More than 100 works from a career spanning more than 60 years are set to go on display in the Orsay Museum as part of the Paris gallery’s attempt to show that Edvard Munch cannot be reduced to just one famous painting.

The artist behind “The Scream” is the subject of “Un poème de vie, d’amour et de mort” (A Poem of Life, Love and Death), a panorama exhibition running until January 22 and created in cooperation with
the Munch Museum in Oslo. 

Before you ask: No, the original of Munch’s iconic “Scream” is not on display (although its first version in print, a lithograph from 1895, is).

Instead of highlighting an already renowned work, curator Claire Bernardi said the goal was to show the entire artistic development of the Norwegian painter, because the complexity of his oeuvre has long
been neglected. 

The show dispenses with a chronological presentation and focuses on Munch’s recurring motifs: loneliness, love, disappearance and death – themes that go hand in hand with the various existential crises the painter and graphic artist endured.

These anxieties are easy to spot in the sinuous lines and expressions of his compositions – paintings, etchings, lithographs and woodcuts, among others. Among the main works on view in Paris are “Vampires”, ”Melancholy”, “Death and Life” and “Evening on Karl Johan Street”. Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH © dpa