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The Arts Intel Report

Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth

Edvard Munch, The Sun, 1912.

July 26 – Oct 15, 2023
225 South St, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA

Edvard Munch is known for fearful imagery, for figures that embody existential crisis (think of The Scream and Vampire, both painted in 1893 and shot with orange). In this exhibition, however, it’s the painter’s landscapes that take center stage. Curators Jay A. Clarke, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen, and Jill Lloyd have arranged his paintings of the German and Norwegian coastlines by theme. As it turns out, these shores, trees, and skies are also fertile ground for the artist’s psychodramas. “In the pale nights,” Munch once wrote, “the forms of nature have fantastical shapes. Stones lie like trolls down by the beach. They move.” —Elena Clavarino