Edvard Munch

Norwegian painter

• Born: December 12, 1863
• Birthplace: Løten, Norway
• Died: January 23, 1944
• Place of death: Ekely, Norway

The dramatic paintings and graphics of Munch not only reflected his inner torment and emotions but also proved highly influential on artistic developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to becoming his native country’s most famous artist, Munch served as one of the main progenitors of expressionism.

Early Life

Edvard Munch (EHD-vahrd moonk) was the second of five children born to Christian Munch and his wife, Laura Cathrine Bj lstad. Munch’s father was a doctor who in 1864 moved his family to Oslo, then called Christiania, where he earned a fairly meager living in one of the city’s poorer districts. A sickly, lonely child, Munch experienced two early tragedies that haunted the rest of his life the deaths of his mother in 1868 and of his beloved elder sister Sophie in 1877, both victims of tuberculosis. His mother’s sister Karen moved into the household to care for the children, and she provided Munch with a degree of warmth and encouragement that his strict and deeply religious father failed to do. All the Munch children grew accustomed to drawing as a means to pass the long winter nights. Recognizing her nephew’s talents, Karen Bj lstad encouraged his interest and bought him painting materials.

Munch’s father decided that his son’s abilities would enable him to pursue a career in engineering, so Munch was enrolled at the Technical College in 1879. Poor health prevented his attending regularly, and the young Munch became determined to follow a career in painting, a decision that a family friend, C. F. Dirike, helped convince the elder Munch to accept.

In 1880, Munch left the technical school and began painting seriously. The following year, he was enrolled in the School of Design to take classes in drawing and modeling under the direction of sculptor Julius Middlethun. With six other young aspiring artists, Munch rented a studio in Christiania’s art district in 1882 and soon became the prize pupil of Christian Krogh, a naturalist painter who was the leader of the town’s artistic community. During these years, Munch was also befriended by a distant relative, Frits Thaulow, who had close connections with many French painters. Thaulow provided financial support that allowed the young Munch to make his first trip to Paris, in 1885. During his three weeks there, he studied the masterpieces in the Louvre and the salons and found himself particularly impressed by the landmark works of Édouard Manet.

As early as 1883 Munch had participated in a group exhibition in Oslo and had managed to sell a few works, but his early career remained hampered by his environment. Norway in the late nineteenth century remained culturally conservative and unreceptive to the new trends then revolutionizing the art world. Local critics attacked Munch’s work as sloppy, unfinished, and unrealistic.

During this period, Munch fell under the influence of the bohemian movement in Oslo, led by the anarchist writer Hans Jaeger. This group of young writers and artists deliberately shocked bourgeois society with their unconventional ideas and behavior and their attack on nearly all sacred traditions. Munch never embraced their program totally, but he was nevertheless influenced by their avant-garde attitudes.

Life’s Work

In 1885, shortly after his return from Paris, Munch began work on three paintings that became hallmarks of his mature style: The Morning After, Puberty, and The Sick Child . The last of these three, clearly inspired by memories of his sister’s death, created an uproar when shown at the Annual State Exhibition in 1886. Critics assailed his works as laughable and the product of a madman. Still, during the years 1889-1891, Munch received three grants from his government that enabled him to escape the narrow cultural confines of Norway and study abroad.

Following his first one-man show in Oslo in 1889, Munch utilized the first of his state grants to leave for study in Paris. The death of his father later in the year, coupled with this move, opened a new era in Munch’s life, a peripatetic existence in which he absorbed many of the dramatic new ideas of late-nineteenth century European culture. He initially was enrolled in the Parisian art school of Léon Bonnat, who was a strict academician. Munch soon quarreled with Bonnat, whose commitment to realism he found unchallenging. He moved to St. Cloud, where he shared a room with Danish poet Emmanuel Goldstein. There he developed a new artistic commitment to abandon his earlier naturalism in favor of mood painting, depicting themes such as suffering and love.

Munch returned to Norway periodically and in 1892 held his second one-man show there, which resulted in his receiving an invitation from the Berlin Artists’ Union to exhibit his works in the German capital. The resulting show created such an uproar that conservatives in the union forced it to close after one week. Nevertheless, the 1882 Berlin exhibition made Munch famous throughout Germany and a hero to the more avant-garde artistic community there. He spent much of the next sixteen years in Germany and became associated with Berlin’s bohemian circles.

From 1892 until 1908, Munch embraced a restless lifestyle, living mainly in hotel rooms and traveling constantly. His artistic output remained prolific, and dozens of exhibitions of his work were held in major cities across Europe. During the 1890’s, he began work in graphics, a field he found both challenging and rewarding, enabling him to reach a wider audience and give new expression to some of his familiar themes. He eventually mastered all graphic techniques, with his greatest output being in lithographs.

Beginning in 1893, Munch embarked on an artistic project that he called The Frieze of Life , conceived as a series of paintings to present a picture of life, love, and death. Many of the works were inspired by his early childhood experiences and reflected his preoccupation with illness, anxiety, and emotional trauma. He worked on this series periodically for more than thirty years and hoped to have all of it eventually collected in one great hall, an aspiration that remained unfulfilled.

Munch’s mature style, which developed throughout the 1890’s, followed his determination to make his works explore the inner psyche of humanity. He kept notes of his visual experiences and most often drew from memory. Mood dominated Munch’s paintings and graphics more than any other artistic element; he frequently gave his works a bold simplicity that enabled them to convey his emotional reactions. Sometimes he went weeks without painting and then would work in a frenzy of activity late into the night, rapidly putting on the canvas visual images that had been building in his mind.

Certain themes and subjects consistently appeared in Munch’s work throughout his long career, many of them reflecting his traumatic childhood and his own introverted nature. Many dealt with death, illness, and isolation. Others were blatantly erotic in nature. Munch became a revealing portraitist and also produced a remarkable series of self-portraits between 1880 and 1943. Other Munch paintings concentrated on the landscape of his beloved Norway. In the early 1900’s, he turned to a new theme, depicting members of the working class. Throughout the entire era he was never totally committed to a single style, and he refrained from joining any one of the numerous schools of art that developed during his lifetime. He remained a supreme individualist, letting his art convey his attitudes and emotions.

Although Munch remained devoted to his aunt and sisters, he deliberately avoided permanent entanglements in his personal life. A lifelong bachelor, he early decided against marriage, citing his family history of tuberculosis and mental illness and also fearing that a wife and children would hinder his artistic development. His most serious affair, with Tulla Larsen, ended disastrously, when she threatened suicide and accidentally shot Munch in the hand, permanently paralyzing one of his fingers.

In the early 1900’s, Munch’s nomadic lifestyle, coupled with overwork and excessive drinking, threatened his mental stability and led to irrational behavior. He became quarrelsome and consumed by feelings of persecution, an emotion perhaps fed by the continued rejection of his work by Norwegian critics. Despite increasing financial security and a growing reputation in Germany, Munch suffered a nervous breakdown in Copenhagen in late 1908 and voluntarily checked himself into a clinic run by Dr. Daniel Jacobsen. After eight months of treatment, he emerged fully recovered physically and mentally. He abandoned his wandering life in favor of a more stable existence in Norway. Munch’s new self-confidence and more optimistic attitude were reflected in his subsequent works, which were less somber and violent.

Although he occasionally traveled throughout Scandinavia and the Continent, Munch spent most of his time after 1908 in Norway. One of his major projects during the initial years after his return concerned a series of murals he painted for the Great Hall of the University of Oslo, an undertaking that caused a fierce controversy in which his designs were initially rejected and only approved five years after he entered the competition. These strikingly modern murals consumed most of Munch’s time until their completion in 1916.

Munch eventually bought or rented several manors in Norway to provide himself with sufficient space for his work. In 1916, he purchased Ekely, an estate on the outskirts of Oslo, which remained his principal home until his death.

Gradually his native country extended official recognition for his accomplishments, purchasing several of his works for the National Gallery and subsequently awarding him the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Olav for his seventieth birthday. Yet in spite of his growing prominence, Munch preferred to live a hermitlike existence at Ekely. He saw only a few friends and lived a spartan life surrounded by his paintings and graphics, which he called his children.

In 1930, a blood vessel burst in Munch’s right eye, which prevented him from working for almost a year. He had trouble with his vision for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, Munch continued to work twelve hours or more a day. In 1937, the Nazi regime in Germany included Munch on a list of “degenerate” artists and confiscated eighty-two of his works on exhibit in German museums. After the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1940 Munch was left alone. He continued painting and printmaking and refused all contact with the invaders.

Munch died of complications resulting from bronchitis on January 23, 1944. In his will he unconditionally bequeathed all of his work in his possession to the city of Oslo. This collection formed the basis for the museum in his honor that opened there in 1963.

Significance

During a career that spanned six decades, Edvard Munch produced a remarkable collection of paintings, drawings, and graphics that made him one of the leading figures of modern European art. His works were highly personal, reflecting his inner torments and anxieties and providing glimpses into the psychological aspects of man’s nature. His most famous painting, The Scream (1893), foreshadowed the horrors that awaited humankind amid the brutality and existential dilemmas of the twentieth century.

In contrast to his tragic contemporary, Vincent van Gogh, Munch managed to survive despite threatened sanity and emerge a stronger figure who vigorously continued to work into his eighties. His bold use of lines and colors, combined with the psychological implications of his work, clearly made him one of the chief influences on the emerging artistic movement called expressionism. His influence, first greatest in Germany, spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe and was eventually recognized throughout the Continent and the United States.

In his writings, Munch maintained that art resulted from man’s desire to communicate with others, and throughout his long life his profoundly personal paintings and other artistic works reflected his desire to share his own grief and joys with his fellowman. His monumental body of work always retained the integrity of his purpose and provided the twentieth century with a poignant glimpse into the dilemmas and perplexities that confronted humanity in an increasingly unsettled and threatening world.

Bibliography

Amman, Per. Edvard Munch. Thornbury, England: Artlines UK, 1987. This monograph contains a brief introductory essay on Munch’s life and significance, a chronological table of major events in his life, and more than eighty pages of enlarged reproductions of his major works.

Dunlop, Ian. Edvard Munch. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. Dunlop provides a biographical sketch of Munch’s life and forty color prints of the Norwegian artist’s key works, accompanied by commentary.

Heller, Reinhold. Munch: His Life and Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. This recent, well-researched biography is thoroughly documented and contains copious excerpts from Munch’s letters and other writings. It includes a select bibliography and 180 illustrations.

Hodin, J. P. Edvard Munch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. A volume in Oxford’s respected World of Art series, this monograph by an author noted for his Munch studies provides a sympathetic account of the artist’s life and works. The format is basically chronological, with separate chapters devoted specifically to Munch’s graphics and his general style. Contains a short bibliography and 168 illustrations.

Munch, Edvard. The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth. Edited and translated by J. Gill Holland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. English-language translation of Munch’s diaries from the 1880’s to the 1930’s. Munch, who considered himself a writer as well as an artist, experimented in his journals with writing fiction, philosophical speculation, and surrealistic prose.

Prideaux, Sue. Edvard Munch: Behind “The Scream.” New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Comprehensive biography of Munch, examining how the artist sought to paint his “soul’s diary.”

Stang, Ragna. Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art. Translated by Geoffrey Culverwell. New York: Abbeville Press, 1979. Probably the most impressive and comprehensive survey of Munch’s life and works, lavishly illustrated. The text is accompanied by numerous quotations from Munch’s writings as well as comments by his contemporaries. The author played a key role at the Munch museum in Oslo.