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A major retrospective of Edvard Munch opens in New York this weekend with one iconic work notably absent -- the Norwegian artist's stolen and still missing painting, "The Scream."
The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) coincides with the trial in Oslo of six men allegedly involved in the theft of one of the world's most recognisable works of modern art from the Oslo Munch Museum in October 2004 .
The first Munch retrospective to be held in a US museum in almost 30 years, the MoMA show features 87 paintings and 50 works on paper that survey Munch's career in its entirety from 1880 to his death in 1944.
Two small lithographs of "The Scream" are included and MoMA director Glenn Lowry said the absence of the stolen masterwork might be a blessing in disguise by allowing the rest of Munch's work to be viewed away from the shadow of his most celebrated image.
"Of course there's a great sense of disappointment that "The Scream" was stolen," Lowry said.
"But I think this is an extremely strong exhibition and in many ways demonstrates that Munch's work is far broader, deeper and more powerful than it's often stereotyped as, because of that iconic painting."
Lowry insisted that curators of the retrospective had never considered "The Scream" as essential to the show.
"It would have been nice to have, but I think the exhibition makes its case very eloquently independently of that," he said.
"And in its own way, by not being here, it allows one to understand that Munch is a far more complex artist than at first glance," he added.
There are in fact four versions of "The Scream," each one a slight variation on the others.
One is in private hands, one is a work on paper and one hangs in the National Art Museum in Oslo, from where it was stolen in 1994 but recovered four months later.
The trial of the six men involved in the theft from the Munch Museum opened on Tuesday, with all the defendants pleading not guilty to charges ranging from aggravated robbery to dealing in stolen goods.
As well as "The Scream," the robbers got away with another major Munch painting, "Madonna" -- an erotic portrait of a long-haired, bare-breasted woman.
The city of Oslo offered a reward of 386,000 dollars for the return of the paintings -- valued together at between 40 million and 100 million dollars -- but a year and a half after the theft their whereabouts remain unknown.
Beginning with the artist's early portraits and genre scenes, the MoMA exhibition charts Munch's move away from Norwegian naturalism and towards an exploration of modern existential experience dominated by love, sexual passion, despair and death.
"Munch is the modern poet and philosopher in painting," said chief curator Kynaston McShine.
"At the same time he is passionately emotional, perhaps more so than any other modern artist. Extremes of joy and pain all come to him and are presented in his work with a naked rawness that still startles more than a century after his vision was formed," McShine said.
The retrospective opens to the public on February 19 and runs through May 8.
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AFPEntertainment-US-art-Munch
AFP 151135 GMT 02 06
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