This exhibition will focus on the Museum’s recently acquired painting Mermaid (1896) by Norway’s most famous painter, Edvard Munch (1863-1944). An important and little-known painting, Mermaid has never been included in a museum exhibition before, having remained in private hands from the time it was executed until it came to the Museum in 2003.
Mermaid, created for a specific architectural setting in the home of a wealthy patron in Norway, portrays the mythical creature in the process of transforming into a human. Beguiling and beautiful, the mermaid looks at the viewer with a beseeching expression as if to draw him into her world. Munch painted Mermaid during the year he spent in Paris in 1896-97, a crucial period in his career in which he experimented with new artistic activities and earned recognition as an artist. The exhibition will include approximately twenty paintings, drawings, and prints, chronicling Munch’s development of the mermaid subject and exploring relationships between Philadelphia’s painting and central themes that run throughout the artist’s work. Mermaid will be specially reframed for the exhibition and installed to suggest the original architectural context for which it was made.
When: September 24 – December 31, 2005
Where: Philadelphia Museum of Arts, Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 26th Street, PA
Info: (215) 763-8100