WASHINGTON – The National Gallery of Art marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edvard Munch, Norway’s most famed painter and printmaker, with an exhibition of more than 20 renowned works from the Gallery’s collection. On view from May 19 through July 28, on the ground floor of the West Building, “Edvard Munch: A 150th Anniversary Tribute” includes Geschrei (The Scream) (1895), The Madonna (1895), and a unique series of six variant impressions, Two Women on the Shore (1898).

“In recent decades the National Gallery of Art has presented three major exhibitions of Munch’s work, the last in 2010,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “We are pleased to bring together these stellar prints and drawings to celebrate this milestone.”

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It is made possible by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art.

Edvard Munch (Dec. 12, 1863–Jan. 23, 1944) both absorbed and influenced the work of innumerable artists throughout the world. He is today revered for his passionate visual expression of intense human experiences: “Art is your heart’s blood,” he said. His most famous image—a screaming figure, its eyes wide with horror—is an icon of anxiety, alienation and anguish. Attraction, love, jealousy and death were also recurring themes. His continual reworking of these subjects is commonly linked to Munch’s personal struggles. He made many telling portraits: tender visions of women and sensitive studies of lovers, children and adolescents. However, the real power of his art lies in his ability to extrapolate universal human experiences from his own life.

Raised in Oslo (then called Christiania), Munch studied at the Royal School of Design before a state scholarship enabled him to study in Paris in 1889. Printmaking was an essential component of Munch’s art for 50 years following his introduction to the graphic media in Berlin in 1894. With the capacity to produce multiple works from a single plate, stone, or woodblock, printmaking served to expand the accessibility of the artist’s themes to the general public and to provide income. Like his repeated revisions in paintings, prints also enabled him to experiment with his imagery; by altering color, line, texture and composition, Munch drastically changed the appearance and emotional impact of a given subject. Thus a woman kissing a man could appear amorous in one print and predatory in another. In many cases Munch continued to print impressions of his graphic works years after the creation of the original matrix.

The exhibition curator is Andrew Robison, Andrew W. Mellon senior curator of prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art.

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NEW YORK – Beginning May 1, in celebration of the 75th-anniversary year of the Cloisters museum and gardens, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will offer same-week admission to The Cloisters for members of the public who visit the Metropolitan Museum’s main building first. Same-week combined admission is an enhancement and expansion of the same-day admission policy that has been in effect between the buildings for decades. A visitor with an admissions receipt from the Metropolitan Museum’s main building will be entitled to one additional admissions button to the Cloisters for up to seven days. The Cloisters—the Metropolitan’s branch museum dedicated to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages—is located in Fort Tryon Park, in northern Manhattan.

Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum, commented: “The Cloisters is an extraordinary place, just a quick subway, bus, or taxi ride away from midtown Manhattan. But we recognize that visiting the Met’s main building and The Cloisters in one day is ambitious; now our millions of visitors can enjoy both experiences in the course of a week and join in the celebration of this important anniversary year.”

The Cloisters museum and gardens features renowned works from the Metropolitan Museum’s world-famous collection of medieval art, including the famed Unicorn Tapestries and hundreds of examples of exquisite stained glass, metalwork, enamels, ivories, and paintings, all in a magnificent architectural setting along the Hudson River that evokes the Middle Ages. An integral part of the Cloisters and among its major attractions when it opened in 1938 and today, the gardens are planted in reconstructed Romanesque and Gothic cloisters.

Special offerings will include the exhibitions “Search for the Unicorn: An Exhibition in Honor of The Cloisters’ 75th Anniversary,” a presentation of unicorn imagery in various media (on view May 15–Aug. 18); “Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet,” a sound installation of the Tudor composition “Spem in alium” by Thomas Tallis in the Cloisters’ Fuentidueña Chapel with its 12th-century apse (Sept. 10–Dec. 8); and Canterbury Stained Glass, a display of Romanesque stained-glass panels from England’s Canterbury Cathedral (Feb. 25–May 18, 2014). Education programs include free regularly scheduled tours of the galleries and gardens, family programs on weekends, and a garden day in the summer. A highlight is the popular series of subscription concerts of medieval and Renaissance music in the spring and winter.

The Medieval Garden Enclosed, a regularly updated blog about the gardens at the Cloisters, has been featured on the website of the Metropolitan Museum since 2008 (http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/).

More information about the Cloisters and it 75-year history is available on the museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org/cloisters.

Follow the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Facebook.com/metmuseum, Twitter.com/metmuseum, and Instagram.com/metmuseum to join the conversation about the anniversary. Use #Cloisters75 on Twitter and Instagram.

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The exhibition features more than 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, writings and television and film clips from the 1920s to the 1980s, including 30 works never before shown in Spain.

“We wanted to show the richness of Salvador Dali’s creation. We wanted to show the whole output of this artist, a complex, paradoxal and controversial personality,” said Jean-Michel Bouhours, one of the curators of the show.

Dali is praised by some as a creative genius for his striking and bizarre images. However his TV ad campaigns and media stunts, such as burying himself in banknotes, led some critics to dismiss the mustachioed artist’s work as little more than marketing.

The star attraction of the exhibition is Dali’s best-known painting, the 1931 The Persistence of Memory, which depicts melting pocket watches.

Dali said the painting, on loan to the exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was inspired by watching camembert cheese liquefying in the sun.

While the show, which runs until Sept. 2, focuses on Dali’s paintings, also on display are photographs, films and even a Lanvin chocolate ad which aired on French TV in the 1960s.

“Dali is an interesting artist because he always shifts between a great respect for the traditions of the great masters and an insatiable desire for all that is new,” said Montse Aguer, another curator of the show.

“Dali lived in an era when painting was inexorably destined to lose ground to other art forms like photography, cinema and conceptual art, and he dabbled in all of these.”

Among the films on display is the 1929 silent short film Un Chien Andalou, written with Spanish director Luis Bunuel, with its notorious scene of a woman’s eye being slit by a razor.

Another is Destino, an animated short Dali made for the Walt Disney Co., which was only released in 2003.

The exhibition was staged earlier this year at the Pompidou Center modern art museum in Paris.

Dali died in his native Figueres in Catalonia in northeastern Spain in 1989 at the age of 85.