Rolf stenersen edvard munch biography
Edvard munch books.
Munch and the myth of the genius
“There is often something feminine and weak about beautiful men. Edvard Munch was beautiful.
Rolf stenersen edvard munch biography
He was also fragile, but he did not seem weak.”
This is the opening of Rolf Stenersen’s biography Edvard Munch – portrait of a genius. The book became the object of research for Lars Toft-Eriksen, art historian and curator at the Munch Museum, when he began working on his PhD dissertation.
He wanted to understand the biographer’s idea behind the term ‘artistic genius’.
“In contemporary art there is a lot of reflection around the role of the artist,” he explains.
“The idea of the artistic genius is often regarded as a cliché from Romanticism and Modernism.
But it is still alive among the general population, and I was therefore confronted with this idea as a curator.”
Munch contributed to his own myth
Toft-Eriksen explains that there is still an almost mythical idea of artists such a