Munch, Edvard (1863–1944). Norwegian painter and printmaker of figure compositions, portraits, and landscapes, his country's greatest artist. He was born in Løten, the son of a doctor, but his family moved to Christiania (now Oslo) when he was a baby. After leaving school he began training as an engineer, but he abandoned this for art, studying at the Royal School of Design, 1881–3. However, he learnt more through informal tuition from Christian Krohg, who was a hero to many young artists because of his championing of new ideas. Through Krohg, Munch became part of Christiania's bohemian world of artists and writers, who outraged bourgeois society with their advocacy of sexual as well as artistic freedom. In 1885 he visited Paris for the first time, and soon after returning to Norway painted the first picture in which he showed a distinctly personal vision, The Sick Child (NG, Oslo, 1885–6). Munch himself described this hauntingly sad scene (of which he painted five later versions) as ‘the breakthrough in my art. Most of what I have done since had its birth in this picture.’ The choice of subject was highly significant, for it reflected his own tragic childhood. His mother and favourite sister had died of tuberculosis in 1868 and 1877 respectively, and his father—driven close to insanity with grief—became almost dementedly pious. Munch wrote that ‘Illness, madness, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle', and in his paintings he gave expression to the neuroses that haunted him. Certain themes—jealousy, sickness, the awakening of sexual desire—occur again and again, and he painted extreme psychological states with an unprecedented conviction and an intensity that sometimes bordered on the frenzied. Already in The Sick Child he showed some of the bold simplification of form, the expressive use of non-naturalistic colour, and the pungency of feeling that were to characterize his mature work.

In 1892 Munch was invited to exhibit at the Verein Berliner Künstler (Association of Berlin Artists), and the anguished intensity of his work caused such an uproar that the exhibition was closed. The scandal made him famous overnight in Germany, so he decided to base himself there and from 1892 to 1908 he lived mainly in Berlin (although he moved around restlessly, staying in boarding houses, and made frequent visits to Norway as well as journeys to France and Italy). During this period—the heart of his creative life—he devoted much of his time to an ambitious series of pictures that he called collectively The Frieze of Life—‘a poem of life, love, and death'. The idea was to display the pictures together, as he thought that the force of his vision could be fully appreciated only when his work was seen en masse. The Frieze never had a definitive form, but it included some of Munch's finest work, including his most famous picture, The Scream (NG, Oslo, 1893), a vision of panic that has become one of the great icons of the modern world. Many of the other pictures in the series deal with a different kind of dread—the fear engendered by female sexual power. Munch characteristically depicted this in three stages—awakening womanhood, voracious sexuality, and an image of death—and he sometimes combined two or even all three of these aspects in one picture. Although he was tall, strikingly handsome, and very attractive to women, Munch was wary of the opposite sex and reluctant to contemplate marriage for fear that any children he might have would inherit the family disposition to mental and physical illness.

Munch translated the images from many of his paintings into prints. He had begun etching in 1894 to earn extra money, but he soon came to love printmaking and also mastered lithography and woodcutting. His woodcuts (often in colour) are particularly impressive, exploiting the grain of the wood to contribute to their effect of rough vigour. Together with the woodcuts of Gauguin (who likewise took up the medium in the 1890s) they were the major stimulus for the great revival of the technique in the 20th century, especially among the German Expressionists. By a process of artistic feedback, Munch's prints also influenced his own paintings, for after refining his ideas as he turned a composition from painting to print, he often translated the image back into a painting in a simpler and more powerful form.

In 1908 Munch suffered what he called ‘a complete mental breakdown', the legacy of heavy drinking, overwork, a wretched love affair, and the general debilitating effects of his nomadic lifestyle. After recuperating in a clinic in Copenhagen for eight months he returned to settle in Norway in 1909, determined to change his life. He realized that his mental instability was part of his genius (‘I would not cast off my illness, for there is much in my art that I owe to it'), but he made a conscious decision to devote himself to recovery and abandoned his familiar anguished imagery, looking to the world around him for subjects rather than inwards to the mind or soul. Almost immediately he began work on a project that emphasized his change of direction—a series of large canvases to decorate the Assembly Hall of Oslo University (1910–16). The subjects, which deal with universal forces, include History and The Sun. Munch depicted them with bright and vigorous colours and an energetic technique.

In 1916 Munch bought a large house called Ekely, at Skøyen on the outskirts of Oslo, and he spent most of the rest of his life there, leading an increasingly isolated existence. By now he was a much honoured figure in Norway; ironically, he had begun to receive official recognition (he was made a Knight of St Olav in 1908) at the very time when the most creative part of his career was ending. He remained extremely productive for the rest of his life, his favourite subjects in his later years including landscapes and scenes of workmen. Occasionally he rekindled some of the passion and profundity of his earlier days, as in the last of his numerous self-portraits, Between the Clock and the Bed (Munch Museum, Oslo, 1940–2), in which he shows himself old and frail, hovering on the edge of eternity. His final years were marred by trouble with his eyesight and by the German invasion of Norway in 1940 (earlier his art had been declared degenerate by the Nazis). At his death he left the huge body of his own work still in his possession to the City of Oslo: about 1,000 oils, 4,500 water-colours, 15,000 prints, and 6 sculptures. The remarkable state in which he left his house is described in Sigurd Willoch's book on Munch's etchings (1950): ‘The interior had a wondrous appearance and in no way resembled a house inhabited by an ordinary mortal. Munch lived in a few sparsely furnished rooms, as if he had not really moved in and was just a passing visitor … On the top floor of the main building, in rooms that had obviously not been lived in for many years, were massive piles of prints: thousands upon thousands of etchings, lithographs and woodcuts … covered in dust and neglected.’ This astonishing legacy is now housed in the Munch Museum, Oslo, which opened in 1963.

Munch ranks as one of the most powerful and influential of modern artists. His impact was particularly strong in Scandinavia and Germany, where he and van Gogh are regarded as the two main sources of Expressionism. The intensity with which he communicated mental anguish opened up new paths for art. ‘Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied anatomy and dissected corpses,’ he said, ‘so I try to dissect souls.’

Munch, Edvard (b Løten, 12 Dec. 1863; d Oslo, 23 Jan. 1944). Norwegian painter and printmaker, his country's greatest artist. He began painting in a conventional naturalistic manner, but by 1884 he was part of the world of bohemian artists in Christiania (now Oslo) who had advanced ideas on ethics and sexual morality, Christian Krohg being his early mentor. In 1885 he made the first of several visits to Paris, where over the next few years he was influenced by the Impressionists and Symbolists and, above all, by Gauguin's use of simplified forms and non-naturalistic colours. Soon after his return from the initial visit he painted the first work in which he showed a distinctly personal vision, The Sick Child (1885–6, NG, Oslo). Munch himself described this hauntingly sad scene (of which he painted five later versions) as ‘the breakthrough in my art. Most of what I have done since had its birth in this picture.’ The choice of subject was highly significant, for it reflected his own tragic childhood (his mother and eldest sister died of consumption when he was young, and as a result his grief-stricken father became almost dementedly pious). ‘Illness, madness and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle’, he wrote, and in his paintings he gave expression to the neuroses that haunted him. Certain themes—jealousy, sickness, the awakening of sexual desire—occur again and again, and he painted extreme psychological states with an unprecedented conviction and an intensity that sometimes bordered on the frenzied.

In 1892 Munch was invited to exhibit at the Verein Berliner Künstler (Association of Berlin Artists) and the anguished intensity of his work caused such an uproar in the press that the exhibition was closed. The scandal made him famous overnight in Germany, so he decided to base himself there and from 1892 to 1908 he lived mainly in Berlin (although he moved around restlessly, staying in boarding houses, and made frequent visits to Norway as well as journeys to France and Italy). During this period—the heart of his creative life—he devoted much of his time to an ambitious open-ended series of pictures that he called the ‘Frieze of Life’—‘a poem of life, love and death’. The most famous of the paintings from the series, The Scream (1893, NG, Oslo), and several others were translated by Munch into etching, lithography, or woodcut. He was one of the greatest of all printmakers, and his woodcuts (often in colour) are particularly remarkable, exploiting the grain of the wood to contribute to their effect of rough vigour. Together with the woodcuts of Gauguin (who likewise took up the medium in the 1890s) they were the major stimulus for the great revival of the technique in the 20th century, especially among the German Expressionists. By a process of artistic feedback, Munch's prints also influenced his own paintings, for after refining his ideas as he turned a composition from painting to print, he often translated the image back into a painting in a simpler and more powerful form.

In 1908 Munch suffered what he called ‘a complete mental collapse’, the legacy of heavy drinking, overwork, and a wretched love affair, and after recuperating he made his home permanently in Norway, where he was by now an honoured figure. He realized that his mental instability was part of his genius (‘I would not cast off my illness, for there is much in my art that I owe to it’), but he made a conscious decision to devote himself to recovery and abandoned his familiar imagery. The tormented quality of his art disappeared and his work became much more extroverted. He announced this change of direction in a series of murals decorating the Assembly Hall of Oslo University (1910–16); they are concerned with what Munch called ‘great eternal forces’ (History and The Sun are two of the subjects) and they are strong and fresh in colour and optimistic in spirit. In 1916 he bought a large house called Ekely, at Skøyen on the outskirts of Oslo, and he spent most of the rest of his life there, leading an increasingly isolated existence, although he continued to travel a good deal. His subjects in his later years, during which he kept up a prodigious output, included landscapes, portraits (he made much of his living through commissions), and workmen, often seen trudging through snow. However, he sometimes returned to the themes that haunted his youth, and occasionally he rekindled the passion and profundity of his early years, as in the last of his numerous self-portraits, Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–2, Munch Mus., Oslo), in which he shows himself old and frail, hovering on the edge of eternity. At his death he left the huge body of his work still in his possession to the City of Oslo to found the Munch Museum (opened in 1963 to mark the centenary of his birth).

Munch ranks as one of the most powerful and influential of modern artists. His impact was particularly strong in Scandinavia and Germany, where he and van Gogh are regarded as the two main sources of Expressionist art. The intensity with which he communicated mental anguish opened up new paths for art. ‘Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses’, he said, ‘so I try to dissect souls.’

Edvard Munch

Born: December 12, 1863
Loieten, Norway
Died: January 23, 1944
Oslo, Norway
Norwegian painter and artist

The Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch illustrated man's emotional life in love and death. His art was a major influence of the expressionist movement, in which where artists sought to give rise to emotional responses.

Early life

Born on December 12, 1863, in Loieten, near Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, Edvard Munch was the son of a military doctor. Childhood experiences with death and sickness—both his mother and sister died of tuberculosis (an often-fatal disease that attacks the lungs and bones)—greatly influenced his emotional and intellectual development. This and his father's fanatic Christianity led Munch to view his life as dominated by the "twin black angels of insanity and disease."

After studying engineering, Munch soon turned to art. In 1880 Munch began to study art and joined the realist painters (school of painters who sought to depict their subjects as realistically as possible) and writers of the Kristiania bohemian (fashionable and unconventional) circle. His ideas were strongly influenced at this time by the writer Hans Jaeger (1854–1910), who sought to establish an ideal society based on materialist atheism (not believing in material wealth) and free love. Jaeger's hopeless love affair with the wife of Christian Krohg, leader of the bohemian painters, and Munch's own brief affairs caused him to intensify the connection he saw between women, love, and death.

Munch's paintings during the 1880s were dominated by his desire to use the artistic vocabulary of realism to create subjective content, or content open to interpretation of the viewer. His Sick Child (1885–1886), which used a motif (dominant theme) popular among Norwegian realist artists, created through color a mood of depression that served as a memorial to his dead sister. Because of universal critical rejection, Munch turned briefly to a more mainstream style, and through the large painting Spring (1889), a more academic version of the Sick Child, he obtained state support for study in France.

A change

After studying briefly at a Parisian art school, Munch began to explore the possibilities made available by the French postimpressionists, a movement that looked to push impressionism beyond its limitations. The death of his father in 1889 caused a major spiritual crisis, and he soon rejected Jaeger's philosophy. Munch's Night in St. Cloud (1890) embodied a renewed interest in spiritual content; this painting served as a memorial to his father by presenting the artist's dejected state of mind. He summarized his intentions, saying "I paint not what I see, but what I saw," and identified his paintings as "symbolism: nature viewed through a temperament" (manner of thinking). Both statements accent the transformation of nature as the artist experienced it.

In 1892 the Berlin Artists' Association, an official organization consisting primarily of German academic artists, invited Munch to exhibit in Berlin, Germany. His paintings created a major scandal in Germany's artistic capital, and the exhibition was closed. But Munch used the publicity to arrange other exhibitions and sell paintings; his art prospered and he decided to stay in Germany. He also began work on a series of paintings later entitled the Frieze of Life, which concentrated on the themes of love, anxiety, and death.

To make his work accessible to a larger public, Munch began making prints (works of art that could be easily copied) in 1894. Motifs for his prints were usually derived from his paintings, particularly the Frieze. The Frieze also served as the inspiration for the paintings he made for Max Linde (1904), Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus (1907), and the Freia Chocolate Factory in Oslo (1922).

Later years

Following a nervous breakdown, Munch entered a hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1908. In the lithograph (a type of print) series Alpha and Omega he depicted his love affairs and his relationship to friends and enemies. In 1909 he returned to Norway to lead an isolated life. He sought new artistic motifs in the Norwegian landscape and in the activities of farmers and laborers. A more optimistic view of life briefly replaced his former anxiety, and this new life view attained monumental expression in the murals of the Oslo University Aula (1911–1914).

During World War I (1914–18), when Germany led forces against the forces of much of Europe and the United States, Munch returned to his earlier motifs of love and death. Symbolic paintings and prints appeared side by side with stylized studies of landscapes and nudes during the 1920s. As a major project, never completed, he began to illustrate Henrik Ibsen's (1828–1906) plays. During his last years, plagued by partial blindness, Munch edited the diaries written in his youth and painted harsh self-portraits and memories of his earlier life. He died in Ekely outside Oslo on January 23, 1944.

For More Information

Eggum, Arne. Edvard Munch: Paintings, Sketches, and Studies. New York: C. N. Potter, 1984.

Heller, Reinhold. Edvard Munch: The Scream. New York: Viking, 1972.

Langaard, Johan H., and Reidar Revold. Edvard Munch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.

Stang, Ragna. Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art. Edited by Geoffrey Culverwell. New York: Abbeville Press, 1979.

Edvard Munch

The Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), working in an antinaturalistic expressionist style, illustrated man's emotional life in love and death. His art was a major antecedent of the expressionist movement.

Born on Dec. 12, 1863, in Loieten near Kristiania (now Oslo), Edvard Munch was the son of a military doctor. Childhood experiences with death and sickness—both his mother and sister died of tuberculosis— greatly influenced his emotional and intellectual development. This and his father's fanatic Christianity led Munch to view his life as dominated by the "twin black angels of insanity and disease."

In 1880 Munch began to study art and joined the realist painters and writers of the Kristiania bohemian circle. His ideas were strongly influenced at this time by the anarchist writer Hans Jaeger, who sought to establish an ideal society based on materialist atheism and free love. Jaeger's hopeless love affair with the wife of Christian Krohg, dean of the bohemian painters, and Munch's own brief affairs caused him to intensify the identity he saw between women, love, and death.

Munch's paintings during the 1880s were dominated by his desire to use the artistic vocabulary of realism to render subjective content. His depiction of the Sick Child (1885-1886), which employed a motif popular among Norwegian realist artists, coloristically rendered a mood of melancholy depression serving as a pictorial memorial to his dead sister. Because of universal critical rejection, Munch turned briefly to a more conservative style and through the large painting Spring (1889), a more academic version of the Sick Child, he obtained state support for study in France.

After studying briefly at a Parisian art school, Munch began to explore the possibilities made available by the French postimpressionists. The death of his father in 1889 caused a major spiritual crisis, culminating in his rejection of Jaeger's philosophy. Munch's Night in St. Cloud (1890) embodied a renewed interest in spiritual content; this painting served as a memorial to his father by presenting the artist's dejected state of mind. He summarized his intentions, "I paint not what I see, but what I saw," and identified his paintings as "symbolism: nature viewed through a temperament." Both statements accent the transformation of nature as the artist experienced it.

In 1892 the Berlin Artists' Association, an official organization consisting primarily of German academic artists, invited Munch to exhibit there. His paintings provoked a major scandal in Germany's artistically provincial capital, and the exhibition was forcibly closed. But Munch used the publicity to arrange other exhibitions and sell paintings; his art prospered and he decided to stay in Germany. He also began work on a series of paintings later entitled the Frieze of Life, which concentrated on the themes of love, anxiety, and death. Incorporating many of his best-known works, the Frieze was essentially completed in 1893 but not exhibited as a unit until 1902.

To make his work accessible to a larger public, Munch began making prints in 1894. Motifs for his prints were usually derived from his paintings, particularly the Frieze. The Frieze also served as the inspiration for the paintings he made for Max Linde (1904), Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus (1907), and the Freia Chocolate Factory in Oslo (1922).

Following a nervous breakdown, Munch entered a sanatorium in Copenhagen in 1908. In the lithograph series Alpha and Omega he allegorically depicted his love affairs and his relationship to friends and enemies. In 1909 he returned to Norway to lead an isolated life. He sought new artistic motifs in the Norwegian landscape and in the activities of farmers and laborers. A more optimistic view of life briefly replaced his former existential anxiety, and this new life view attained monumental expression in the murals of the Oslo University Aula (1911-1914).

During World War I Munch returned to his earlier motifs of love and death; his own increasing age combined with the tensions of world affairs to arouse a new pessimism in him. Symbolic paintings and prints appeared side by side with stylized studies of landscapes and nudes during the 1920s; as a major project, never completed, he began to illustrate Henrik Ibsen's plays. During his last years, plagued by partial blindness, Munch edited the diaries written in his youth and painted harsh self-portraits and memories of his earlier life. He died in Ekely outside Oslo on Jan. 23, 1944.

Further Reading

Some of Munch's own writings are contained in Johan H. Langaard and Reidar Revold, Edvard Munch (1963; trans. 1964). Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream (1972), is the first book in English to make use of Munch's unpublished writings and of his drawings; although it concentrates on a single drawing, it serves as an introduction to his art in general. □

Munch, Edvard (1863–1944). Norwegian painter and printmaker, his country's greatest artist. He began painting in a conventional naturalistic manner, but by 1884 he was part of the world of bohemian artists in Christiania (now Oslo) who had advanced ideas on ethics and sexual morality, Christian Krohg being his early mentor. In 1885 he made the first of several visits to Paris, where he was influenced by the Impressionists and Symbolists and, above all, by Gauguin's use of simplified forms and non-naturalistic colours. Soon after his return he painted the first work in which he showed a distinctly personal vision, The Sick Child (1885–6, NG, Oslo). Munch had endured a traumatic childhood (his mother and eldest sister died of consumption when he was young, and as a result his grief-stricken father became almost dementedly pious): ‘Illness, madness, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle’, he wrote, and in his paintings he gave expression to the neuroses that haunted him. Certain themes—jealousy, sickness, the awakening of sexual desire—occur again and again, and he painted extreme psychological states with an unprecedented conviction and an intensity that sometimes bordered on the frenzied.

In 1892 Munch was invited to exhibit at the Verein Berliner Künstler (Association of Berlin Artists) and his work caused such an uproar in the press that the exhibition was closed. The scandal made him famous overnight in Germany, so he decided to base himself there and from 1892 to 1908 he lived mainly in Berlin (although he moved around restlessly, staying in boarding houses, and made frequent visits to Norway as well as journeys to France and Italy). During this period—the heart of his creative life—he devoted much of his time to an ambitious open-ended series of pictures that he called the ‘Frieze of Life’—‘a poem of life, love and death’. The most famous of the paintings from the series, The Scream (1893, NG, Oslo), and several others were translated by Munch into etching, lithography, or woodcut. He was one of the greatest of all printmakers, and his woodcuts, together with those of Gauguin, played a major part in the 20th-century revival of the technique; they are often in colour and exploit the grain of the wood to create a sense of rough, intense vigour. In 1908 Munch suffered what he called ‘a complete mental collapse’, the legacy of heavy drinking, overwork, and a wretched love affair, and after recuperating he made his home permanently in Norway, where he was by now an honoured figure. He realized that his mental instability was part of his genius (‘I would not cast off my illness, for there is much in my art that I owe to it’), but he made a conscious decision to devote himself to recovery and abandoned his familiar imagery. The anguished intensity of his art disappeared and his work became much more extroverted. He announced this change of direction in a series of murals decorating the Assembly Hall of Oslo University (1910–16); they are concerned with what Munch called ‘great eternal forces’ (History and The Sun are two of the titles) and they are strong and fresh in colour and optimistic in spirit. In 1916 he bought a large house called Ekely, at Skøyen on the outskirts of Oslo, and he spent most of the rest of his life there, leading an increasingly isolated existence, although he continued to travel a good deal. His subjects in his later years, during which he kept up a prodigious output, included landscapes, portraits (he made much of his living through commissions), and workmen, often seen trudging through snow. However, he sometimes returned to the themes that haunted his youth, and occasionally he rekindled the passion and profundity of his early years, as in the last of his numerous self-portraits, Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–2, Munch Mus., Oslo), in which he shows himself old and frail, hovering on the edge of eternity. At his death he left a huge body of his work to the City of Oslo to found the Munch Museum (opened in 1963 to mark the centenary of his birth).

Munch ranks as one of the most powerful and influential of modern artists. His impact was particularly strong in Scandinavia and Germany, where he and van Gogh are regarded as the two main sources of Expressionist art. The intensity with which he communicated mental anguish opened up new paths for art. ‘Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses’, he said, ‘so I try to dissect souls.’

Edvard Munch , 1863–1944, Norwegian painter and graphic artist. He studied in Oslo and under Bonnat in Paris and traveled in Europe. He abandoned impressionism and in the 1890s, from a profound personal sense of isolation, visually examined such primal themes as birth, death, thwarted love, sex, fear, and anxiety. Stricken by tragedy (his mother and favorite sister died young, another sister was psychotic, and he feared for his own sanity), Munch transformed his own trauma into an exploration of universal themes, creating figurative images that are sometimes violent, sometimes tranquil and sorrowful. He also executed a masterful series of self-portraits. Munch's emotionally charged style is recognized as being of primary importance to the birth of German expressionism . Also during the 1890s, Munch's most productive period, he made a number of powerful and often shocking woodcuts, developing a new technique of direct and forceful cutting that served to revive creative activity in this medium.

Among Munch's strongest and best-known works are The Scream (1893), Vampire (1894), and The Kiss (1895). Reaction to his stark and sometimes fearsome images caused the closing of his first major exhibition held in Berlin in 1892. In 1909, after a severe mental illness, he returned from Germany to Norway, where he painted murals for the Univ. of Oslo and for an Oslo chocolate factory. His painting became brighter of palette and less introverted until the 1920s, when he again was moved to portray his dreadful anguish. All but a few of Munch's paintings, e.g. Summer Night's Dream (The Voice) (1893, Boston Mus. of Fine Arts), are in Norwegian collections.

Bibliography: See Munch: In His Own Words (2001), ed. by P. E. Tojner; The Private Journals of Edvard Munch (2005), ed. by J. G. Holland; biographies by O. Benesch (tr. 1960) and S. Prideaux (2005); studies by A. Moen (3 vol., 1956–58), W. Timm (tr. 1969), J. P. Hodin (1972), T. M. Messer (1973), G. Woll (2001), and K. McShine, ed. (2006).

Munch, Edvard (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker. Munch was one of the most influential of modern artists, inspiring expressionism. Munch's tortured, isolated figures and violent colouring caused a scandal when he exhibited his work in Berlin in 1892, but his paintings inspired progressive artists to form the Sezession. Munch compiled a series of studies of love and death entitled a Frieze of Life, which included The Scream (1893). Other important works are Ashes (1894) and Virginia Creeper (1898).

http://www.edvard-munch.com