Sixty-Four Stunning Artworks by Famed ‘Scream’ Painter Edvard Munch Are Heading to Harvard
The extensive collection shows how the Norwegian painter tweaked his techniques and reworked his aesthetic sensibilities over and over again
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In Edvard Munch’s oil painting Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), a man and a woman stand side by side, but there’s a noticeable gap between them. They gaze out to the pale swirling sea, together and alone.
Painted between 1906 and 1908, Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) is among the 64 Munch paintings and prints that art collectors Philip and Lynn Straus have bequeathed to the Harvard Art Museums—a landmark gift that transforms the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution into a “one of the largest and most significant collections of works by Munch in the United States,” per a statement.
“Capturing the tension between proximity and distance—spatial as well as emotional—the work addresses the universal theme of the human condition,” says Lynette Roth, a curator at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, which is part of the Harvard Art Museums, in the statement. “We are thrilled to be able to teach with and display it alongside the other significant paintings from their collection going forward.”
Philip, an investment banker who died in 2004, and Lynn, a former teacher who died in 2023, began collecting Munch works in 1969, when they purchased a lithograph called Salome for their 20th wedding anniversary.
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“The first Munch fan was Lynn,” Marjorie B. Cohn, a former curator at the Harvard Art Museums, tells the Art Newspaper’s J.S. Marcus. “Phil eventually caught the Munch bug.” One he realized that the original lithograph and woodblock prints—which allowed Munch to generate a consistent income and tweak similar images over and over—were “extremely varied, [he] was determined to find the best ones and ignore the rest.”
Over the years, the Strauses helped the Harvard Art Museums acquire 117 Munch works, bringing the total to 142. Many of these eight paintings and 134 prints will be on view at the museums’ spring exhibition, “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking,” which opens next month.
The Straus collection is a dynamic portrait of the artist as an adjuster and refiner, honing his techniques and aesthetic preferences over time.
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Aside from the oil painting of Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), the donation also includes five prints from the same series made between 1894 and 1917. The set of images allows viewers to study how Munch made small alterations over more than two decades and “manipulated his jigsaw woodblocks to print different parts of a single work in different colors,” as Jonathan Shaw writes in Harvard magazine.
Visitors to the Harvard Art Museums will also witness how Munch experimented with different combinations of lithography, hand-coloring and woodblocks over several versions of Vampire II and Madonna.
However, some of the prints are more singular. Melancholy II is a rare example of a print that Munch made himself with his small hand-crank press. Young Woman on the Beach reveals Munch’s short-lived experimentation with mezzotint, a printing technique that involves pricking many small holes into a metal plate to hold extra ink and create large swaths of rich color.
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“Through their distinct style of collecting Munch’s prints—seeking out and acquiring multiple images of the same theme—[the Strauses] created a collection that affords deep insights into the artist’s practice and is therefore a perfect match for a university museum with a strong teaching and research mission,” Sarah Ganz Blythe, the director of the Harvard Art Museums, says in the statement.
Since the 1980s, the Strauses have donated or helped the Harvard Art Museums purchase 128 works, including pieces by Alexander Calder, Max Beckmann, Georges Braque and Emil Nolde. In 1994, the couple gave a $7.5 million gift to the museums’ conservation center, later renamed the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. (The total monetary value of the Strauses’ major Munch gift was not disclosed, according to Angelica Villa of ARTnews.)
Last year, conservators touched up Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) and Train Smoke, a 1910 painting. The process involved cleaning “atmospheric grime” to bring the paintings “in closer alignment with their original appearance,” per the statement.
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Until Lynn’s death in 2023, the two oil paintings hung in the living room of their home in Mamaroneck, New York. Their dozens of prints were also “mostly on the walls,” as their son, Philip Straus Jr., tells the Art Newspaper.
In their final gift to Harvard, the Strauses also bequeathed Savarin, a 1982 lithograph by Jasper Johns that depicts a coffee can filled with paint brushes. An arm at the bottom of the print is a subtle reference to the skeletal arm in Munch’s 1895 Self-Portrait—a connection that the couple emphasized by hanging the two prints near each other in their home.
“Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” will be on view at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from March 7, 2025 through July 27, 2025.
