Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul was the first retrospective of Munch (1863-1944) to appear in an American museum in almost thirty years. Including 87 paintings and 50 works on paper, it surveyed the Norwegian artist's work from 1880 to 1944. While the exhibition itself presented a crowd-pleasing array of paintings, the accompanying catalogue contributes a significant new scholarly reference on Munch. It includes concise essays by leading American Munch experts Patricia Berman, Reinhold Heller, Elizabeth Prelinger, and Tina Yarborough that refreshingly challenge some of our most basic assumptions about Munch and expressionism. It also contains excellent color plates, a rich chronology, exhibition history, selected bibliography, and brief but valuable notes on each plate. The small installation at Scandinavia House of 25 prints from the Museum of Modern Art's collection, curated by Deborah Wye, chief curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA, presented a welcome balance for the larger show, which neglected works on paper. It focused in depth on a smaller set of Munch's best-known 1890s motifs, emphasizing the artist's unprecedented experiments with woodcut, linocut, lithograph, etching and aquatint through effective comparisons of the same motif in divergent processes. Together, the shows raised significant issues regarding the reception of Munch as a modernist "master," revealing new aspects of his work and providing an opportunity to re-evaluate our assumptions about originality versus social context in Munch's oeuvre.