Edvard Munch

I

Introduction

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Norwegian artist, whose brooding, anguished paintings and graphic works, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of the art movement known as expressionism.

II

Munch’s Life

Munch was born in Løten in southern Norway, on December 12, 1863. During his childhood his mother and older sister died of tuberculosis. This early knowledge of disease, suffering, and death provided many of the themes that haunt his art. Munch was raised primarily by his father, a military doctor troubled by depression and haunted by religious visions.

Munch began painting at the age of 17 in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway. The Sick Child (1885-1886, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo), an important early work, reflects the childhood trauma of his mother’s and sister’s deaths. A government grant, awarded in 1889, enabled Munch to study in Paris, France. For the next 20 years, Munch worked chiefly in Paris and Berlin, Germany, returning to Norway in summer.

In 1908 Munch, suffering from acute anxiety aggravated by heavy drinking and smoking, was hospitalized in Denmark. He returned to Norway in 1909 and moved to a fishing town on the Norwegian coast. The relative tranquility of the rest of Munch’s life is reflected in his murals for the University of Oslo (1910-1916) and in his vigorous, brightly colored landscapes.

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III

Munch’s Art

At first Munch was influenced by the French art movements impressionism and postimpressionism, but he later turned to a highly personal style and content. Literal representation was subordinated in his art to the emotional tone of the subject. He conveyed emotion through the distortion of form and through exaggerated, often swirling shapes. The sinuous shapes in Munch’s paintings also reflect the influence of the art nouveau movement, which was at its height in Europe during the 1890s. Illness and death, along with failed emotional relationships between men and women, became Munch’s central themes. In 1892, in Berlin, an exhibition of his paintings so shocked the authorities that the show was closed. Undeterred, Munch and his sympathizers worked throughout the 1890s in Germany, developing the artistic style that came to be known as expressionism.

The transformation of emotion into art is evident in Munch’s best-known painting, The Scream (1893). This nightmarish depiction of despair—an opened-mouthed woman holding her hands to her ears—illustrates Munch’s belief that he could “hear the scream in nature.” The Scream belongs to a series of 22 paintings that show people overpowered and helpless before the indifferent forces of life, love, and death. The series, which Munch began in 1893 and first exhibited in Berlin in 1902, later became known as The Frieze of Life.

Melancholy suffuses most of Munch’s paintings. In several versions of Girls on a Bridge, the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses loom over limp female figures with featureless or hidden faces. Reflections of Munch’s sexual anxieties are seen in his portrayals of women, represented alternately as frail, innocent maidens or as lurid, life-devouring vampires. Men seem enticed and destroyed by each. Munch’s tormented inner state is also reflected in numerous self-portraits. Although his later paintings are less tortured than his earlier work, introspection marks the late self-portraits, notably Between Clock and Bed (1940, Munch Museet, Oslo).

Munch experimented with lithography and the woodcut in Paris; in Germany, he mastered etching (see Prints and Printmaking). His considerable body of etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts is highly valued for its originality. These graphic works restate the subject matter of the paintings; they are direct and vigorous in style. Few of Munch’s paintings are found in museums outside Norway. His own collection is housed in the Munch Museet in Oslo.

Munch’s The Scream, one of the most famous paintings in the world, has twice been the object of theft. A version stolen from the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo in 1994 was recovered after several months. In 2004 thieves grabbed The Scream and Madonna (1894-1895) from the walls of the Munch Museet. The paintings were retrieved in 2006 and temporarily exhibited in the museum before being restored; police gave no details about the recovery process.

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