Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch the Norwegian painter and printmaker (1863-1944), a pioneer of Expressionism whose intensely subjective images of anxiety, love and death transformed the art of the modern period. His most famous work, The Scream, has become an emblem of the human condition in the twentieth century.

Family and Early Sorrow

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 at Loten in Norway and grew up in Christiania, now Oslo, in a family marked by illness and loss. His father was a physician and a devout man given to melancholy, and his mother died of tuberculosis when Edvard was five. His beloved sister Sophie died of the same disease when he was in his teens, and a younger sister was afflicted with mental illness.

These deaths shaped his sensibility and supplied the themes that would occupy him for life: sickness, bereavement, dread and the fragility of love. He later wrote that without illness and suffering he would have been like a ship without a rudder, and that his art grew out of his attempt to understand his own existence.

He studied at the Royal School of Drawing in Christiania and came under the influence of the naturalist and bohemian circles of the city, especially the radical writer Hans Jaeger, who encouraged artists to depict their own lives. A state scholarship allowed him to travel to Paris in 1885, where he encountered the work of the Impressionists.

Toward Expressionism

In Paris Munch absorbed the lessons of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and in the late 1880s he began to develop his own radical manner. He abandoned the careful realism of his early pictures for a style in which colour, line and broad gesture carry emotional meaning, and in which the psychological state of the artist is the true subject.

The Sick Child, painted in the mid-1880s, was a breakthrough and a scandal. Its theme was the deathbed of his sister, rendered not with sentimental detail but with a raw, scratched surface and a mood of grief. The painting announced a new kind of art in which the inner life was rendered directly, and it was followed by a series of pictures of love, jealousy and despair.

He worked increasingly in series, conceiving of his paintings as chapters in a single unfolding account of life and death. This habit of returning to the same motif in different moods and media would culminate in the great cycle he called the Frieze of Life.

The Frieze of Life and The Scream

The Frieze of Life is Munch's central project, a group of paintings and prints on the themes of love, anxiety and death. It includes such works as The Kiss, Madonna, Vampire, Ashes, Melancholy and The Scream, arranged to trace the course of a doomed love affair and the dread that accompanies it.

The Scream, made in several versions from 1893 onward, shows a figure on a bridge or shoreline, hands pressed to its face, mouth open in an expression of anguish, while the sky and water swirl in violent bands of red and orange. The landscape itself seems to shriek, and the image dissolves the boundary between inner feeling and outer world.

Munch recorded in his diary the experience that inspired the picture: a walk at sunset when the sky turned blood red and he sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. The painting is thus a record of a moment of existential terror, and its power lies in its refusal to separate the landscape from the emotion it arouses.

Graphic Work, Illness and Late Career

Munch was a prolific printmaker and used etching, lithography and woodcut to revisit his favourite themes. The woodcuts, in which he exploited the grain and the roughness of the block, are especially original, and his prints spread his reputation widely and brought him a modest income. He frequently translated a painted motif into a print, and vice versa.

His life was darkened by heavy drinking and by a breakdown in 1908, after which he was hospitalised for several months. He recovered and returned to Norway, where he settled at Ekely, near Oslo, and lived in increasing seclusion. He received honours and commissions, including the decoration of the university hall at Oslo, and his financial position improved.

In old age he painted large, vigorous pictures of farm life and landscapes, as well as self-portraits of unflinching honesty. He died at Ekely in 1944, shortly after his eightieth birthday, leaving a vast body of work to the city of Oslo, which formed the core of the Munch Museum.

Influence and Legacy

Munch is regarded as the father of Expressionism. His willingness to subordinate observation to feeling, and his use of colour and distortion to convey states of mind, offered a model to the German Expressionists and to later artists in many countries who sought an art of emotional directness.

His themes of alienation, anxiety and mortality spoke to a century of upheaval, and The Scream became a universal symbol, endlessly reproduced and adapted. Yet his work is not only a record of torment; his love of nature, his luminous evenings, his celebration of life in pictures such as The Dance of Life reveal a broader and more humane vision.

The museums dedicated to him hold a large collection of his paintings, prints and writings, and his letters and diaries are valued as an intimate commentary on his art. He stands among the small group of artists whose private struggles became the shared imagery of modernity.

See also

• Expressionism
• The Scream
• Frieze of Life
• Symbolism