Hunterian Art Museum
By serendipity I came across the online home of The Hunterian Art Museum from the University of Glasgow. It was a lovely find. Glasgow has some wonderful art galleries, including the recently reopened Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum which I used to haunt when I visited my Auntie Mina and Uncle Bill in Partick as a callow yoof
The Munch Print exhibition
The Hunterian is of course famous for Mackintosh House. But they also have other calls on your attention if wanted to give it the click. The Munch exhibition is over - but there is a nice little online archive of what was on view, here.
I always had a lot of sympathy for Mr Munch. Saw a lot of his works in an exhibition in Melbourne a few years ago. Total stunner.
The Hunterian has this to say:
"Munch started making prints only once he had matured as a painter. Attracted by the bigger audiences of central Europe, he lived 1893 – 1909 in Berlin, where his first etchings were made from a desperate need to publicise his paintings. In 1896 he travelled to Paris to make lithographs and his first woodcuts.
By 1904, prints provided Munch with the means to make a living and, crucially, they could be exhibited in many places, spreading knowledge of his work. He was an artist who continually pondered and revised his images, and the prints are frequently the most powerful versions of his subjects.
After a nervous breakdown in 1908, Munch returned permanently to Norway but contributed to European exhibitions, most notably the Cologne Sonderbund show of 1912, in which he was hailed (alongside Van Gogh and Gauguin) as one of the founders of Expressionism.
Munch’s greatest prints were made in the period 1895-1905, but the artist continued painting and making prints until his death in 1944.
The exhibition includes examples of the best work from all periods, including the impressive large woodcut The Girls on the Bridge of 1918, which shows the pier in the village of Åsgårdstrand where the artist retreated each summer to paint.
Prints enabled Munch to exhibit widely and helped to spread his influence throughout Europe. He left his own huge collection to the city of Oslo, and the works on exhibition are borrowed from the Munch Museum there."
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Currently traveling in the UK - so posts might be a little erratic depending on schedule, bandwidth, and the state of the British people
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