Friday, August 3, 2012

EDVARD MUNCH at the SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART

In Glasgow we like to call a spade a spade , a hun a hun and a woman a dug.On a trip to Edinburgh we had to mind our p's and q's and pronounce Munch not as it is spelt but as Moonk , it took us a lot of getting used to.

Though his most iconic image is The Scream , Munch was a very early exponent of the  pressures , stresses and strains of Modern Life , this is why his work has a quality of currentness to us Today, giving his pictures an aura of sympathy , empathy and warning as to whether we serve the system or the system should serve us.Alas it is a rhetorical question in the negative which reflects sadly on the issue of progress or regression in the over one hundred years since most of Munch's work has been with us.

Munch himself suffered from many of the ills such as anxiety ( above) and melancholy ( below) which very much made him a suffering artist who points a mirror to society in which it can see what it is doing to our being.

His work is probably more relevant to us that it was to his times as we all are caught in the debt and work off the mortgage trap which exacerbates the very ills he brought out into the public sphere.

This review gives more details of the actual exhibition.

You can see a revealing documentary about The Scream in the video below:





No comments:

Post a Comment