Love London Love Culture rounds up the reviews for the British Museum’s major exhibition of the artist’s prints.
Londonist: **** “Unsurprisingly given his tumultuous life, Munch’s works are raw, lonely, sad and often disturbing — but that’s what makes them so evocative and gives them a magnetic hold over us.”
The Guardian: ***** “Munch’s art is addictive. It is at once brutal and refined. This exhibition concentrates on his works on paper, revealing their astonishing technical qualities, even showing some of his original plates and lithographic stones.”
Time Out: *** ” This exhibition doesn’t make for easy viewing: it’s heavy, dour stuff that’ll hang over you like a dark cloud.”
The Telegraph: **** “If exhibitions of prints tend to feel second best to shows of painting and sculpture, Edvard Munch’s biggest show of prints in 45 years – with 83 works, 50 from Oslo’s Munch Museum – is the exception. It shows the artist at his most expressive, taking us into a mind-set of untrammelled passion and intensity.”
The Times: **** “Step into a world of flame-tressed femmes fatales: of erotic madonnas and life-draining vampires, of lovers who tangle in fatal embraces and lone sylphs who stand, with their backs to you, on the brink of seashores.
This is the darkly entrancing realm that Edvard Munch conjures.”
The Upcoming: **** “Nevertheless, there is much beauty to admire here, as well as some wonderfully passionate and moving depictions of ordinary people. Munch’s prints capture something of a zeitgeist, and they do so in a powerfully emotional way.”
Evening Standard: **** “he timeless aspect is real enough. It is felt in all its authenticity through clouds of familiar-seeming meanings. Clichéd at first, they gather a genuinely impactful force as you go around this small but rich exhibition.”
Edvard Much: Love and Angst is on display at the British Museum until the 21st July.