Harvard Art Museums Receive Major Bequest of Edvard Munch Works
184Feb. 7, 2025
The Harvard Art Museums have received a trove of sixty-four works by Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch. The works—sixty-two prints and two paintings—were donated by the estate of collectors Phillip Straus, who graduated from the university in 1937, and his wife, Lynn Straus. Also included in the gift was a 1982 print by Jasper Johns titledSavarin. Philip, a portfolio manager, died in 2004; Lynn died in 2023.
“We are immensely grateful to Philip and Lynn Straus for their generosity and stewardship over these many years,” said Harvard Art Museums director Sarah Ganz Blythe in a statement. “Their enthusiasm for the work of Edvard Munch ensures generations of students and visitors can experience and study his prints and paintings here in Cambridge.”
The donated paintings are Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1906–08), which depicts a couple gazing out to sea, and Train Smoke, 1910, which shows the titular substance drifting through a landscape. Both works underwent conservation at Harvard, with conservators Ellen Davis and Kate Smith noting that Two Human Beings had at one point been varnished, in a move inconsistent with Munch’s practice, and that Train Smoke had accumulated atmospheric grime and was in need of paint stabilization. The prints include three from the series “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” which demonstrate the artist’s various woodcut and etching techniques; three lithographs from the “Vampire II” series that are either hand-colored or feature color added with a woodblock; and four impressions of Munch’s iconic Madonna.
The gift is the last of many the Straus’s made over their lifetimes. Among the works they donated to the museum, or whose purchase they facilitated, are those by Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Timothy David Mayhew, and Emil Nolde.