Professor Patricia Berman brings Munch to NYC

Last month Professor Patricia Berman, a specialist in early modern European (and especially Scandinavian) art, organized a conference, Marketing the North, at Scandinavia House in New York on behalf of the "Munch, Modernism, and Modernity" research network in Oslo, Norway. At the conference she chaired a panel on "Artistic Self Fashioning" (pictured above). The conference was scheduled to coincide with the opening of Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Professor Berman has an essay in the catalogue for this exhibition.

Set to run more or less concurrently with the Met's exhibition, The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch's Photography, at Scandinavia House, is curated by Professor Berman and complements the pieces on view at the Met, which bring into focus Munch's repeated use of the self portrait to explore his own psychology. Much less well-known than his prints and paintings, Munch's photographs often utilized blurs and distortions to make himself and his surroundings as much a part of his expressionistic world of representation as the figures in his other, more familiar forms of art.

An interview with Professor Berman forms the basis of this online review of the Scandinavia House show; the same show was also recently reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Both the photography show and the exhibition at the Met were reviewed in the New York Times article here.

Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed is on view at the Met from Nov. 15, 2017 - Feb. 4, 2018.

The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch's Photography is on view at Scandinavia House from Nov. 21, 2017 - March 5, 2018.