Warhol after Munch

This summer Louisiana welcomes guests to an exhibition which is the first of its kind in the world: Warhol’s “Munch pictures” are rarely shown and the showing of them together in a museum exhibition is unique.

Placing Edvard Munch, whom most people view as the painter of the innermost reaches of the soul, alongside Andy Warhol, who is normally classed as the apostle of the surface, may seem the strangest choice of all. But there are three good reasons to do so. First, in 1984 Warhol actually made a long series of prints that are copies or rather versions of four major subjects by Munch – the iconic The Scream, Madonna, Self-Portrait and The Brooch. Secondly, Warhol and Munch both worked intensively with the print medium, with the concepts of quantity and repetition as guidelines. Thirdly, the juxtaposition of Warhol and Munch seeks to modulate the image we have of the two artists by showing that Warhol is less superficial than he is normally viewed – and Munch correspondingly more a painter of the surface than we think.

The exhibition Warhol After Munch has a selection of Munch’s four major print works in various versions and 30 of Warhol’s large, colourful versions of them.