Harvard Art Museums Receive Bequest of 64 Edvard Munch Artworks

The Harvard Art Museums received a bequest of 62 prints and two paintings by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, an addition that makes the museum’s collection of Munch’s work one of the largest in the United States, the museum announced Tuesday.

The bequest, which brought the museum’s Munch collection to 142 pieces total, also included one print by American artist Jasper Johns.

The gift is the last one made by longtime benefactors Philip A. Straus ’37 and Lynn G. Straus, following Lynn Straus’s death in 2023. The Strauses have donated art regularly to the Harvard Art Museums since the 1980s, contributed to the museums’ renovation in the 1990s, and endowed its conservation center and a conservatory fellowship.

A pioneer of the Expressionist movement, Munch used bold coloring and exaggerated features to represent emotions. He is best known for his widely-reproduced 1893 work “The Scream.”

Lynette Roth, who curates the Busch Reisinger Museum, said the artworks are “ideal for a teaching museum like ours” because they showcase the variety of techniques Munch used. Elizabeth Rudy, who curates the museum’s prints, said the collection includes examples of Munch’s innovative jigsaw wood cutting, etching, aquatint, and lithography methods, as well as “combination prints” that incorporated several techniques.

“To be able to present this really important artist in depth through many different variations of many different works of art, many different prints, will allow generations of scholars and students to really take a deep dive into his exploration of print,” Rudy said.

Part of what makes the Strauses’ Munch collections “unique and special” are the personally inscribed dedications the artist included in some prints and the fact that many of them are hand colored, Rudy added.

Roth said that ownership of the works will enable the museum to examine them in depth and identify the specific materials Munch used, an opportunity she hoped would encourage an understanding of his works as “physical objects” and clarify his artistic process.

In light of the donation, the museum will put on an exhibition of Munch’s work from March to July, titled “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking.”

In that exhibit, the curators hope to display Munch’s innovative style as well as how he adapted recurring motifs in his work to different artistic mediums.

“Hopefully in the exhibition, we’ll be able to draw out the ways in which painting and printmaking in his oeuvre influenced one another,” Roth said. “He was drawing on both techniques, and in some ways combining those techniques as well, or letting one technique inspire the other.”

The exhibit will differ from other Munch exhibits in that it will not present his works chronologically, Roth said.

“It’s not focusing on his development as something that’s linear,” she said. “We’re really wanting to focus on this return to motifs, and how these media are interacting with one another, and how playful that can be, but also how experimental the work is.”

—Staff writer Sophie Gao can be reached at sophie.gao@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.