Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation

A rich study exploring the connections, creative processes, and themes shared by two world- renowned artists

At a crucial point midway through his career, American painter and printmaker Jasper Johns (b. 1930) looked to the art of Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) for inspiration. Munch’s innovative working methods and defining themes of love, anxiety, illness, and death infused Johns’s work with new meaning, allowing him a broadened range of expression that propelled his return to recognizable imagery after a decade of abstraction.
 
This groundbreaking publication is the first to describe precisely how and when Johns began to explore Munch’s imagery and ideas.  At the same time, it takes a comprehensive view of each artist’s career, giving readers a deeper understanding of Johns’s connection to his predecessor. Through  new  scholarship  and  copious  illustration,  Ravenal  makes  the  persuasive  case  that Munch should be considered one of the catalysts for the sea change that occurred in Johns’s art of the early 1980s.

Published in association with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Exhibition Schedule:

Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway
(06/18/16-09/25/16)

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
(11/19/16-02/20/17)

John B. Ravenal is executive director of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and former Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.