Edvard Munch @ Centre Pompidou in Paris

Norwegian painter Edvard Munch might be best known for his painting The Scream, which can be found on numerous museum mementos and pop art novelties. As an artist, he explored pre-abstraction and the internal psychological elements in producing a visual image. With one foot (and mind) in the late 19^th century, and the other in the early 20^th century, Munch embodies an aesthetic than can be placed alongside painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh.

However, the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) exhibition “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye” examines the impact of film and photography on the visual artist, especially in regards to Munch who might be categorized as only revealing his interior psyche through his varied artworks. When a click of a camera (today also a cell phone), could immediately reproduce a visual image and film capture a living, moving action sequence, what would the painter reproduce? How would the artist paint the world in the light of this “modern” media?

The exhibit “The Modern Eye” uncovers Munch\'s dedicated journey to pursue facets of the traditional painting while embracing this technology to answer that question. Approximately 140 artworks combined drawings, etchings, paintings, photographs, videos and sculptures seen through collaboration with Oslo\'s Munch Museum to present this artist\'s expansive creative journey before his death in 1944. Munch embraced the answers to these questions as shown through the Pompidou\'s eleven thematic galleries that overlap in subject material to focus on how the artist envisioned art\'s modern “eye.”

Repetition was a theme throughout the exhibition because Munch\'s subjects were repainted numerous times, for several reasons, including the selling of a particular painting, a collector\'s commission or his fascination with one motif. Munch\'s The Kiss, The Sick Child and The Girls on the Bridge were images repeated six to ten times. Each time in the artist\'s representation of lovers kissing, the painting morphed in setting while the two faces and figures melded into one revealing colors of rich burgundies, deep greens and ruby reds in his 1897 image. Other versions incorporated alternate settings, The Kiss by the Moon, or The Kiss on the Shore by Moonlight, both painted in the early 1900\'s.

At other times, repetition could become an obsession as seen in Munch\'s variations on the Weeping Woman. Created in etchings, paintings and other works on paper in diverse scales, the image portrays a slim, slouched woman standing beside a bed. Each rendering adds another layer to Munch\'s “eye” on this woman\'s physical and emotional life in a ritualistic manner that historians believe was an encounter with Rosa Meissner, a model, in the early 1900\'s.

Munch further embraced the century\'s new technique through repetition in the black and white prints, primarily self-portraits, that he experimented with in an answer to photography\'s relevance. These rarely seen photos display the physical attributes of the man, Munch, in evocative shades of charcoals and grays, while also incorporating sublime psychological subtext.

The compulsion with self-portraiture overflowed into Munch\'s later life when he began painting more than one self-portrait a year to record his personal history. A large-scale oil portrait pictures Munch in his bathrobe, sitting in a chair, appearing direly miserable with the flu. The painter religiously records his aging and then his disturbed vision caused by a ruptured vitreous humor in his right eye. The contemporary appearing images exhibited in a separate gallery record these struggles with his physical outlook on how Munch could alternately view the world when distorted from his eye\'s disease.

So much more can be viewed in this exhibition, a thematic retrospective that expands on what people only referentially understand about the artist who painted The Scream. While deeply introspective in his traditional painting, Munch applauded, encouraged and experimented with the upcoming 20^th century technology, in an effort to answer the question of how film and photography would change art in the future, and his own "modern eye."

Afterwards emerging from exhibition in the museum\'s top floor gallery and sitting at the Pompidou\'s rooftop restaurant, one could snap their own photographs from cameras or cell phones. Wih a spectacular view of Paris right before one\'s eyes, the sun set on the September evening. The Eiffel Tower twinkled in a haze of lavender, before settling to the iconic skeleton of bright lights. The Gran Palais, Notre Dame and the Louvre beamed with soft radiance in an ever-darkening sky, and one practically understood the impact photography imposed on art. A photo could capture this entrancing scene perfectly, from over a dozen perspectives, in repetitious shots, and then transpose it through the latest multiple photoshopping methods. How long would it take a painter, or how would a painter, now capture the mystique of this magical view? Which would be more memorable? Perhaps the very individual and personal memory romanticized in the mind. 

(To view the exhibition “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye” visit www.centrepompidou.fr)