Northern Lights

Ezra Shales Art

If fin de siècle Nordic cultural ferment—and contemporary global anxiety—is often summarized in shorthand by Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), to enter the former home of Stockholm banker Ernest Thiel (1859–1947), a museum open to the public since 1926, is to dwell in the plush, cool parlors where such paintings were first revered as windows into the human psyche.

Strange bedfellows: Munch and Johns at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Asked to name two artists least likely to be paired in a museum exhibition, you could do worse than to suggest Edvard Munch and Jasper Johns. The former is the father of expressionism, maker of The Scream and other paintings filled with anxiety and existential dread; the latter is best known for his cool and detached depictions of commonplace objects such as flags and targets—works that laid the foundation for pop art and other contemporary art movements.