STANFORD, CA.-The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University announces an exhibition by the great turn-of-the-century symbolist artist Edvard Munch, March 22–June 25, 2006. Desire, Anxiety, and Loss: The Prints of Edvard Munch brings together 36 works, lithographs, etchings and drypoints, and woodcuts, from 15 collections.

Munch's works explore states of mind with which viewers can identify— love, anxiety, jealousy, and depression. For these themes, Munch drew directly from his personal life experiences. His early recollections were dominated by family illness, including the death of his mother and a sister from tuberculosis, as well as his father’s depression. As an adult, Munch suffered a nervous breakdown and an ocular hemorrhage resulting in a temporary visual loss in his right eye. An intense and moody person, his relationships with women were stormy and unsatisfactory. Understanding these experiences is crucial to a fuller comprehension of his creative process and the images that obsessed him.

The exhibition highlights three aspects of the artist’s career. First, his earliest etchings of the 1890s presage later recurring themes. Second, the innovative woodcuts and lithographs from about 1900 profoundly express his preoccupation with the complex and contradictory nature of woman. Third, his portraits of himself, other artists, writers, and musicians include August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.

The exhibition features the Cantor Arts Center’s recent acquisition of the 1902 woodcut "Melancholy III." Works on loan come from the Art Institute of Chicago and from a number of California museums, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, and from private collections. The exhibition is organized by Betsy G. Fryberger, Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator of Prints and Drawings, and by curatorial assistant Judy Koong Dennis.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a symposium is planned for Saturday April 29, 2006. In addition, there will be a reading from Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House by American Conservancy Theater star Renee Augeson, a showing of Peter Watkins’ award-winning biographical film (Edvard Munch, 1976, 167 minutes, color, Norwegian w/ English subtitles) and a series of concerts presented jointly with members of Stanford University’s Department of Music. The exhibition is made possible by the Burton and Deedee McMurtry Fund.