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Edvard Munch (12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety. Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, to Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura Catherine Bjølstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an older sister, Johanne Sophie (born 1862), and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas (born 1865), Laura Catherine (born 1867), and Inger Marie (born 1868). Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherited their artistic talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch (1776 – 1839) and historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810 – 1863). The family moved to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard’s mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. After their mother's death, the Munch siblings were raised by their father and by their aunt Karen. Often ill for much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard would draw to keep himself occupied, and received tutoring from his school mates and his aunt. Christian Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained the children with vivid ghost stories and tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Christian’s positive behavior toward his children, however, was overshadowed by his morbid pietism. Munch wrote, “My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious — to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.” Christian reprimanded his children by telling them that their mother was looking down from heaven and grieving over their misbehavior. The oppressive religious milieu, plus Edvard’s poor health and the vivid ghost stories, helped inspire macabre visions and nightmares in Edvard, who felt death constantly advancing on him. One of Munch's younger sisters was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Of the five siblings only Andreas married, but he died a few months after the wedding. Munch would later write, "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies — the heritage of consumption and insanity." Christian Munch’s military pay was very low, and his attempts at developing a private side practice failed, keeping his family in perennial poverty. They moved frequently from one sordid flat to another. Munch’s early drawings and watercolors depicted these interiors, and the individual objects such as medicine bottles and drawing implements, plus some landscapes. By his teens, art dominated Munch’s interests. At thirteen, Munch had his first exposure to other artists at the newly formed Art Association, where he admired the work of the Norwegian landscape school. He returned to copy the paintings, and soon he began to paint in oils.
In
1879 Munch enrolled in a technical
college to
study engineering, where he excelled in physics, chemistry, and math.
He learned scaled and perspective drawing, but frequent illnesses
interrupted his studies. The
following
year, much to his father’s disappointment, Munch left the
college determined to become a painter. His father viewed art as an
“unholy trade”, and his neighbors reacted bitterly and sent him
anonymous letters. In
contrast to his father’s rabid pietism, Munch adopted an undogmatic
stance toward art, writing in his diary his simple goal: “in my art I
attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.” In
1881,
Munch enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of
Christiania, one of whose founders was his distant relative Jacob
Munch. His teachers were sculptor Julius
Middelthun and naturalistic painter Christian Krohg. That
year Munch demonstrated his quick absorption of his figure training at
the Academy in his first portraits, including one of his father and his
first self-portrait. In 1883, Munch took part in his first public
exhibition and shared a studio with other students. His
full length portrait of Karl Jensen - Hjell, a notorious
bohemian about town, earned a critic’s dismissive response: “It is
impressionism carried to the extreme. It is a travesty of art.” Munch’s nude paintings from
this period survive only in sketches, except for Standing Nude (1887), perhaps confiscated
by his father. During
these early years in his career, Munch experimented with many styles,
including Naturalism and Impressionism.
Some early works are reminiscent of Manet.
Many of these attempts brought him unfavorable criticism from the press
and garnered him constant rebukes by his father, who nonetheless
provided him with small sums for living expenses. At
one point, however, Munch’s father, perhaps swayed by the negative
opinion of Munch's cousin Edvard Diriks (an established, traditional
painter), destroyed at least one painting (likely a nude) and refused
to advance any more money for art supplies. Munch
also received his father’s ire for his relationship with Hans Jæger,
the
local nihilist who lived by the code “a passion to destroy is also
a creative passion” and who advocated suicide as the ultimate way to
freedom. Munch
came under his malevolent, anti-establishment spell. “My ideas
developed under the influence of the bohemians or rather under Hans
Jaeger. Many people have mistakenly claimed that my ideas were formed
under the influence of Strindberg and the Germans … but that
is wrong. They had already been formed by then.” At
that time, contrary to many of the other bohemians, Munch was still
respectful of women, as well as reserved and well mannered, but he
began to give in to the binge drinking and brawling of his circle. He
was unsettled by the sexual revolution going on at the time and by the
independent women around him. He later turned cynical concerning sexual
matters, expressed not only in his behavior and his art, but in his
writings as well, an example being a long poem called The City of Free Love. Still
dependent on his family for many of his meals, Munch’s relationship
with his father remained tense over concerns about his bohemian life. After
numerous
experiments, Munch concluded that the Impressionist idiom did
not allow sufficient expression. He found it superficial and too akin
to scientific experimentation. He felt a need to go deeper and explore
situations brimming with emotional content and expressive energy. Under
Jaeger’s commandment that Munch should “write his life”, meaning that
Munch should explore his own emotional and psychological state, Munch
began a period of reflection and self-examination, recording his
thoughts in his “soul’s diary”. This deeper perspective helped
move him to a new view of his art. He wrote that his painting The Sick Child (1886),
based on his sister’s death, was his first “soul painting”, his first
break from Impressionism. The painting received a negative response
from critics and from his family, and caused another “violent outburst
of moral indignation” from the community. Only his friend Christian Krohg
defended him: He
paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that
of other artists. He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is
all he paints. For this reason Munch’s pictures are as a rule ‘not
complete’, as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh,
yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once
the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is
precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other
generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and
what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else. Munch
continued to employ a variety of brushstroke technique and color
palettes throughout the 1880s and early 1890s as he struggled to define
his style. His idiom continued to veer between naturalistic, as seen in Portrait of Hans Jæger, and impressionistic, as in Rue Lafayette. His Inger On the Beach (1889),
which caused another storm of confusion and controversy, hints at the
simplified forms, heavy outlines, sharp contrasts, and emotional
content of his mature style to come. He began to carefully calculate his
compositions to create tension and emotion. While stylistically
influenced by the Post-Impressionists, what evolved was a subject matter which
was symbolist in
content, depicting a state of mind rather than an external reality. In
1889, Munch presented his first one-man show of nearly all his works to
date. The recognition it received led to a two year state scholarship
to study in Paris under French painter Léon
Bonnat. Munch
arrived in Paris during the festivities of the Exposition
Universelle (1889) and
roomed with two fellow Norwegian artists. His picture Morning (1884) was displayed at the
Norwegian pavilion. He
spent his mornings at Bonnat’s busy studio (which included live female
models) and afternoons at the exhibition, galleries, and museums (where
students were to make copies). Munch
recorded little enthusiasm for Bonnat’s drawing lessons — “It tires and
bores me — it’s numbing’’ — but enjoyed the master’s commentary during
museum trips.
Munch
was enthralled by the vast display of modern European art, including
the works of three artists who would prove influential: Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh,
and Henri Toulouse
- Lautrec — all notable for how they used color to convey
emotion. Munch
was particularly inspired by Gauguin’s “reaction against realism” and
his credo that “art was human work and not an imitation of Nature”, a
belief earlier stated by Whistler. As
one of his Berlin friends stated later about Munch, “he need not make
his way to Tahiti to see and experience the primitive in human nature.
He carries his own Tahiti within him.” That
December, his father died, leaving Munch’s family destitute. He
returned home and arranged a large loan from a wealthy Norwegian
collector when wealthy relatives failed to help, and assumed financial
responsibility for his family from then on. Christian’s
death depressed him and he was plagued by suicidal thoughts: “I live
with the dead — my mother, my sister, my grandfather, my father… Kill
yourself and then it’s over. Why live?” Munch’s
paintings of the following year included sketchy tavern scenes and a
series of bright cityscapes in which he experimented with the
pointillist style of Georges
Seurat. By
1892, Munch formulated his characteristic, and original, Synthetist aesthetic,
as seen in Melancholy,
in which color is the symbol laden element. In 1892, Adelsteen
Normann, on behalf of the Union of Berlin Artists invited Munch
to exhibit at its November exhibition,
the
society’s first one man exhibition. However, his paintings evoked
bitter controversy (dubbed “The Munch Affair”) and after one week the
exhibition closed. Munch was pleased with the
“great commotion”, and wrote in a letter: “Never
have I had such an amusing time — it’s incredible that something as
innocent as painting should have created such a stir.”
In
Berlin, Munch involved himself in an international circle of writers,
artists and critics, including the Swedish dramatist and leading
intellectual August
Strindberg,
whom he painted in 1892. During his four years in Berlin, Munch
sketched out most of the ideas that would comprise his major work, The Frieze of Life,
first designed for book illustration but later expressed in paintings. He sold little, but made some
income from charging entrance fees to view his controversial paintings. Already, Munch was showing a
reluctance to part with his paintings, which he termed his “children”. His other paintings, including casino
scenes, show a simplification of form and detail which marked his early
mature style. Munch
also began to favor a shallow pictorial space and a minimal backdrop
for his frontal figures. Since poses were chosen to produce the most
convincing images of states of mind and psychological conditions, as in Ashes, the figures impart a monumental, static
quality. Munch's figures appear to play roles on a theatre stage (Death in the Sick-Room),
whose pantomime of fixed postures signify various emotions; since each
character embodies a single psychological dimension, as in The Scream,
Munch's men and women now appear more symbolic than realistic. He
wrote, “No longer should interiors be painted, people reading and women
knitting: there would be living people, breathing and feeling,
suffering and loving.” Painted
in 1893, The Scream is
Munch's most famous work and one of the most recognizable paintings in
all art. It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal
anxiety of modern man. Painted
with
broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms, and
employing a high viewpoint, the agonized figure is reduced to a garbed
skull in the throes of an emotional crisis. With this painting, Munch
met his stated goal of “the study of the soul, that is to say the study
of my own self”. Munch
wrote of how the painting came to be: I
was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly,
the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence,
feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the
bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind,
shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of
nature. He
later described the personal anguish behind the painting, “for several
years I was almost mad… You know my picture, ‘’The Scream?’’ I was
stretched to the limit — nature was screaming in my blood… After that I
gave up hope ever of being able to love again.” In
summing up the painting’s impact author Martha Tedeschi has stated: Whistler's
Mother, Wood's American Gothic,
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream have
all achieved something that most paintings — regardless of their art
historical importance, beauty, or monetary value — have not: they
communicate a specific meaning almost immediately to almost every
viewer. These few works have successfully made the transition from the
elite realm of the museum visitor to the enormous venue of popular
culture.
In
December 1893, Unter den Linden in Berlin held an
exhibition of Munch's work, showing, among other pieces, six paintings
entitled Study for a Series: Love. This began a cycle he later
called the Frieze of
Life — A Poem about Life, Love and Death. "Frieze of Life" motifs
such as The Storm and Moonlight are steeped in atmosphere.
Other motifs illuminate the nocturnal side of love, such as Rose and Amelie and Vampire. In Death
in the Sickroom,
the subject is the death of his sister Sophie, which he re-did in many
future variations. The dramatic focus of the painting, portraying his
entire family, is dispersed in a series of separate and disconnected
figures of sorrow. In 1894, he enlarged the spectrum of motifs by adding Anxiety, Ashes, Madonna and Women in Three Stages (from innocence to old age). Around
the
turn of the century, Munch worked to finish the "Frieze". He
painted a number of pictures, several of them in larger format and to
some extent featuring the Art Nouveau aesthetics of the time. He
made a wooden frame with carved reliefs for the large painting
Metabolism (1898),
initially called Adam
and Eve. This work reveals Munch's preoccupation with the "fall of
man" myth and his pessimistic philosophy of love. Motifs such as The Empty Cross and Golgotha (both c. 1900) reflect a
metaphysical orientation, and also echo Munch's pietistic upbringing.
The entire Frieze showed for the first time at the secessionist exhibition in Berlin in
1902. "The
Frieze
of Life" themes recur throughout Munch's work but find their
strongest outpouring in the mid 1890’s. In sketches, paintings, pastels
and prints, he taps the depths of his feelings to examine his major
motifs: the stages of life, the femme fatale, the hopelessness of love,
anxiety, infidelity, jealousy, sexual humiliation, and separation in
life and death. These themes find expression in
paintings such as The Sick Child (1885), Love and Pain (1893 – 94), Ashes (1894), and The Bridge.
The latter shows limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over
which loom the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses.
Munch portrayed women either as frail, innocent sufferers (Puberty and Love and Pain) or as
the cause of great longing, jealousy and despair (Separation, Jealousy and Ashes). Munch
often
uses shadows and rings of color around his figures to emphasize
an aura of fear, menace, anxiety, or sexual intensity. These
paintings
have been interpreted as reflections of the artist's sexual
anxieties, though it could also be argued that they are a better
representation of his turbulent relationship with love itself and his
general pessimism regarding human existence. Many of these sketches and
paintings were done in several versions, such as Madonna, Hands and Puberty,
and also transcribed as wood block prints and lithographs. Munch hated
to part with his paintings because he thought of his work as a single
body of expression. So to capitalize on his production and make some
income, he turned to graphic arts to reproduce many of his most famous
paintings, including those in this series. Munch
admitted to the personal goals of his work but he also offered his art
to a wider purpose, “My art is really a voluntary confession and an
attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life — it is,
therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that
through this I can help others achieve clarity.” Still
attracting strongly negative reactions, in the 1890s Munch did begin to
receive some understanding of his artistic goals, as one critic wrote,
“With ruthless contempt for form, clarity, elegance, wholeness, and
realism, he paints with intuitive strength of talent the most subtle
visions of the soul.” One of his great supporters in Berlin was Walter
Rathenau, later the German foreign
minister, who greatly
contributed to his success. In
1896,
Munch moved to Paris, where he focused on graphic representations
of his “Frieze of Life” themes. He further developed his woodcut and
lithographic technique. Munch’s Self-Portrait
With Skeleton Arm (1895)
is done with an etching needle-and-ink method also used by Paul Klee. Munch also produced
multi-colored versions of “The Sick Child” which sold
well, as well as several nudes and multiple versions of Kiss (1892). Many of the Parisian critics
still considered Munch’s work “violent and
brutal” but his exhibitions received serious attention and good
attendance. His financial
situation improved considerably and in 1897, Munch bought
himself a summer house, a small fisherman’s cabin built in the late
18th century, in the small town of Åsgårdstrand in Norway. He dubbed this
home the "Happy House" and returned here almost every summer for the
next 20 years. Munch
returned
to Christiania in 1897 where he also received grudging
acceptance, where one critic wrote, “A fair number of these pictures
have been exhibited before. In my opinion these improve on
acquaintance.” In
1899, at the age of thirty-four, Munch began an intimate relationship
with Tulla Larsen, a “liberated” upper class woman. They traveled to
Italy together and upon returning, Munch began another fertile period
in his art, which included landscapes and his final painting in “The
Frieze of Life” series, The
Dance of Life (1899). She
was eager for marriage, and Munch begged off. His drinking and poor
health reinforced his fears, as he wrote in the third person, “Ever
since he was a child he had hated marriage. His sick and nervous home
had given him the feeling that he had no right to get married.” Munch almost gave in to Tulla,
but fled from her in 1900, also turning away from her considerable
fortune, and moved to Berlin. His Girls on the Jetty,
created in eighteen different versions, demonstrated the theme of
feminine youth without negative connotations. In
1902, he displayed his works thematically at the hall of the Berlin
Succession, producing “a symphonic effect — it made a great stir — a
lot of
antagonism — and a lot of approval.”
The Berlin critics were beginning to appreciate Munch’s
work even though the public still found his work alien and strange. The
good
press coverage gained Munch the attention of influential patrons
Albert Kollman and Max Linde. He described the turn of events in his
diary, “After twenty years of struggle and misery forces of good
finally come to my aid in Germany — and a bright door opens up for me.” However, despite this positive
change, Munch’s self-destructive and erratic
behavior involved him first with a violent quarrel with another artist,
then with an accidental shooting in the presence of Tulla Larsen, who
had returned for a brief reconciliation, which injured two of his
fingers. She finally left him and married a younger colleague of Munch.
Munch took this as a betrayal, and he dwelled on the humiliation for
some time to come, channeling some of the bitterness into new paintings. His paintings Still Life (The
Murderess) and
The Death of Marat I, done in 1906-7, clearly reference the
shooting incident and the emotional after effects. In 1903-4, Munch exhibited in Paris where
the coming Fauvists,
famous for their boldly false colors, likely saw his works and might
have found inspiration in them. When the Fauves held their own exhibit
in 1906, Munch was invited and displayed his works with theirs. After studying the sculpture of Rodin, Munch may have experimented with
plasticine as an aid to design, but he produced little sculpture. During
this time, Munch received many commissions for portraits and prints
which improved his usually precarious financial condition. After an earlier period of landscapes, in
1907 he turned his attention again to human figures and situations. However,
in
the autumn of 1908, Munch's anxiety, compounded by excessive
drinking and brawling, had become acute. As he wrote later, “My
condition was verging on madness — it was touch and go.” Subject to hallucinations and
feelings of persecution, he entered the clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobson.
The therapy Munch
received for the next eight months included diet and "electrification"
(a treatment then fashionable for nervous conditions, not to be
confused with electroconvulsive
therapy). Munch's
stay in hospital stabilized his personality, and after returning to
Norway in 1909, his work became more colorful and less pessimistic. His
portrait of Professor Jacobson, done in 1909, is one of Munch’s best. Further brightening his mood,
the general public of Christiania finally warmed
to his work, and museums began to purchase his paintings. He was made a
Knight of the Royal Order of St. Olav “for services in art”. His first American exhibit was
in 1912 in New York. As
part
of his recovery, Dr. Jacobson advised Munch to only socialize with
good friends and avoid public drinking. Munch followed this advice and
in the process produced several full length portraits of high quality
of friends and patrons — honest portrayals devoid of flattery. He
also created landscapes and scenes of people at work and play, using a
new optimistic style — broad, loose brushstrokes of vibrant color with
frequent use of white space and rare use of black — with only
occasional
references back to his morbid themes. With more income, Munch was able
to buy several properties giving him new vistas for his art and he was
finally able to provide for his family. The
outbreak of World War I, found Munch with divided loyalties, as he
stated, “All my friends are German but it is France that I love.” In the 1930s, his German patrons, many
Jewish, lost their fortunes and some their lives during the rise of the
Nazi movement. Munch found Norwegian printers to
substitute for the Germans who had been printing his graphic work. Given
his poor health history, during 1918 Munch felt himself lucky to have
survived a bout of the “Spanish” flu, the worldwide pandemic of that
year. Munch
spent most of his last two decades in solitude at his nearly
self-sufficient estate in Ekely, at Skøyen, Oslo. Many of his late paintings
celebrate farm life, including many where he used his work horse
“Rousseau” as a model. Without
any effort, Munch had a steady stream of female models, some of which
he may have had sexual relations with, and who were the subjects of
numerous nude paintings. Munch
occasionally left his home to paint murals on commission, including
those done for the Freia chocolate factory. To
the
end of his life, Munch continued to paint unsparing self-portraits,
adding to his self-searching cycle of his life and his unflinching
series of snapshots of his emotional and physical states. In the 1930s
and 1940s, the Nazis labeled Munch's work "degenerate art"
(along with Picasso, Paul Klee, Matisse, Gauguin and many other modern
artists) and removed his 82 works from German museums. Hitler
announced in 1937, “For all we care, those prehistoric Stone Age
culture barbarians and art stutterers can return to the caves of their
ancestors and there can apply their primitive international scratching.” This deeply hurt Munch, who had
come to feel Germany was his second homeland. In
1940,
the Germans invaded Norway and the Nazi party took over the
government. Munch was seventy-six years old. With nearly an entire
collection of his art in the second floor of his house, Munch lived in
fear of a Nazi confiscation. Seventy-one of the paintings previously
taken by the Nazis had found their way back to Norway through purchase
by collectors (the other eleven were never recovered), including The Scream and The
Sick Child, and they too were hidden from the Nazis. Munch
died in his house at Ekely near Oslo on January 23, 1944, about a month
after his 80th birthday. His Nazi orchestrated funeral left the
impression with Norwegians that he was a Nazi sympathizer. The city of Oslo bought the Ekely estate
from his heirs in 1946 and demolished his house in May 1960. When
Munch died, he bequeathed his remaining works to the city of Oslo,
which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen (it
opened in 1963). The museum hosts a collection of approximately 1,100
paintings, 4,500 drawings, and 18,000 prints, the broadest collection
of his works in the world. The Munch Museum currently serves at Munch's
official Estate and
has been active in responding to copyright infringements, as well as
clearing copyright for the work, such as the appearance of Munch's The Scream in a 2006 M&M
advertisement campaign. The
U.S. copyright representative for the Munch Museum and the Estate of
Edvard Munch is the Artists Rights
Society. Munch’s
art
was highly personalized and he did little teaching. His “private”
symbolism was far more personal than that of other Symbolist painters
such as Gustave Moreau and James Ensor.
Nonetheless, Munch was highly influential, particularly with the German
Expressionists, who followed his philosophy, “I do not believe
in the art which is not the compulsive result of Man’s urge to open his
heart.” Many of his paintings, including The
Scream, have universal appeal in addition to their highly personal
meaning. Munch's
works are now represented in numerous major museums and galleries in
Norway and abroad. After the Cultural
Revolution in
the People's Republic of China ended, Munch was the first Western
artist to have his pictures exhibited at the National Gallery in
Beijing. His cabin “the Happy House” was given to the municipality of
Åsgårdstrand in 1944 and is now a small Munch museum. The
inventory is still exactly as he left it. One
version of The Scream was stolen from the
National Gallery in 1994. In 2004 another version of The Scream along with one of Madonna were
stolen from the Munch Museum in a daring daylight robbery. All were
eventually recovered, but the paintings stolen in the 2004 robbery were
extensively damaged. They have been meticulously restored and are on
display again. Three Munch works were stolen from the Hotel Refsnes Gods in 2005; they were shortly
recovered, although one of the works was damaged during the robbery. In
October 2006, the color woodcut Two people. The lonely (To mennesker. De ensomme)
set a new record for his prints when it was sold at an auction in Oslo
for 8.1 million NOK (1.27 million USD). It
also set a record for the highest price paid in auction in Norway. On November 3, 2008, the painting Vampire set a new record for his paintings when
it was sold for 38.162 million USD at Sotheby's New
York. |