It has been a long time since I have looked forward to an exhibition with such great anticipation and impatience as “Modern Prophecies” at the Munch Museum. Here they show the great Spanish romantic Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) together with our own towering expressionist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Goya was the artist who took the seven-mile leap from the Rococo into modern times. He was not only a standard-bearer for romanticism in the transition between the 17th and 19th centuries. Goya is also often described as the father of modern art, because he heralded a new explosively emotional art in which the dark undercurrents in man came to light. MUST STUDY: This is not a work you can glean from just a few quick glances. Here you have to enter a kind of “reading mode”. Although the awareness of the treasures that the display cases hide here makes my professional heart flutter, the somewhat monotonous forest of display cases can probably seem a bit repulsive and inaccessible to a wider audience. Photo: Ingrid Aas/Munchmuseet I hope, however, that people will be willing to put in a bit of effort to experience these unique series. Photo: Ingrid Aas/Munchmuseet Academic weight and great professionalism The presentation, which fills the entire third floor of the Munch Museum, is characterized by academic weight and great professionalism. Munch plays a natural second fiddle in the exhibition. It is, after all, Goya who is the guest of honour. And there is no modest selection they have to offer. Here we can actually experience both of Goya’s two most famous graphic series: “The caprices” and “The horrors of war”. This is not everyday food! DREAM WORLD: “Los Caprichos”, or the Caprichos, are among Goya’s most famous works. The series consists of 80 graphic sheets that were published as booklets and sold in a perfume and spirits shop close to where Goya himself lived. He did not sell quite as many as he had imagined, so he donated the rest of the print run to the Royal Institute of Graphics to protect them from the restored Inquisition. “Caprichos” means whims or fancies. The most famous Caprichos print is “The sleep of reason creates monsters”. Goya was concerned precisely with the conflict between reason and imagination; the nightmare as a bearer of the irrational. Photo: The National Museum in Oslo It is a unique opportunity to study Goya’s ground-breaking, mischievously cheerful social criticism: his vexation with folly, abuse of power and mass suggestion, but also his despairingly topical depictions of the eternal brutality of war. I get shivers down my spine when I find in a lighted display the only preserved proof of “The horrors of war” with Goya’s handwritten caption. It takes a good hour to study all these prints, but it is really worth the time. In addition to the spectacular selection of works on paper from Goya’s hand, the exhibition shows nine more modest paintings. Among these are a couple of truly stately portraits, which show both Goya’s brilliant colorism and his alert powers of observation. SATIRICAL: There is a lot of humor in Goya’s Caprices, such as in “Back to his ancestors”, which ridicules the emphasis on a great pedigree. Photo: Andreas Harvik/Nasjonalmuseet Or “Until death”, which shows an old, shrunken woman dolling herself up in front of a mirror. This was seen as a direct comment on Queen Maria Luisa with all her young lovers. Photo: Andreas Harvik/Nasjonalmuseet In “What a golden beak!” we see people who close their eyes and listen enraptured to parrot chatter. A work that alludes to spiritual lethargy and passive submission. Photo: Andreas Harvik/Nasjonalmuseet There is no “conversation” between the artists Although the exhibition in many ways offers great positive surprises, I cannot deny that I also feel a slight disappointment. It’s about the expectations I had for what would happen when the two artists met. For one reason or another, no real “conversation” occurs between the two universes in the exhibition. I don’t feel that they have managed to make Munch’s powerful darkness and anxiety work together with Goya’s dark visions of horror. With his prints in the “Horrors of War” series, Goya shows the raw brutality of war completely unmasked. Photo: British Museum A similar motif in “The Hanged Man” by Edvard Munch, but instead of being hanged on the battlefield, the person in Munch’s picture has apparently hanged himself in his own home. Photo: Munch Museum Goya’s “Unfortunate mother!” shows how civilians are all too often affected by the brutality of war. Photo: British Museum Edvard Munch’s “War”. Photo: The Munch Museum It is probably partly about format, but also about the fact that the two artists are not actively pitted against each other to a small extent. Goya is mainly presented in small formats inside display cases, which must be studied up close in a kind of reading mode. Munch, on the other hand, is presented in somewhat larger formats on the wall and can be experienced more immediately from a distance. Goya is mainly represented with graphics, while the majority of Munch’s works in the exhibition are paintings or drawings (this in itself is a bit funny, all the while Munch is one of the world’s greatest graphic artists). HIDDEN TREASURE: This is an unknown but very powerful picture by Munch that is shown in the exhibition. It shows how good he is at portraying horror and despair with just a few suggestive lines. Here he depicts the blind anxiety of the disease. Photo: The Munch Museum Searched connections When the two artists are sometimes tentatively set up in a dialogue, the connections sometimes appear a little superficial. A portrait of a prince by Goya, for example, is juxtaposed against Munch’s group portrait of Max Linde’s children. Goya nurtured a deep tenderness and interest in the child, as a counterweight to the corrupt reality with all its vanity and folly. Both Goya and Munch were outstanding portraitists, but these two child portraits do not point to any significant commonality. With Goya, the child had an important role as a symbol of innocence and beauty; as the counterweight to all the folly and evil in the world. Munch, for his part, was not particularly interested in children. A funny anecdote tells that when he painted the Linde children, he was so engrossed with his gaze fixed on the canvas that he chatted a little to the little models, who had long since run their way. In Munch’s world, children probably played a far less prominent role. Together with Goya’s Caprices, Munch’s unknown (and rather weak) “Foster mothers in the Court of Appeal” is hung. The painting is a kind of true crime depiction of a terrible incident in Kristiania at the beginning of the 20th century where women received money to take care of orphans, while in reality they drowned them in Akerselva to get rid of both the expenses and the trouble. DARK HISTORY: Even Munch has his weaker works. The interesting thing about it is that it conveys an incredibly gruesome tale of infanticide. But there are so many other Munch pictures which in their expression convey anxiety and sorrow and which could rather be used to put him on a par with Goya. Photo: The Munch Museum This is undoubtedly a genuine Goya theme, but unlike many of Munch’s other paintings, the deep horror and despair is not to be found in the painterly depiction itself. In this way, there is no real connection between the two artists here either. But fortunately, the exhibition also offers many of Munch’s most powerful paintings, such as the museum’s newly restored version of “Vampire”. CHANGED NAME: “… just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the inside of the human body and dissected corpses, I try to dissect souls,” said Munch. Among other things, he was concerned with love’s exhausting power and mask game. This painting was originally called love and pain, but was later given the title “Vampire”. Photo: The Munch Museum Art’s light bearer “Modern Prophecies” is perhaps not the powerful encounter between Goya’s raw, pre-modern bestiality and Munch’s disillusioned alienation that I had imagined. But there is no doubt that the exhibition gives us a completely unique insight into Goya’s graphic production. In his merciless social satire, we see that Goya was really not an artist of darkness, but a light bearer of art. He was someone who cast a glaring, revealing light on society’s deep class differences, the man’s dominance over the woman, the child as a prisoner in the adults’ world of reason, and the church’s iron grip on the spiritual life. The fact that we get 40 works by Munch with the purchase is of course just a wonderful bonus! news reviewer Photo: Ingrid Aas/Munchmuseet Title: “Goya and Munch: Modern Prophecies” Artist: Fransisco de Goya and Edvard Munch Curator: Trine Otte Bak Nielsen Place: Munchmuseet, Oslo Time: 28 October 2023 – 11 February 2024 Estimated time : Between 60 and 120 minutes
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Modern prophecies” at the Munch Museum – Reviews and recommendations
