A renowned artist, though often remembered only for a few iconic works, Edvard Munch was one of the great protagonists of the artistic revolutions of the last century. The exhibition opens with works by the Norwegian master preserved in the civic collections of Ca’ Pesaro, positioning Munch as a guide to a new adventure of discovery in the art of our time. The show pursues two parallel and complementary aims: on the one hand, to situate the artist within his historical context, freeing him from the myth he himself helped to create and revealing the true breadth of his genius beyond the familiar narrative of The Scream, thereby underscoring his significance within twentieth-century art. On the other hand, it bears witness to the profound extent of his influence on the art of the following decades, right up to the core of contemporary creation.
The works by Munch that open the exhibition focus on the human figure, the true centre of the entire project, and come from outstanding Venetian civic collections as well as prestigious international loans. From this point, a web of references and resonances unfolds: fertile terrain on which the artist’s vision took root and flourished.
From the drama of the prints by the Norway-born Waldemar to the symbolist and secessionist atmospheres emerging in Franz von Stuck’s timeless visages and James Ensor’s ironic masks, the opening sections of the exhibition explore the unsettling echoes of Italian and Belgian Symbolism. Printmaking was fundamental for Munch, and for many years he was known in Europe almost exclusively for his engravings. He also presented his graphic works at the Venice Biennale, of which Ca’ Pesaro preserves four celebrated examples created using different techniques – drypoint, aquatint, etching, and lithography – across various periods. These works embody Munch’s great revolution: from the outset, his distinctive style marked faces and figures with raw ferocity, their expressiveness rendering them almost monstrous, with hollow, vacant eyes enclosed in spaces that seem to collapse inward, or set within desolate and disquieting landscapes. In his paintings and prints, we encounter masks, spectres, monsters, skeletons, symbols, and personifications of fear and anxiety that reveal the Scandinavian roots of Munch’s iconography while also affirming his deep kinship with the French and Belgian Symbolists.
The exhibition also offers an opportunity to rediscover a lesser-known Munch through the extraordinary, monumental painting Two Old Men, on loan from Stockholm, a work that evokes a brighter phase in the Norwegian master’s career, closer to post-Impressionist influences. The year 1909 marked a decisive turning point, following Munch’s admission to Dr Jacobson’s clinic in Denmark. The works of that period reflect the artist’s renewed engagement with public art and a more empathetic contemplation of the lives of peasants and workers. The mood became lighter, the palette more luminous, and the subjects recalled certain iconographies reminiscent of Van Gogh, combined with the Dutch realism of Jan Toorop, and naturally akin to the Berlin Secession and Max Liebermann.
Yet the exhibition is not only about Munch and his own time: it also traces how profoundly he shaped subsequent generations, right up to contemporary art. In the room dedicated to German Expressionism, Munch’s influence is expressed in a harsher, more incisive language, where critique becomes overt: the distorted landscapes and figures of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann embody the collective drama of the Weimar Republic and the tensions that gripped Europe between the two World Wars. As history advanced, the meaning of Expressionism itself evolved: no longer, or not solely, the cry of the individual, but the anguish of an entire society. In the intense works of the masters of German Neue Sachlichkeit, there is no pity in their scrutiny of the human face, no redemption, only an unforgiving light that accentuates every edge, every scar, the raw ugliness of a moment in history marked by crisis, suffering, and fear.
The exhibition finally reaches the present day, where the echoes of Munch’s demons, vampires, and haunting portraits still resound. Tony Oursler, Marina Abramović, and Shirin Neshat bear witness to the vitality of Munch’s legacy, capable of giving form to the pain, violence, and solitude that continue to pervade our contemporary world.
The whole complex expressionist revolution is thus made up not only of inner outbursts and individual distress, but also of a symphony of reflections which, from individual experience, become symbols of truly universal struggles, fears, loneliness and alienation.
All images: courtesy MUVE. Exhibition views ph. Nico Covre