Symbolist & Expressionist Paintings
The Scream, the Isle of the Dead, Hammershøi's grey rooms: painting that turned inward at the end of the nineteenth century.
6 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
Inward
Symbolism, from the 1880s, painted ideas and moods rather than things seen: Böcklin's Isle of the Dead was reproduced so widely that Freud, Lenin and Clemenceau all owned a print. Expressionism, a generation later, distorted colour and line to carry feeling directly; Munch's The Scream of 1893 is its founding image, and Schiele and Modigliani its most distinctive portraitists. Hammershøi in Copenhagen painted the same quiet rooms for thirty years and belongs to neither movement and both.
The works in this collection
Munch's The Scream and Madonna; Schiele's self-portrait with physalis; Modigliani's Reclining Nude; Böcklin's Isle of the Dead; Hammershøi's Interior with Sunlight on the Floor.
On the wall
These are intense pictures and one is enough for a room. The Scream and Madonna suit a study or a hallway; the Hammershøi and the Böcklin are calm enough for a bedroom and take a grey or dark-blue wall well.