After the robbery of the Munch Museum 22.08.2004, the museum has been closed due to security measures and reconstruction. 18 June the museum reopens for the public with the exhibition, Munch by Himself, a comprehensive presentation of Edvard Munch’s self portraits. Few pictorial artists have scrutinized themselves as mercilessly and intensively as Edvard Munch. Between the start of his career in the 1880s and his death in 1944 he produced over 70 painted self portraits and some 20 in graphic media, as well as over a hundred watercolours, drawings and studies.
In the self–portraits Munch examines his role as an artist, his relationship with the world around him and his position as an outsider. These pictures lay bare his existential angst and explore his attitudes to life and death, love, masculinity, femininity and sexuality. Throughout the second half of his life Munch was intensely occupied with loneliness and disease, and towards the end of his life aging and death are to the fore in his works.
Most of these self-portraits were never exhibited during Munch's lifetime. A selection was shown in 1945 and 1963 as part of larger exhibitions, and the self-portraits have been exhibited individually on a number of occasions. Munch by Himself offers however the first critical and comprehensive study of Munch's artistic exploration of his own identity.
