FEBRUARY New York´s Museum of Modern Art presented the first retrospective devoted to the work of the internationally renowned Norwegian painter, printmaker, and draftsman, Edvard Munch,to be held in an American museum in almost three decades. Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul surveys Munch’s career in its entirety, from 1880 to 1944, showcasing his artistic achievement in its true richness and diversity. Beginning with the artist’s early portraits and genre scenes, the exhibition charts Munch’s move away from Norwegian naturalism toward an unprecedented exploration of modern existential experience. Through eighty-seven paintings and fifty works on paper representing each phase of his career, the exhibition reveals Munch’s struggle to translate personal trauma into universal terms and, in the process, comprehend the fundamental components of human existence: birth, love, and death.

The Frick Collection presented the exhibit Goya´s Last Works. Goya’s understated portrait of the woman known as María Martínez de Puga, acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1914, is the inspiration for The Frick Collection’s special exhibition Goya’s Last Works. It is the first show in the United States to concentrate exclusively on the final phase of Goya’s long career — the years of the artist’s voluntary exile in Bordeaux from 1824 to 1828. Fifty-one examples of Goya’s final production have been borrowed from public and private European and North American collections. This ensemble of drawings, paintings, miniatures on ivory, and lithographs demonstrates the vitality and irrepressible creativity of an artist who, at age seventy-eight, pulled up roots in Madrid, his home for the preceding half century, and started over in France.

The Guggenheim Museum Museum in New York presented the exhibit David Smith a Centennial. Widely considered the greatest sculptor of his generation, David Smith (1906–1965) created some of the most iconic works of the 20th century. Marked by the use of industrial materials, especially welded metals, and the integration of open space, Smith’s three-dimensional version of Abstract Expressionism revolutionized the art of sculpture in the U.S. and around the world. Organized on the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, David Smith: A Centennial presents over 120 of his greatest sculptures, as well as a selection of his drawings and sketchbooks, from his entire 33-year career as a sculptor. Considering his art as a totality, the exhibition provides audiences with a singular opportunity to understand the complexity of Smith’s aesthetic concerns as well as his impact on the course of modern and contemporary sculpture. In addition to bringing together the masterpieces of Smith’s mature period in the 1950s and 60s, the exhibition gives special emphasis to his connection with his European forebears. In his early works, Smith introduced into the idioms of American sculpture the models pioneered during the 1920s by Pablo Picasso, Julio González, Alberto Giacometti and the Russian Constructivists. Most importantly Smith took up the Cubist mode of “drawing in space,” welding sheets and rods of metal—often industrial discards—into an abstract open network of forms. This collage aesthetic, combined with the influence of Surrealism, led Smith, like his contemporaries in the world of painting, to formulate a new mode of expressionism amid the turbulent context of the World War II and its aftermath. Even at its most literal, Smith’s symbolism only hinted at the inner workings of his psyche, keeping full meaning veiled. In the 1950s, as he streamlined his aesthetic and his sculptures became more abstract, Smith continued to assert that his sculpture was a pure expression of his identity. He grew increasingly ambitious during the 1960s, creating works of monumental scale that were often painted in bright colors. When Smith died suddenly in a tragic car accident in 1965, he was at the height of his creative powers, and he left behind an expansive yet remarkably coherent, and extraordinarily powerful, body of work.