Strindberg, Schönberg, Munch

Involvement with the art of Strindberg, Schönberg and Munch opens up the breadths and abysses of the soul; the art bespeaks extreme mental states, loneliness, fear, illness and experiences of death, combined with ghosts, vampires and other visions. The three artists created their works out of inner necessity by (in Strindberg's words) approximately copying Nature, especially imitating its way of creating, or (in Schönberg's words) expressing themselves directly or (in Munch's words) because of the need to experiment, develop and improve. They distrusted superficial perception and turned their gaze inward to grasp the intangible values of the subjective world. The present catalogue is an attempt at detecting and presenting the affinities among the forms of expression in music, painting and writing, as well as tracing the intellectual kinship of the influential cultural milieus in Vienna and Northern Europe in the years surrounding 1900.