Title

Edvard Munch: Alpha and Omega - a lyrical love poem.

Venues

Australian National Gallery (18 August 1984 – 7 October 1984)

Date

(1984)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (ACT). Prints

Curator

Coppel, Stephen.

Documentation

Room brochure

Web address

https://nga.gov.au/exhibitions/edvard-munchs-alph…

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

The Alpha and Omega portfolio contains eighteen main images, two introductory vignettes, a title page and a table of contents which were printed lithographically, and two sheets of text in Norwegian and French. The images were first drawn on paper with greasy crayon, then transferred to stone and printed in Copenhagen in 1908-09. The declared size of the first edition was fifty impressions, but it appears that subsequent editions and separate impressions were printed, so the total number of impressions is closer to 150.

Edvard Munch completed Alpha and Omega while recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1908-09. Alcoholism and personal problems had affected his mental stability and he sought prolonged treatment at a sanitorium in Copenhagen where his doctor friend encouraged his creative efforts.

The prints and the related story form a pessimistic parable of the world's first two human inhabitants. They return to the themes of sexual attraction, separation and death which Munch first formulated iconographically in his Frieze of Life paintings from the early 1890s and which continued to obsess him throughout his working life. He painted and exhibited the first of these works in 1893, conceiving them as a series in which the universal themes of love and death were interwoven within a narrative. Key works comprising the 1893 sequencewere The voice, The kiss, Vampire, Madonna, Melancholy and The scream, each of which contained important ideas and motifs that were endlessly reworked and rephrased in his subsequent paintings and prints.

[Australian National Gallery, media, 1984].

Last Updated

06 Aug 2024