Edvard Munch

Norwegian, 1863–1944

BiographyMunch was born on 12 December 1863 in Loten, Hedmark, a working-class suburb of Kristiania (now Oslo). his father was a military doctor, and the family was aristocratic but poor; sickness and death (his mother died in 1868 and his sister in 1877), and his father's psychological problems, determined the gloomy character of Munch's childhood. Munch studied sculpture under Julius Midelthun (1847-1908) in 1881, and painting under Christian Krohg (1852-1925) in 1882 and Frits Thaulow (dates) in 1883. From 1884 to 1889 he belonged to the Kristiania Bohème, a group of artists, writers, and students opposed to bourgeois lifestyle and morality. his work of this period, painted in a style fusing French Impressionism and Norwegian Naturalism, presents scenes from his troubled childhood and erotic motifs, as well as more acceptable and marketable landscapes and portraits. A solo exhibition in Kristiania in 1889 led to a grant for study in Paris with Léon Bonnat (1833-1922) in 1889. Once there, upon learning of the death of his father, Munch's own psychological crisis led to a rejection of his earlier impressionistic naturalism for Symbolism, and to emotional works with themes such as despair and death, sexuality and love. From 1892 to 1908, he spent much time in Berlin as a member of the avant-garde circle around August Strindberg (see Main Text), while also traveling widely and suffering through an intense romantic affair with Tulla Larsen. his great cycle of paintings, the Frieze of Life, was exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1902.

From 1908, when he suffered a mental breakdown, Munch lived mostly in Norway, continuing to paint new works (for example, the wall paintings for the University Aula in Kristiania), and to repaint and rework his earlier paintings until his death in Oslo on 23 January 1944. From 1894, Munch turned to printmaking to develop and disseminate his images. The images of the Frieze of Life, for example, were re-created in The Mirror, a print series exhibited in Oslo in 1897 but never completed.9 Munch's huge and highly innovative printed oeuvre was enormously influential on German Expressionist artists, such as Kirchner, Heckel, and Kollwitz. In 1912, he was recognized as one of the precursors of German Expressionism, along with Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. Munch made more prints in lithography than in any other medium. The subtlety of tone provided by the lithographic process made it his preferred black-and-white medium. Although he made relatively few color lithographs, they are among his most innovative. At his death he left over 15,000 prints, in addition to 1,000 paintings, 5,000 watercolors and drawings, and a few sculptures, to the municipality of Oslo.