Beginning on 11 February 2025, Palazzo Bonaparte is hosting the year’s most eagerly awaited exhibition – the show dedicated to Edvard Munch. More than 100 masterpieces on special loan from the Munch Museum in Oslo, for an extraordinary retrospective that recounts the entire career of one of the world’s most beloved artists, and among those most difficult to see. Fresh from its success in Milan where it set an all-time record, the exhibition is coming to Rome and the splendid setting of Palazzo Bonaparte, once again produced and organized by Arthemisia as it begins the celebrations for its 25th anniversary.

In my art I have tried to explain to myself life and its meaning – I have also tried to help others to understand their own lives.

(Edvard Munch)

Decades have passed since the last exhibition dedicated to Munch in Rome; although one of the world’s most beloved artists (the only one who, with his most well-known work The scream, “generated” an emoticon), he is also one of the artists most difficult to see represented in shows, because almost all of his works are held at the Munch Museum in Oslo, which has agreed to extend an unprecedented special loan.

Thus, beginning 11 February 2025, Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome will be hosting one hundred masterpieces by Edvard Munch, including the iconic The death of Marat (1907), Starry night (1922 1924), The girls on the bridge (1927), Melancholy (1900–1901), Dance on the bridge (1904), as well as one of the lithographic versions of The scream (1895).

The exhibition, which paid a previous visit to Palazzo Reale in Milan where it attracted visitors in record numbers, recounts Munch’s entire artistic journey, from his very beginnings to his last works, traversing the themes dearest to him, linked to one another by his interpretation of the tormented essence of the human condition.

The exhibition Munch. Il grido interiore (Munch. The scream within) is produced and organized by Arthemisia. “It is our pride and honour to have been able to produce this grand project,” comments Iole Siena, Chairperson of Arthemisia – “in collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo. Munch was absent in Italy for many years, and the enormous success in the exhibition’s first stop in Milan confirmed for us how great is the public’s love for this immense artist, one who is capable of giving us such strong emotions.”

Curated by Patricia G. Berman, one of the world’s greatest Munch scholars, with the academic contributions of Costantino D’Orazio, the exhibition is being held in collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo.

The exhibition’s Main partner is Fondazione Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale, with Poema. The exhibition enjoys the patronage of the Ministry of Culture, the Region of Lazio, the Municipality of Rome – Councillorship of Culture, the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Rome and Jubilee 2025 – Dicastery for Evangelization.

The exhibition is supported by its sponsors Generali Valore Cultura and Statkraft, special partner Ricola, mobility partners Atac and Frecciarossa Treno Ufficiale, media partner la Repubblica, hospitality partners Hotel de Russie and Hotel de la Ville, technical sponsor Ferrari Trento, and radio partner Dimensione Suono Soft. The exhibition will include a rich programme of events involving a number of the city’s cultural organizations in order to more deeply analyze the artist’s personality and expand the themes of his works.

The exhibition

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) had an exceptional work ethic that brought him to produce thousands of prints and paintings during his long life. Both a man of images and of words, he also composed endless notes, literary sketches, correspondence, and even a play. The desire to communicate his perceptions accompanies him throughout his life and is the beating heart of his practice as an artist. His works deal with images of birth, death, love, and existential questioning. He considered these themes to be universal. Many works portray psychological struggle: the instabilities of erotic love, the toll of physical and psychological illness, and the vacuum left by death. Others attempt to capture the invisible forces that Munch believed to animate and bind the universe.

This exhibition focuses on Munch’s inner fire, his commitment to crystalize and communicate his memories and sense perceptions. He explored the means to make his sensory and emotional experience visible by staging narrative scenes in flat areas of color and discordant perspectives. We can associate his works with a creative process that seeks to bring together what he observed, what he remembered, and how much he charged with emotion.

Munch’s early career coincided with radical changes in the study of perception, in which scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and artists debated the relationship between what the eye sees directly and how the contents of the mind affect sight. His lifelong interest in the unseen forces that shape experience conditioned the works that made him one of the most consequential artists of his time. In his exploration of unseen forces -- a precursor to 20th-century Expressionism and even Futurism – he continues to speak to our own inner visions and contemporary concerns. In his works, Munch endeavoured to make the invisible, visible.

Among the leading 19th-century symbolists and a forerunner of Expressionism, an artist whose life was marked by great pain and early sorrows, Edvard Munch quickly established immediate empathy with his viewers, causing them to perceive and not just see the suffering and anguish he depicted.

His mother’s premature death when he was only 5 years of age, the loss of his sister and father, and his tortured relationship with his fiancée Tulla Larsen were the primordial emotional material upon which the artist began to form his poetics. Thanks to his extraordinary artistic talent, these poetics were then combined, in a highly original way with his passion for the energies unleashed by nature.

His expressionless faces, his dazed landscapes, his powerful use of colour, and his need to communicate unspeakable sorrows and the most human anguish, succeeded in transforming his works into universal messages, and Munch into one of the 19th-century’s most iconic artists.

Shock, visions, and emotional violence were translated into powerful images – with a sometimes direct and sometimes suffocated emotionality – reiterated with the obsessive aim of reproducing as faithfully as possible the impression of scenes etched into memory.

Munch is one of the artists most able to interpret the feelings, passions, and anxieties of his soul, communicating them in a powerful and direct fashion. Initially shaped by Norwegian naturalist Christian Krohg, who encouraged his painting career, in the 1880s he visited Paris where he absorbed the influences of Impressionism and Postimpressionism, which suggested to him a more intimate and dramatic use of colour, but above all a psychological approach.

In Berlin, he contributed to the formation of the Berlin Secession, and his first solo exhibition in Germany, which was deemed scandalous, was held in 1892: from that moment on, Munch was perceived as a subversive and accursed artist, alienated from society – an identity in part promoted by his literati friends. In the mid-1890s, he devoted his efforts to making prints and, thanks to his experimentation, became one of the most influential artists in this field.

His productivity and punishing exhibition schedule led him to commit himself voluntarily to clinics beginning in the late 1890s. Painful romantic relationships, a traumatic accident, and alcoholism – a life lived “on the edge of a precipice” – led him to a psychological breakdown that he sought to recover from in a private clinic between 1908 and 1909.

After having lived much of his life abroad, the 45-year-old artist returned to Norway, establishing himself by the sea and painting landscapes. Here, he began to work on the giant murals in the University Aula of the University of Oslo. These canvasses, the largest of Expressionism in Europe, reflect his lively interest in invisible forces and the nature of the universe. In 1914, he purchased a property in Ekely, Oslo, where, as a renowned international artist, he continued his experimental work until his death in 1944, just one month after his eightieth birthday.