation at Ekely,
and it was during that time that he painted
this intensely powerful image of himself.
The self portrait, Between The Clock And The Bed,
has, in my mind, a ceremonial character
where Munch,
the old wretched... er... 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,
and the bed has inferences of both birth and death.
It's the bed where eventually he knows he will die.
The clock measuring time.
Although the clock has no hands in this instance.
And you see him between the temporal and what will become the infinite.
And there he stands. Erm...
So old, so sunken, so... so brave
with his chin 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 in his sleep, and I'm pleased to say,
he DID die on that bed, fully conscious. He experienced it.
'The end finally came for Munch on 23rd January 1944.'
'A month before, a German ammunition dump
'had exploded in Oslo harbour,
'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, is it possible for people like you
to have your opinion of Munch changed
as a consequence of this exhibition?
Or does it reinforce what you already knew and felt about him?
To me, it's, er, really interesting
to see Munch's whole life's work
shown in two places, in two houses,
because the National Gallery has this 19th century museum quality,
and here, at the Munch Museum, it's more kind of modernist,
so it emphasises also the wide span in his career.
So it reinforces then
what you were saying at the beginning,
of this 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.
We've said about this straddling of two centuries,
but 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.
Is that his position in art history?
He is an artist attached to various movements,
but he's always a singular isolated figure?
I definitely think that in terms of new research
that what should maybe be done more is to discuss Munch
in relation to Modernism and the Modernist canon,
and also in relation to post-war, erm, er, tendencies
in the art world, like Abstract Expressionism.
Because, like, in this room, where we are standing now,
you see that his way of painting, er, is 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, seemed 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 ongoing relevance or resonance too.
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. There we must leave it.
Thank you both and congratulations.
And we've come to the end of our time here in Oslo.
So from the Munch Museum, thank you and goodbye.
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