PARIS – The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch has long been associated with emotional instability, melancholia, bursts of paranoia, recurring illnesses and alcoholism. The exhibition “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye” that opened at the Pompidou Center here on Wednesday certainly reflects the torment he suffered throughout his life.

But there is another Munch on display among the works here. Even though many of Munch’s most famous works date from the 19th century, the exhibition seeks to show him as a modern man open to the ideas and technologies of the 20th century. (Munch lived from 1863 to 1944, and three-fourths of his artworks were done after 1900).

An avid filmgoer and reader of illustrated magazines, he had a passion for photography, using a small Kodak Bull’s Eye camera he bought in Berlin in 1902. Fifty of his black-and-white images are on display here, including eerie ones that he took of himself, in profile or with a sideways glance, by holding his camera in his outstretched hand.

His photographic works seems to have pleased him, and he told an interviewer in 1930: “I have learned a lot from photography. I have an old camera with which I took many photos of myself. The results are often surprising. One day, when I am old and have nothing to do but write my autobiography, then all my self-portraits will be exhibited.”

Munch also experimented with film. On a visit to France in 1927 he acquired a Pathé Baby, a small movie camera for amateurs. In a short grainy film of slightly more than five minutes, his camera shakes. But the film captures his appreciation of light and fascination with everyday life on a street in Oslo. At one point, setting the camera in front of him, he bends down toward the lens as if to study it closely.

In 1930 Munch suffered a hemorrhage that severely damaged his right eye. He produced a series of paintings, intimate and troubling, that captured the world as he perceived it through his bad eye. The most striking is “The Retina of the Artist. Optical Illusion Created by an Occular Illness” done with watercolors and black crayon in 1930. The pupil is white; the iris circles of reds and oranges. Black splotches and squiggles frame it.

His series of self-portraits document the aging process. One stands out as different from the others: in “Self-portrait at the Clinic” in 1909 (Munch spent some time in a mental institution), he looks straight at the viewer, and seems free from suffering. The picture has more detail than most of his other works, as if he is struggling to reconstruct a healthy identity. He considered it one of his best works.

”Edvard Munch: L’Oeil Moderne” (The Modern Eye) continues through Jan. 9 at the Pompidou Center. It moves to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt ( Feb.9-May 13) and then to the Tate Modern in London (June 28-Oct.12).

