Despite Munch’s rising prestige and acclaim in the art world, by 1907 anxiety and
depression began to consume him and he became more self-destructive in his
alcohol consumption, finally becoming so deranged that, in 1908, he committed
himself to a psychiatric facility where he remained for 8 months. The treatment
seemed to improve Munch’s outlook on life significantly and he became more stable
producing more optimistic work. AAPS member Walt Kuhn, traveling Europe in
search of art for the Armory Show, saw a mix of the works that Munch made before
his break in 1908 and those from after his treatment in 1909 in the massive Cologne
Sonderbund Exhibition of 1912.
Kuhn arrived in Cologne on the very last day of the historic Sonderbund Exhibition
and was able to see 32 paintings by Munch—the largest group of works exhibited by
a living artist in the show (there were over 100 works by van Gogh, the largest number
of any artist in the exhibition). Kuhn met and became friends with Munch at the
exhibition and the two shared a dinner together following the closing. Kuhn reported,
“Sonderbund great show, Van Gogh & Gauguin great! Cézanne didn’t hit me so hard.
I met Munch, the Norwegian this morning—fine fellow. Munch is about 50, a tall nervous
sort of fellow with a handsome head. He paints big wild figure things, very crude but
extremely powerful . . . he is on top of the wave in Europe and I guess he can’t spare
many pictures for us, however he promised me a couple.” Unfortunately, the two
paintings Kuhn wanted did not make it to the Armory Show. Munch himself had to
send the eight prints of his that were included in the Armory Show, one of which was
a color woodcut variant of The Kiss (priced at $200, or around $4,700 today).
The Armory Show was the first American exhibition containing works by Munch and
unfortunately his prints were largely overshadowed by the more arresting French
paintings of Cézanne, Matisse and Duchamp. His works were hung in Gallery K and
were considered complementary to Redon’s work, exhibited in the same room. One
of the only significant enthusiasts of Munch’s work in the Armory Show was Carl
Zigrosser (1891-1975), future curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and
major contributor to print scholarship in America (especially for his work on John
Marin), who was very impressed by Munch’s work: “Another of my discoveries was
Edvard Munch, who was represented at the show by four woodcuts and four
lithographs in color. I was so taken with the lithographs that I made tiny sketches of
three of them in my catalogue. I have never lost my enthusiasm for Munch’s graphic
work.” It wasn’t until the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in 1915 that Munch made a true
impact on American viewers. The majority of Munch’s work is now held in the Munch
Museum in Oslo. In 2012 a variant of his most famous work,
The Scream
, sold at
auction in New York for $119 million dollars.
