The Harvard Art Museums have received a significant bequest consisting of 62 prints and two paintings by the renowned Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. This addition makes the museum’s collection of Munch’s work one of the largest in the United States, the museum announced on Tuesday. The gift is the last from longtime benefactors Philip A.
Straus ’37 and Lynn G. Straus, following Lynn Straus’s death in 2023. The Strauses have been generous contributors to Harvard Art Museums since the 1980s, supporting the museums’ renovation in the 1990s, and endowing its conservation center and a conservatory fellowship.
Lynette Roth, the curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, highlighted that the new collection is ideal for a teaching museum due to the variety of techniques Munch employed.
Munch bequest enhances teaching collection
Elizabeth Rudy, who curates the museum’s prints, noted that the collection provides excellent examples of Munch’s innovative jigsaw woodcutting, etching, aquatint, and lithography methods, as well as “combination prints” that incorporated several techniques.
“To be able to present this really important artist in depth through many different variations of many different works of art, many different prints, will allow generations of scholars and students to really take a deep dive into his exploration of print,” Rudy said. Rudy further explained that what makes the Strauses’ Munch collection unique are the personally inscribed dedications included in some prints and the fact that many of them are hand-colored. Roth added that possessing the works enables the museum to examine them in-depth, offering insight into the specific materials Munch used, and encouraging an understanding of his works as “physical objects.”
In recognition of this donation, the museum will hold an exhibition of Munch’s work from March to July, titled “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking.” The exhibit aims to showcase Munch’s innovative style and how he adapted recurring motifs across different artistic mediums.
“Hopefully in the exhibition, we’ll be able to draw out the ways in which painting and printmaking in his oeuvre influenced one another,” Roth said. “He was drawing on both techniques, and in some ways combining those techniques as well, or letting one technique inspire the other.”
The exhibition will diverge from traditional chronological presentations, focusing instead on Munch’s return to motifs and the interplay of various media. “It’s not focusing on his development as something that’s linear,” Roth said.
“We’re really wanting to focus on this return to motifs, and how these media are interacting with one another, and how playful that can be, but also how experimental the work is.”