Rare lithograph of Edvard Munch’s The Scream comes to British Museum as part of major show The lithograph of Munch’s most famous work will be part of the biggest UK exhibition of the artist’s prints in 45 years.
‘Edvard Munch: Love and Angst’ will take place at the British Museum, London from April and will include a total of 83 works, including 50 prints from Oslo’s Munch museum.
Munch once reflected: “For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.” The British Museum show will focus on how he used his art to express deep and complicated emotional experiences.
The version of The Scream in the exhibition is a black and white print which came after a painting and two drawings of the image.
Speaking to the Guardian, exhibition curator Giulia Bartrum said of The Scream: “The emotional impact is incredibly important. Munch was deeply, deeply aware of mental instability, mental illness, a huge subject at the time, and that’s what he was trying to portray. Anything which tries to express the inner workings of the mind … has huge resonance today.”
The exhibition opens on 11 April 2019 and runs until 21 July.
£212,871 spent in two years repairing 396 works in Government Art Collection Figures obtained by the Guardian from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) have revealed that hundreds of thousands of pounds has been spent in the last two years repairing artworks owned by the government that were damaged or needed restoration. The work is part of the Government Art Collection, which was established in 1898 and includes historical, modern and contemporary British art that is on display in Whitehall and at government-owned residences around the world.
Amongst the artworks that needed repairing is a bust of the 19th-century author and politician Sir George Cornewall Lewis by the artist William Meredyth Thomas. The work was smashed by a transport company months after it had been cleaned and waxed at a cost of £350. The cost of reconstructing the work was £3,750, and it is now on display at 11 Downing Street.
Meanwhile, £7,380 was spent on cleaning and retouching the artist Sir Godfrey Kneller’s oil painting of King George I as part of its ‘general conservation’ last year.
In addition, several artworks from the collection were restored after they were damaged in a 2011 attack on the British embassy in Tehran. This included more than £16,000 being spent last year on a tear repair and ‘relining, cleaning, filling, retouching’ of an oil painting of Fath ‘Ali Shah, the second Qajar shah of Iran, by the artist Ahmad.
A DCMS spokesman said: “We take its conservation very seriously and use a range of preventative measures. While the majority of treatments are due to gradual deterioration, a proportion of recent costs are due to conservation following long-term display.”
He added that the government is in the process of trying to recoup the repair costs of the Iranian artworks as part of a larger compensation claim being made to the government in Tehran by the Foreign Office.
Nicola L. dies aged 81 The French Moroccan artist was known for her sculptures, performances, videos, and designs that borrowed elements from the Pop and the Parisian Nouveau Réalisme movement in order to examine the female body.
During the 1960s, L. showed alongside Yves Klein at the Galerie Iris Clert, and more recently, in 2015, Tate Modern featured her in its survey of the Pop movement, ‘The World Goes Pop’. She is currently featured in ‘Chère’, a four-person group show at Arsenal Contemporary gallery in New York, where the artist had partly lived since 1979.
In 2017 she had a retrospective at the New York museum SculptureCenter, and its curator Ruba Katrib told Artnews: “Nicola was dedicated to art and politics, never concerned with prescriptive modes of making. She embedded her singular vision into hybrid-forms of sculpture, painting, clothing, performance, furniture, and early interactive pieces, while also making films and writing plays. She fearlessly tried new things and never got enough credit for her influential pieces, many of which have circulated widely, becoming iconic, yet often unattributed.”
Italy blocks Leonardo loans for Louvre anniversary show The country’s populist government has said it will not honour the previously agreed loan of work made by Italy’s then minister of culture, Dario Franceschini, in 2017. He had agreed to lend several paintings and drawings for the Louvre’s Leonardo exhibition this autumn, which will mark the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death.
As the Art Newspaper reports, Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, said: “I am sure my French colleagues at the museum will support me when I apply the same rules to our Leonardo paintings that they apply to the Mona Lisa.” He was referring to the Louvre’s policy of never lending Leonardo’s famous portrait.
Lucia Borgonzoni, the undersecretary for the Italian ministry of culture, added: “Leonardo is Italian; he only died in France. Giving the Louvre all those paintings would mean putting Italy on the margins of a great cultural event.”
New York court dismisses case against Knight Landesman and Artforum magazine The former Artforum publisher had been accused of sexual harassment by former employee Amanda Schmitt and several other women but because the three-year statute of limitations had expired, she was unable to sue for workplace sexual misconduct.
Instead, Schmitt brought a retaliation claim against Landesman, alleging that he had confronted her at a restaurant in May 2017 and ‘slandered and humiliated’ her in front of others by saying she had ‘unfairly accused him of sexual harassment’.
However, the New York Supreme Court dismissed the case, with Judge Frank P. Nervo saying that the lawsuit had partially failed to meet the requirements for causes of action and finding no case for slander. He said the five-year gap between Schmitt’s employment at Artforum and the encounter at the restaurant “is sufficient to eliminate any nexus between her employment and the alleged acts”.
In a statement after the ruling, Artforum said: “Despite the fact that the lawsuit has been dismissed, we remain firm in our commitment to create a safe and equitable workplace for our employees and associates.”
Landesman, who worked for Artforum for 35 years, resigned hours after the lawsuit was filed. According to the New York Times, Schmitt’s lawyer, Emily Reisbaum, said her team is considering an appeal.
Images:
1. Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895. Lithograph, private collection, Oslo Photo: Thomas Widerberg; Courtesy: The British Museum
2. Edvard Munch, self portrait, 1895. Courtesy: The British Museum
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Arts calendar 2019: exhibitions, conferences and other art events
New Year’s Honours list 2019: artists including Barbara Walker and Sonia Boyce receive honours
