Edvard Munch
The painter of the soul and of anxiety.
Edvard Munch painted love, sickness and death in a series he called “The Frieze of Life”. He is one of the forefathers of Expressionism.
Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in Løten in Norway and grew up in Kristiania, today’s Oslo. His childhood was marked by sickness and death. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, and his beloved sister Sophie died of the same disease in 1877. His father was an army doctor and deeply religious. Munch began studying engineering but switched to art, and was taught by Christian Krohg among others.
In Kristiania he mixed with the bohemians around the writer Hans Jæger, who argued that art should be based on one’s own life. The Sick Child of 1885–1886, which recalls his sister’s death, became his first major work. It was met with ridicule but is today one of the best-known paintings in the National Museum in Oslo. His years in Paris from 1889 brought him into contact with Impressionism and Symbolism.
In 1892 an exhibition of his work opened in Berlin. It caused such a scandal that it was closed after a week, but it made his name. During the 1890s he worked on what he called the Frieze of Life, a series about love, anxiety and death. It includes The Scream of 1893, Madonna, Vampire, Anxiety and The Dance of Life. The Scream exists in several versions, including those in the National Museum and the Munch Museum in Oslo. He was also one of the leading printmakers of his day and above all renewed the woodcut.
Munch’s style is built on undulating lines, simplified forms and colours that express emotion rather than reality. His private life was stormy. A relationship with Tulla Larsen ended in 1902 with a gunshot that injured his hand. In 1908 he suffered a breakdown and was treated at a clinic in Copenhagen. Afterwards his painting grew brighter. He carried out large murals for the university’s Aula in Oslo, among them The Sun.
From 1916 he lived at the Ekely estate outside Oslo. The Nazis declared his art “degenerate” and removed his works from German museums. Munch died in January 1944 and bequeathed his works to the City of Oslo. The collection is shown at the Munch Museum. He is regarded as one of the most important forerunners of Expressionism. In Stockholm the Thiel Gallery holds a significant collection of his work.