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Born on 12 December 1863: Edvard
Munch, Norwegian
Symbolist and Expressionist
painter who died on 23 January 1944.
Artist Biography: Printer, etcher. painter and printmaker. Intense,
evocative treatment of psychological and emotional subjects was a major
influence on the development of German Expressionism during the early
20th century. His painting The Scream (1893) is regarded as an
icon of existential anguish.
Munch was born in Loten, Norway. He grew up in Christiania (now
Oslo) and studied art under Christian Krohg, a Norwegian naturalistic
painter. Munch's parents, a brother, and a sister died while he was still
young, which probably explains the bleakness and pessimism of much of
his work. Paintings such as The
Sick Child
(1886), Vampire
(1893-94), and Ashes
(1894) show his preoccupation with the darker aspects of life. Munch traveled
to Paris in 1885, and his work began to show the influence of French painters
first, the impressionists,
and then the postimpressionists--as well as art nouveau design. Like many
young artists Munch reacted against conventional behavior, and in 1892
he took part in a controversial exhibit in Berlin. His circle of friends
included several writers, one of whom was the Norwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen. Munch designed the sets for several of Ibsen's plays. Between 1892
and 1908, Munch spent much of his time in Paris and Berlin, where he became
known for his prints etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts. After
1910 Munch returned to Norway, where he lived and painted until his death.
In his later paintings Munch showed more interest in nature, and his work
became more colorful and less pessimistic. Munch died in Ekely, near Oslo.
He left many of his works to the city of Oslo, which built a museum in
his honor.
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian artist whose brooding and anguished
paintings and graphic works, based on personal grief and obsessions, were
instrumental in the development of expressionism. Born in Løten, Norway,
Munch began painting at the age of 17 in Christiania (now Oslo). A state
grant, awarded in 1885, enabled him to study briefly in Paris. For 20
years thereafter Munch worked chiefly in Paris and Berlin. At first influenced
by impressionism and postimpressionism, he then turned to a highly personal
style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death.
In 1892, in Berlin, an exhibition of his paintings so shocked the authorities
that the show was closed. Undeterred, Munch and his sympathizers worked
throughout the 1890s toward the development of German expressionist art.
Perhaps the best known of all Munch's work is The
Scream (1893). This, and the harrowing The Sick Child
(1886), reflect Munch's childhood trauma, occasioned by the death of his
mother and sister from tuberculosis. Melancholy suffuses paintings such
as The Bridge -- in limp figures with featureless or hidden faces,
over which loom the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses.
Reflections of sexual anxieties are seen in his portrayals of women, alternately
represented as frail, innocent sufferers or as lurid, life-devouring vampires.
In 1908 Munch's anxiety became acute and
he was hospitalized. He returned to Norway in 1909 and died in Oslo. The
relative tranquillity of the rest of his life is reflected in his murals
for the University of Oslo (1910-16), and in his vigorous, brightly colored
landscapes. Although his later paintings are not as tortured as his earlier
work, a return to introspection marks his late self-portraits, notably
Between
Clock and Bed (1940). Munch's considerable body of etchings,
lithographs, and woodcuts is now considered a significant force in modern
graphic art; the work is simple, direct, and vigorous in style, and powerful
in subject matter. Few of Munch's paintings are found outside Norway.
His own collection is housed in the Munch Museet.
Art, wrote Edvard Munch, is the antithesis of
nature. Munch's most famous paintings reflect his interior conflicts
in intensely subjective images that are often morbid and disturbing. He
spent most of his twenties in Paris and Berlin. Paul Gauguin's work particularly
influenced him, demonstrating the possibilities of distilling intense
emotions into universal experiences through simplified, sinuous forms
and evocative blocks of pure color. By validating the concept of painting
one's emotional response to a subject, Munch pointed the way for the development
of German Expressionist
painting. His most ambitious work, The Frieze
of Life, begun in 1888, was never completed. He hoped to create
a room for this series of paintings to deal with the modern life
of the soul, but he ended up selling works individually and then
making new versions of them.
By 1900 Munch had created his most important
works. In 1908 he suffered a nervous breakdown, after which his paintings
changed. Instead of the revelation of private despair, he looked into
the world for more optimistic and universal symbols. Munch's prints, which
often shared subject matter with his paintings, may have been his most
influential creations
LINKS
Two
Women on the Beach (1898)
The
Kiss (1892, 73x92cm) _ This was painted in Nice in 1892, and the subject
continued to absorb Munch throughout the 1890s. Nasjonalgalleriet's version,
which is one of the earliest, is a more bashful scene than later ones.
The young, embracing couple - the figure of Munch is easily recognisable
- has moved away from the window. They hide from the outside world as
they abandon themselves to their love. It is dark in the room; outside
it is evening, with illuminated shop windows, and people strolling in
the street. In later versions, Munch shows the couple naked in front of
the window, demonstrating their right to free love, regardless of how
society might judge them. In our picture, however, it happens in secret.
The bluish coloring, thinly applied paint, and light yet visible strokes
are characteristic of the pictures Munch painted during his stay in Nice.
Already we see that he integrates the two figures into one large shape,
dominated by the man's outline. He was to take this concept further in
his famous woodcut, where he draws the couple as an unbroken contour,
omitting all detail, and merges this line with the annual rings of the
wood. Thus lovemaking becomes part of nature's eternal cycle. In this
picture, Munch has developed an idea from an etching by Max Klinger entitled
In the Park, one of the series A Love (1887). There too, the
artist, easily recognisable, appears in the role of seducer. Munch admired
Klinger's art, and had encountered his series of prints in the early 1880s.
— Puberty
(1895, 152x110cm) _ A young girl sits naked on the edge of a bed, her
thighs pressed together and her hands hiding her nakedness. She stares
straight ahead but without meeting an onlooker's eyes. She has experienced
something, and her state is tense as a result, a fact underlined by the
dark shadow unfurling behind her. Was it her first erotic dream? Her first
menses? We do not know, nor is that crucial. What Munch depicts in this
painting is sexual awakening, an awareness of something new, something
frightening yet alluring and inescapable. Not surprisingly, a picture
of such a subject was considered offensive at the time. Even nowadays
when the topic is not taboo, the picture can shock the viewer with its
frank portrayal of an intimate situation experienced by all young girls.
For this work, too, Munch's inspiration came from Max Klinger's series
of etchings A Love, from the plate entitled Awaken.
Spring
The
Dead Mother (1900, 100x90cm)
Death
in the Sick-Room (1893, 153x170cm) _ Munch's childhood memories of
the death of his sister Sofie materialized into several well-known motifs.
In this painting, the family has assembled at Sofie's deathbed. To facilitate
her breathing, the patient is sitting in a high-backed chair, turned away
from us. The artist wants to depict not the sick girl but the reaction
of the other members of the family as they come face to face with death.
There is no communication among the persons, each is locked in his own
world. The father, who was a doctor, is shown full-face, his hands clasped
in prayer. The aunt, Karen Bjølstad, is tending the sick girl.
The group in the foreground includes Munch's two other sisters. Laura
is sitting with her hands in her lap; Inger is standing, exactly as in
the full-length portrait painted in 1892. Edvard is turned towards the
dying girl, whereas the brother Peter Andreas is leaving the room by the
door on the left. "I paint not what I see but what I saw", Munch
said of his art. This is the picture of a memory, not a faithfully rendered
interior, and so all unnecessary details are omitted. He and his sisters
have grown to adulthood since the event took place, his father and brother
are dead. The arrangement of figures becomes a symbol of numbing grief.
Munch repeated the composition in several versions and in a number of
lithographs.
/ Despair
Melancholy
(Evening) (1896, woodcut in color, printed from two blocks, each cut into
two sections, 38x46cm) _ Munch’s first attempts at printmaking, of which
this is an example, were made in Paris, a center of experimentation in
printmaking methods. At first working in color lithography (which required
extensive collaboration with a professional printer), Munch soon turned
to woodcut, a technique that enabled him to prepare the block himself
up to the moment of printing. In his woodcuts, the artist innovatively
included the grain of the wood into his designs. He also developed a unique
jigsaw-puzzle technique of sawing the wooden blocks into pieces, inking
them individually, then reassembling and printing them as a single block.
Composed of simplified shapes and curving, expressive line, this image,
derived from his Frieze of Life paintings, universalizes human experience
while depicting a specific subject — a friend, infatuated with an older
woman, who mourns alone on a beach while his lover and her husband embark
on a boat trip on a midsummer night. — 9
prints at FAMSF
The
Sick Child, (1886, 120x118cm). _ Edvard Munch derived the subject-matter
for many of his works from events in his own life. Love and death are
central themes. The Sick Child evokes memories of his sister
Sofie, who died of tuberculosis when Edvard was fourteen. The girl in
the picture is a hired model. Propped up by a pillow, she is sitting in
a chair, a pale hand on the blanket over her lap. To the right we see
the aunt, her head bowed in grief. All attention is focused on the head
of the young girl, seen in profile against the pillow. She gazes across
the room, perhaps into eternity. Depictions of the ill and dying were
not unusual in the art of his day, but Munch adds a new dimension to a
current theme. In order to give expression to atmosphere and space, he
applies thick layers of paint, and scores the surface with his palette
knife. Naturalist that he is, he wants to convey the impression of his
own eyelashes as he squints towards his sitters. This is the first of
five versions of this painting; the latest dates from 1925. Several prints,
too, varying in technique and composition, treat the same subject. [compare
the same subject by Metsu,
Hooch,
Francisco] |