The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch: The Vivian and David Campbell Collection [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Prelinger (Author), Michael Parke-Taylor (Author), Peter Schjeldahl (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 1996

Edvard Munch is famous for his prints, particularly "The Scream" and "Madonna". This work considers Munch's graphic work through the lens of a private collection, which includes impressions of virtually all of his major prints, along with alternative versions and early states.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The artwork in The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch is so beautifully reproduced that one might be tempted to tear out pages, frame them and hang them on the wall. Munch's work, which constitutes some of the 20th century's greatest printmaking, is presented through the lens of an extraordinary private collection that includes almost every one of his prints along with alternate versions and early sketches. Elizabeth Prelinger's essays provide background on Munch's life, printmaking techniques, and the development of his symbolist aesthetic. An exciting element of the book is an evocative essay by renowned critic, Peter Schjeldahl, who, in inimitable style, likens Munch's effect on the viewer to that of listening to the early work of a favorite rock-star. Published on the occasion of an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in early 1997, this book provides excellent documentation of an artist whose work remains vital more than fifty years after his death.

From Library Journal

Published as the catalog for an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, this is an attractive and thoughtful consideration of early prints by the Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). The 59 exhibited prints, all from a private collection, provide the armature for three essays. Prelinger's essay on Symbolism and graphic techniques explores a theme also found in her Edvard Munch: Master Printmaker (1983. o.p.); Michael Parke-Taylor discusses the reception of Munch's sometimes difficult work in America; and art critic Peter Schjeldahl provides a poetic appreciation. Somewhat narrower in scope than the catalog for the 1990 exhibition at the National Gallery ("Edvard Munch: Master Prints from the Epstein Family Collection," National Gallery of Art), yet with accessible text and excellent illustrations, this is highly recommended for general collections as well as for specialists.?Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (September 10, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300069529
• ISBN-13: 978-0300069525
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 10.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,730,484 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Print and the Darkness, August 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch: The Vivian and David Campbell Collection (Hardcover)

He was bound determined not to paint people reading and women knitting, but instead to show people who breathed emotions into his darkly suggestive prints. "Death in the sickroom" showed family members at the ages when they were painted, not when his sister Sophie died; it expressed unity in grief as one of death's longlasting effects by seemingly overlapping planes flowing together across bleakly empty areas, starkly B&W contrasts, and stiffly posed mourners frozen in misery. "The mirror" heads of a disembodied man and woman was his first woodcut to give up the Japanese method of printing each color with a separate woodblock; instead, he jigsawed blocks into pieces according to compositional design, linked each piece with a different color, and put everything back together into a multicolored print. He considered his "Sick child II" his most important print: his first color lithograph, it focused on the diseased upper chest and the head in profile facing right against a large pillow in order to gaze with tragically meditative resignation into the flatly patterned looming void on the far right. However, his "Scream" became the most compelling image for the late twentieth century: it expressed terror before the universe by powerfully decorative lines reverberating through the starkly opposed black lines and bleakly white voids of pulsing land and sky. Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor have applied reader-friendly illustrations and text to their catalog of the Vivian and David Campbell exhibition. Their SYMBOLIST PRINTS OF EDVARD MUNCH goes down good with PROGRESSIVE PRINTMAKERS by Warrington Colescott and Arthur Hove, PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING by Antony Griffiths, EDVARD MUNCH by Josef Paul Hodin, and THE PRINT IN THE WESTERN WORLD by Linda C Hults.

5.0 out of 5 stars Art Books are not created equal, February 7, 2010

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G. T. Bysshe (San Francisco Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch: The Vivian and David Campbell Collection (Hardcover)

Reinhold Heller has called this book "A unique and visually handsome contribution to the literature on the graphic images of one of the greatest pintmakers of this century"(20th). For people interested in the artist and high quality production and content, this book is a step above most all other art books, especially other Yale catalog publications, such as After The Scream - The Late Paintings of Edvard Munch and Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (Art Institute of Chicago), inexpensive art catalog memorabilia for attendees of the shows they represent.

This book does not pander to the audience about its material or purpose, which is to permanently catalog this private collection of prints. It was created by the collectors and benefactors of the exhibition, David and Vivian Campbell, unimpeded by copyright costs, book production and marketing costs, possible bad writing, design and reproduction, to insure that the art has been transmitted in its fullest measure in a vehicle that can be purcased by anyone- buy a hardcover and keep it for posterity!

Elizabeth Prelinger writes the key essay on the Symbolist Art generation. She follows several writers in articulating this, including Aurier writing on Gauguin (1891), Emmanuel Goldstein, poet and friend of the artist, writing in 1891 and Natasia Staller writing in 1994.

Staller: "The idea of a separate parallel language that was coherent in itself, composed of a fictive manipulated alphabet of lines and colors, was shared, with variations, by the entire Symbolist generation. The complex play between the two languages and multiple meanings, coupled with the extreme visual complexity of such works, demands that we decipher them, like a puzzle, over time."

Goldstein to Munch: "All I have to do is think of Naturalism and Realism and all that other sham-filled art, and I am nauseated...Salvation will come from Symbolism, that is to say, a artistic tendency in which the artist imposes his domination onto reality, so that it is his servant, not visa versa. Symbolism is the art that values moods and thoughts above all else, and uses reality only as a symbol... No longer should a visual presentation of conventional reality be given, but rather a visual presentation of what lives in the mind...The reality thus dipicted will be solely symbols of thoughts and feelings."

Prelinger: "Symbolist Art, often hermetic, and even elitest, sometimes teeters uncomfortably between an intensely personal and universal vision. The stongest examples, as in Munch's art, succeed at being both."

Two other essayists are included: Michael Parke-Taylor for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto staff, documenting the exhibition history of Edvard Munch in North America during the 20th century; and Peter Scheldahl who gives another succinct and thoughtful piece on the artist.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars La douleur, la couleur et le criard, December 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch: The Vivian and David Campbell Collection (Hardcover)

Il montrait sa soeur Sophie qui mourait jeune, entouree de toute la famille. Mais il montrait chacun a l'age qu'il avait a l'epoque de la peinture, et non pas a la mort de la jeune fille. Car la douleur durait a jamais et unifiait toute la famille pour toujours. Puis avec des tetes d'une femme et d'un homme, gravees et multicolorees, il cessait de suivre le style repandu des japonais de faire une seule couleur d'un seul troncon de bois. Son prefere de tout son oeuvre etait Sick Child II, en tant que sa premiere lithographie en couleur. Mais son Scream est le plus reconnu, en tant que l'image la plus frappante du 20eme siecle.