Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker, best known for The Scream (1893), whose raw images of illness, desire, jealousy and death made him a founder of Expressionism. Many people find him in our catalogue through The Death of Marat (1907), his reworking of a famous murder into a picture of his own wrecked love affair.

Life in brief

Munch grew up in Kristiania (now Oslo). His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, and his favorite sister, Sophie, died of the same disease when he was thirteen; his father was a devout, anxious army doctor. "Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle," he later wrote. He trained at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania and fell in with the city's bohemians around the anarchist writer Hans Jæger, who urged artists to write and paint their own lives.

Trips to Paris introduced him to Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. In 1892 an exhibition of his work in Berlin caused such outrage that it was closed after a week, which made him famous in Germany. Through the 1890s, living mainly in Berlin, he developed The Frieze of Life, a cycle of paintings about love, anxiety and death, and became a master printmaker in woodcut and lithography.

His relationship with Tulla Larsen, a wealthy Kristiania woman who wanted marriage, ended in 1902 in a quarrel during which a revolver went off and shot away part of a finger on his left hand. Drinking and exhaustion led to a breakdown in 1908 and eight months in a Copenhagen clinic. Afterward he returned to Norway, painted the murals for the University of Oslo's assembly hall (1909–16) and lived from 1916 on his estate at Ekely, outside Oslo. In 1937 the Nazis removed 82 of his works from German museums as "degenerate." He died at Ekely in 1944 and left his remaining work to the city of Oslo.

Style and technique

Munch simplified forms into flowing outlines and flat, symbolic color, and he was ruthless with his surfaces: he left canvases outdoors in rain and snow, scraped paint away and worked thinly so the weave showed through. He painted the same motif many times, in oils and prints, and many famous titles exist in several versions.

The Death of Marat

In 1793 Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist of the French Revolution, was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a scene immortalized by Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat. In 1907, five years after the shooting, Munch borrowed the story to stage his break with Tulla Larsen. A naked woman stands rigid and expressionless facing us; behind her a bloodied man lies across a bed. There is no bath. The woman is Corday and Tulla at once, and the man is Marat and Munch.

The painting is as radical in technique as in subject. In the version known as The Death of Marat II, in the MUNCH museum in Oslo, the paint is laid in long, separate streaks, vertical and horizontal, that cross the whole canvas like rain. Munch was experimenting that year with this rough, striped handling, and it makes the room seem to vibrate around two motionless figures.

Other works in the catalogue

• Self-Portrait with Cigarette (1895, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo) shows the artist emerging from a haze of blue smoke, lit from below, a cigarette held to his chest.
• Anxiety (1894) moves the blood-red sky and swirling fjord of The Scream behind a crowd of ashen-faced figures walking toward us.
• Melancholy shows a man brooding on the shore at Åsgårdstrand, the curving coastline echoing his mood, one of the first pictures of his Symbolist style.
• Starry Night (1893) is a blue nocturne of the shore at Åsgårdstrand, painted without any of Van Gogh's swirling energy; it is now at the Getty Museum.
• Vampire (Love and Pain) shows a red-haired woman bent over a man's neck. Munch first titled it Love and Pain; a critic named it Vampire, and the name stuck.

Influence

Munch's mix of personal confession and simplified, expressive form fed directly into German Expressionism, especially the painters of Die Brücke in Dresden. The Scream has become one of the most reproduced images in the world. Explore related themes in Symbolism and Death in Art.

Where to see his work

The MUNCH museum in Oslo, which opened its waterfront building in 2021, holds most of his bequest. The National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo owns the 1893 painted Scream and other key works. Outside Norway, the Getty, the Museum of Modern Art and museums in Germany and Sweden hold important paintings and prints.