Munch: The Scream Within

Forty years after his most recent exhibition in Milan, Edvard Munch (Norway, 1863 – 1944) is being celebrated with a major retrospective, promoted by the municipality of Milan – Culture Directorate, with the patronage of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Rome and produced by Palazzo Reale and Arthemisia in collaboration with the MUNCH Museum in Oslo.

An undisputed key figure in the history of modern art, Munch is considered a forerunner of Expressionism and was one of the 19th century’s leading Symbolist artists, in addition to being interpreter par excellence of the deepest anxieties of the human soul.

Munch’s life was marked by great sorrows that brought him to the brink of madness: the premature loss of his mother and sister, his father’s tragic death, his tortured relationship with his fiancée Tulla Larsen. Everything contributed towards forming Munch’s poetics, which, thanks to his exceptional talent, succeeded in expressing his inner scream, transforming it into artworks. His expressionless faces, his dazed landscapes, and his powerful use of colour can reach every human being, transforming his works into universal messages, the existential disquiet that afflicts every human being. This is what has determined Munch’s greatness, making him one of the 20th century’s most iconic artists.

Curated by Patricia Berman, one of the world’s leading Munch scholars, the exhibition will recount the artist’s entire universe, his life journey, and his output – and it will do so through 100 works, including one of Oslo’s lithographic versions of The Scream (1895), but also The Death of Marat (1907), Starry Night (1922–19249), The Girls on the Bridge (1927), Evening. Melancholy (1900–1901) and Dance on the Beach (The Linde Frieze) (1904).

The Milan exhibition will include a rich programme of events involving a number of the city’s cultural organizations, in order to more deeply analyze the artist’s personality and expand the themes of his works while exploring a variety of languages, from cinema to architecture, from music to literature, and much more.

The programme is slated for publication in the near future via the partners’ communication channels.

The exhibition will continue on to a second venue in Rome, at Palazzo Bonaparte, from 18 February to 2 June 2025.

THE ARTIST

Munch is one of the artists most able to interpret the feelings, passions, and anxieties of his soul, communicating them in a powerful and tragic fashion.

Initially shaped by Norwegian naturalist Per Lasson Krohg, with whom he embarked on his painting career in 1880, he relocated to Paris for the first time in 1885; there, he came under the influences of Impressionism and Postimpressionism, which suggested to him a more intimate and dramatic use of colour, but above all a psychological approach Munch was conditioned for his entire life by the sorrow and want he had already experienced as a boy, when he suffered the stunning loss of his mother and sister to tuberculosis.

In Berlin, he contributed towards the formation of the Berlin Secession, and his first solo exhibition – which went unappreciated and was even deemed scandalous – was held in 1892: from that moment on, Munch embodied the figure of the cursed and subversive artist.

This precarious life lived “on the edge of a precipice” would lead to alcoholism and to a psychological breakdown that saw him hospitalized in several clinics between 1908 and 1909.

Choosing isolation, he relocated to his property in Ekely, Oslo, until his death in 1944, just one month after his eightieth birthday.

Information and bookings

T +39 02 892 99 21
www.palazzorealemilano.it www.arthemisia.it

Official hashtag
#MunchMilano

Tickets Open € 17.00
Full price € 15.00
Reduced price € 13.00 – €10.00