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The Scream. 1893.
Oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard. Nasjonalgalleriet.
Additional Biography
Born on December
12th, 1863, Løten, Norway, Munch grew
up in Christiania (now Oslo). He was related
to painter Jacob Munch (1776 - 1839) and historian
Peter Andreas Munch (1810 - 1863). After the
death of his mother, Laura Cathrine Bjølstad,
of tuberculosis in 1868, Munch was raised by
his father, Christian Munch, until 1889 when
his father died. Christian Munch instilled in
his children a deep-rooted fear of hell by repeatedly
telling them that if they sinned, in any way,
they would be doomed to hell without chance of
pardon. While Munch was still young, his mother,
a brother and Munch's favourite sister Sophie
(in 1877) died. A younger sister was diagnosed
with mental illness at an early age. Munch was
also often ill. Of the five siblings only Andreas
married, only to die a few months after the wedding.
This may explain the bleakness and pessimism
of much of Munch's work. He would later say, "Sickness,
insanity and death were the angels that surrounded
my cradle and they have followed me throughout
my life."
A number of modern sources have described Munch's
illness as probably being bipolar disorder.
In 1879, Munch enrolled in a
technical college to study engineering, but frequent
illnesses interrupted his studies. In 1880, he
left the college to become a painter. In 1881,
he enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design
of Kristiania. His teachers were sculptor Julius
Middelthun and naturalistic painter Christian
Krohg.
Munch traveled to Paris in 1885,
and his work began to show the influence of French
painters - first of the impressionists, and then
of the postimpressionists and of art nouveau
design. While stylistically influenced by the
postimpressionists, Munch's subject matter is
symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind
rather than an external reality.
Munch maintained that the impressionism
idiom did not suit his art. Interested in portraying
not a random slice of reality, but situations
brimming with emotional content and expressive
energy, Munch carefully calculated his compositions
to create a tense atmosphere.
During his career, Munch changed
his idiom many times. In the 1880s, Munch's idiom
was naturalistic, such as Portrait of Hans Jæger,
and partly impressionistic (Rue Lafayette). In
1892, Munch formulated his characteristic, and
original, Synthetist idiom as seen in Melancholy
in which colour is the symbol-laden element (The
Scream).
Death in the Sickroom. c. 1895. Edvard Munch.
Oil on canvas. 59 x 66 in. Nasjonalgalleriet
at Oslo.During the 1890s, Munch favoured a
shallow pictorial space, and used it in his
frequently frontal figures. Since he chose
the poses to produce the most convincing images
of states of mind and psychological conditions
(Ashes), the figures lend to the paintings'
a monumental, static quality. Munch's figures
appear to play roles on a theatre stage (Death
in the Sick-Room), even perhaps a pantomime
of fixed postures signifying the emotions.
Because he gave his characters only one psychological
dimension, as in The Scream, Munch's men and
women do not seem realistic.
In 1892, the Union of Berlin
Artists invited Munch to exhibit at its November
exhibition. His paintings invoked bitter controversy
at the show, and after one week the exhibition
closed. In Berlin, Munch involved himself in
an international circle of writers, artists and
critics, including the Norwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen (Munch designed the sets for several Ibsen's
plays), and the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg.
Between 1892 and 1908, Munch
divided his time between Paris and Berlin, where
he became known for his etchings, his lithographs,
and his woodcuts. While in Berlin at the turn
of the century, Munch experimented with a variety
of new media (photography, lithography, and woodcuts),
in many instances re-working his older imagery.
In the autumn of 1908, Munch's
anxiety became acute and he entered the clinic
of Dr. Daniel Jacobsen. The therapy Munch received
in hospital changed his personality, and after
returning to Norway in 1909, he showed more interest
in nature subjects, and his work became more
colourful and less pessimistic.
In the 1930s and 1940s, German
Nazis labeled his work "degenerate art",
and removed his work from German museums. This
deeply hurt the antifascist Munch, who had come
to feel Germany was his second homeland.
Munch died in Ekely, near Oslo,
on January 23, 1944, about a month after his
80th birthday. He left 1,000 paintings, 15,400
prints, 4,500 drawings and watercolors, and six
sculptures to the city of Oslo, which built the
Munch Museum at Tøyen in his honor. The
museum houses the broadest collection of his
works. His works are also represented in major
museums and galleries in Norway and abroad.
Munch appears on the Norwegian
1,000 Kroner note along with pictures inspired
by his artwork.
"From my rotting body,
flowers shall grow and I am in them and that
is eternity."
-Edvard Munch
Frieze of Life - A Poem about Life, Love and
Death
The Dance of Life. 1899 - 1900. Edvard Munch.
Oil on canvas, 49 1/2 x 75 in. NasjonalgallerietIn
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 are steeped
in atmosphere such as The Storm, Moonlight and
Starry Night. Other motifs illuminate the nocturnal
side of love, such as Rose and Amelie and Vampire.
In Death in the Sickroom (1893), he depicts his
sister Sophie's death to illustrate the morbid
theme. The dramatic focus of the painting, in
which he portrays the entire family, is the Munch
figure. In 1894, he enlarged the spectrum of
motifs by adding Anxiety, Ashes, Madonna and
Women in Three Stages.
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 in Munch's pessimistic philosophy
of love. Motifs such as The Empty Cross and Golgota
(both c. 1900) reflect a metaphysical orientation
to the times, and also echo Munch's pietistic
upbringing. The entire Frieze showed for the
first time at the secessionist exhibition in
Berlin in 1902.
Edvard Munch on Film
Edvard Munch is a 1973 biographical film
about the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard
Munch, written and directed by Peter Watkins.
It was originally created as a three-part miniseries
co-produced by the Norwegian and Swedish state
television networks NRK and SVT, and has subsequently
been shown as a three-hour feature film. The
film covers about thirty years of Munch's life,
focusing on the influences that shaped his art,
particularly the prevalence of disease and death
in his family and his youthful affair with a
married woman.
Like Watkins' other films, Edvard
Munch uses a combination of dramatic and documentary
techniques: scenes from Munch's life are enacted
by a large cast (mostly Norwegian and mostly
nonprofessional actors), but there is also a
voiceover narration by Watkins, and there are
documentary-style segments in which the characters
speak directly to an interviewer about their
own lives or their opinions of Munch. Some of
the dialogue was improvised by the cast, especially
in the interview segments; to convey the hostile
response Munch's work often received during his
lifetime, Watkins recruited Norwegians who genuinely
disliked the paintings.
After its initial broadcast,
the film was briefly an international success
but then was not widely available for many years;
Watkins has said that network officials tried
to suppress its distribution, and tried to bar
it from competition in the Cannes Film Festival,
because they disapproved of its use of nonprofessional
actors and anachronistic dialogue. After NRK
relinquished rights to the film in 2002, it gained
a wider international release.
Munch Museum
The Munch Museum (Norwegian: Munchmuseet) is
a museum in Oslo, Norway, dedicated to the
work and life of the painter Edvard Munch.
The museum was financed from
the profits generated by the Oslo municipal cinemas
and opened its doors in 1963 to commemorate what
would have been the painter's 100th birthday.
Its collection consists of works and articles
willed by Munch to the municipality of Oslo,
additional works donated by his sister Inger
Munch, and various other works obtained through
trades of duplicate prints, etc. As a result,
the museum now has in its permanent collection
well over half of the artist's entire production
of paintings and at least one copy of all his
prints. This amounts to over 1,100 paintings,
15,500 prints covering 700 motives, six sculptures,
as well as 500 plates, 2,240 books, and various
other items.
In addition to its collection
of works of art, the museum also contains educational
and conservation sections. It has facilities
for performing arts.
The museum structure was designed
by the architects Gunnar Fougner and Einar Myklebust.
Myklebust also played an important role in the
expansion and renovation of the museum in 1994
for the 50th anniversary of Munch's death.
Trivia
· After the Cultural Revolution in China
ended, Munch was the first Western artist to
have his pictures exhibited at the National Gallery
in Beijing.
· Some art historians believe that the
red sky in the background of The Scream reflects
the unusually intense sunsets seen throughout
the world, following the 1883 eruption of the
Indonesian volcano Krakatoa.
Further reading
Reinhold Heller, Munch. His life and work (London:
Murray, 1984).
Gustav Schiefler, Verzeichnis des graphischen
Werks Edvard Munchs bis 1906 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer,
1907).
Gustav Schiefler, Edvard Munch. Das graphische
Werk 1906 - 1926 (Berlin: Euphorion, 1928).his
painting
©
Copyright 2006 Rene Cerney
Webmaster@EdvardMunch.info
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