In Photos: Edvard Munch Exhibition at the Met Museum, NYC

Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-43)Few artists have ever seen their own old age with such terrifying clarity as Munch. Compared with this illusionless recognition of imminent mortality, the late works of Rembrandt seem self-congratulatory. Time is ticking away in the shape of a solemn grandfather clock. A single bed, covered with a stylish modern pattern of diagonal lines, testifies to his solitude. The artist himself seems frozen, flattened, already seeing himself as a stiffened corpse. He was to die, soon after painting this austere farewell, in 1944
Photograph: Ove Kvavik/Edvard Munch