At the Harvard Art Museums

 At the Harvard Art Museums

July 25, 2025

Opening last February 2025, I finally saw this exhibit two days before its August 28 closing, Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking. You can see the entire exhibit online HERE and scrolling down. I'd written about it after viewing it online and sharing eight works in my Postcard of the day last February 12, 2025.

Edvard Munch often expressed his fear that he would become insane since it ran in is family, his sister institutionalized. And this show did nothing to disprove that. A great artist, productive, yet this print show has a depressing theme, suggested by the titles that include, nine variations of "Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)", Three variations of "Vampire", and one of "Death in the Sickroom". It's more apparent upon seeing the exhibit in person.

Yet elsewhere in the Museum I viewed two paintings of his, landscapes that were enthralling, including this one.

1
From Kragero
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Norwegian
Oil on board, 18" x 22" (w x h), 1910-1911

When at a museum, not simply viewing art online, I get that grand feeling of size (unknown person thus demonstrating the scale).

2
Karma
Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), American
PVA paint on canvas, 12' x 10' (w x h), 1964

This one by Kenneth Noland, one of the best-known American color field painters, piqued my interest. In 2001 he moved from Santa Barbara, CA, where he had a studio for 20 years, to Port Clyde, Maine. He and his wife, Paige Rense, purchased a home from another painter, Malcolm Morley. He lived out his life there for the next nine years. I'm always interested in Port Clyde, since I had my mailbox in Port Clyde from 1973-1975, when I lived on McGee Island. And my first children's book was photographed in Port Clyde, Finestkind o' Day: Lobstering in Maine.

Another Kenneth Noland was on display in The Solomon Collection, on exhibit until August 17, 2025. You can see the entire exhibit online HERE, scroll down to see the art. There was another Kenneth Noland in this collection.

3
Circle II, IV-II
Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), American
Monoprint, colored pressed paper pulp
with lithographic monotype, published by
Tyler Graphics Ltd. 20" x 31" (w x h), 1978

4
At the Cambridge Public Library

I was fortunate to connect at the museum with a patron of my art who lived within walking distance of the museum, Nancy Wells Woods. She's also gotten art when she was in Iceland from my Icelandic artist friends. I drove to NH, took a bus to South Station, the Red Line subway to the Museum. She walked over and it was nice to meet and talk about art at the Museum, though I was hoping to also meet Fred Wood, her husband. We took a lunch break and Nancy showed me the Main Exhibition Hall at the Cambridge Public Library, which also had Fred's poem on the stairs...

Talk this Walk
Yo!
I'm a poem.
Speak my words
while you're walking.
Now you are the sidewalk
Talking.
Step on me--
there you go--
now you've got poetry
in your sole.
--Fred Woods

Back at the museum I was delighted when I came across one of my favorite paintings of Paul Cezanne. It shows the simplicity he was striving for.

5
Study of Trees
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), French
Oil on canvas, 19" x 25" (w x h), circa 1904

Museum Notes edited:
Study of Trees, painted two years before he died, exemplifies Cezanne depicting depth on a flat canvas. This had been a focus of his for most of his career. Energetic diagonal brush strokes slice the space of the picture, producing the suggestion of movement in and out of depth, and dashed lines define the tree trunks on either side of a country winding road. The rough, unpainted areas of the canvas seem as animated as the daubs of paint flickering across the picture's surface, like leaves in shifting sunlight. At the time of its making, Study of Trees was at the vanguard of intellectualized, abstract painting.

And then I marveled at Landscape with Bathing Women, the paint so fresh and vivid, like it had been painted yesterday, but Erich Heckel had painted it 115-years-ago, wow.

6
Landscape with Bathing Women
Erich Heckel (1883-1970), German
Oil on canvas, 38" x 33" (w x h) 1910

Museum Notes edited:
Heckel spent several consecutive summers at lakes near Dresden. While there with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein in 1910, he painted this scene of three nudes at the water's edge. Heckel and the other artists chose to use non-professional models, to "guarantee movements without studio training," as he recalled, and to increase the impression of spontaneity. Heckel sought spontaneity in his artistic process as well, recording his impressions in color planes. Such expressionist strategies signified a conscious move away from academic strictures in art, as well as an increasing liberation for the growing nudist/naturist movement of the period.

I painted a watercolor study of one of Monet's Train Station paintings. See it and other paintings in Monet's Train Station series on my website HERE. So of course I was delighted to discover this one in his series.

7
The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train
Claude Monet (1840-1926), French
Oil on canvas, 40" x 33" (w x h), 1877

Museum notes and Wiki edited:
Monet painted the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris in a series of twelve paintings. For Monet's fourth impressionism exhibition on April 5, 1877, he selected seven paintings from the dozen he had made of the train station Gare Saint-Lazare in the past three months, the first time he had "synced as many paintings of the same site, carefully coordinating their scenes and temporalities". The paintings were well received by critics, who especially praised the way he captured the arrival and departures of the trains.

This is the largest in Monet's series of twelve paintings of the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris, a subject favored by many impressionist painters. While completing the series, Monet relocated from the town of Argenteuil to an apartment near the station in Paris. He worked on all the paintings at the same time, and sometimes he leaned the stretched canvases against each other while the paint was still wet. This caused the cork spacers on the backs of the stretchers to be pressed into the adjacent paintings, creating circular indentations in the surface that are visible along the top edge of this work. Monet's thick build-up of pigments here is an example of his approach to painting during this period, when he juxtaposed many hues in mounds that blended into a coherent whole only when viewed from a distance. This technique reportedly led Cezanne to declare, "Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!"

Lastly, it's always fascinating to take in a black-and-white Franz Kline. I was amused by the coincidental shape of the upper center of Monet's train station roof and the top center of Franz Kline's High Street.

8
High Street
Franz Kline (1910-1962), American
Oil on canvas, 78" x 58" (w x h), 1950

See his ink study sketch for this painting that he did in a phone book that sold in November 2007 at Christie's for almost $200,000 USD HERE.

Museum Notes Edited:
For Franz Kline, the series of paintings that includes High Street was a breakthrough, marking his transformation from an illustrator and sidewalk artist to a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement of the early 1950s. Made with house painters' brushes and cheap enamel house paint, the series has the monumental intensity and fierce directness that would come to characterize Kline's subsequent work. Despite the spontaneous look of his canvas, however, Kline carefully planned these compositions in preliminary sketches. The calligraphic black forms often evoke urban landscapes, machinery, or the engines, bridges, and railroads of the artist's Pennsylvania youth. But Kline sought complete abstraction, and he worked the white paint as aggressively as the black, giving it a sculptural quality and material presence. The result is a dense, rugged, allover ground that challenges the impulse to see the composition as identifiable black figures on a white background.