Edvard Munch | TateShots

my name is nicholas conan and i curated the edward monk exhibition I'm going to talk today about some of my favorite paintings in the exhibition this is a motif I painted about twelve times in his career you have this gray kind of claustrophobic scene with this couple this man and woman in this rather ambiguous embrace it could be a gesture of love but it could also be as the title implies something more sinister it now if we compare this painting to the one across you see how much monk transforms his paintings as he works on them over a number of years and so for example with this version which he painted almost three decades later you have the same couple embracing but now rather than being set in this very dark claustrophobic interior he's put it in this rather bucolic outdoor scene with daylight flooding in and of course much more color seeping into the painting this painting Red Virginia Creeper is one of my favorite paintings in the exhibition you have this tension between this figure in the foreground and then of course this sense of the space were seeding away very quickly it's very cinematic and you see this same device exploding all the other paintings on this wall you have this road and these very strong diagonal lines that basically both draw you into the painting but also create this almost vertigo-inducing feeling of this tension between the foreground and the background so this room I think is one of my favorite rooms in the exhibition because it unites for the first time six versions of a motif he painted in 1907 called the weeping woman and here you see this female figure in a bedroom looking very downcast and dejected and pensive and we do my monk painted this so obsessively but obviously was very drawn to the subject matter and not only did he painted some in these six paintings but he made a sculpture and he actually intended the sculpture to be his grave marker so it must have held great personal significance for him in 1930 monk develops hemorrhage in one of his eyes which starts to cloud his vision and this must have been quite terrifying for a painter but what Mumtaz is typically defiant and brave he actually starts to paint his own afflicted vision so these two paintings here you see the strange masts that started to cloud and obscure his vision and he talks about this taking on sometimes the form of a bird's self portraiture becomes a real mainstay he seems fascinated by his own image but not in a way that's vain it doesn't flinch from painting his own deteriorating physical presence he's basically documenting his life and he's using himself as a model I perhaps one of the most remarkable paintings in the final room is self-portrait which in the clock and the bed you see monk here in his studio as an old man quite frail surrounded still by his paintings but it's also an allegory and it's about time passing and death approaching there's black and red cross hatching which you see here which is a very bold way to make a painting directly influenced Jasper Jones some of his paintings it shows how influential monk has been to generations of artists after him you Oh

Channel: Tate

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Keywords: tate, tate modern, edvard munch, walkthrough, tateshots

Id: kL0gRFgUT_M

Length: 4min 15sec (255 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2012