Childhood Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in a farmhouse in the village of
Ådalsbruk in
Løten,
Norway, to Laura Catherine Bjølstad and Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie, and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas, Laura Catherine, and Inger Marie. Laura was artistically talented and may have encouraged Edvard and Sophie. Edvard was related to the painter
Jacob Munch and the historian
Peter Andreas Munch. The family moved to
Oslo (then called Christiania and renamed Kristiania in 1877) in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at
Akershus Fortress. In 1868 Edvard's mother died of
tuberculosis. Munch's favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, also died of tuberculosis, at the age of 15, 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. He was tutored by 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 the tales of the American writer
Edgar Allan Poe. As Edvard remembered it, Christian's positive behavior towards his children 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 father's obsessions, Edvard's poor health, and the vivid ghost stories helped inspire his macabre visions and nightmares; he felt that death was constantly approaching. One of Munch's younger sisters, Laura, 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 to develop a private side practice failed, keeping his family in genteel but perennial poverty. At 13, 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.
Mental health or
depression in
borderline personality disorder. Due in part to the mental health struggles and incarceration in an institution of his sister, Laura Catherine, and in part to then-prevailing beliefs in hereditary insanity, Edvard Munch often expressed his fear that he would become insane. Critics of his art also accused him of insanity, deploying this term in a purely abusive sense. When his painting
The Sick Child was first displayed in Oslo in 1886, Gustav Wentzel and other young Realists encircled Munch and accused him of being a "madman"; another critic Johan Scharffenberg stated that because Munch derived from an "insane family" his art was also "insane." Later in his life, he was diagnosed with
bipolar disorder,
depression and
schizophrenia. Munch also displayed
alcoholism, a trait often associated with
impulsivity in BPD.
Studies and influences , Oslo In 1879, Munch enrolled in a
technical college to study engineering, where he excelled in
physics,
chemistry and
mathematics. 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 towards art. He wrote his goal in his diary: "In my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself." 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). They may have been confiscated by his father.
Impressionism inspired Munch from a young age. During these early years, he 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. 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 Jæger. 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. 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 Jæger's commandment that Munch should "write his life", meaning that Munch should explore his own emotional and psychological state, the young artist 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. '', 1889, Bergen Kunstmuseum Munch continued to employ a variety of brushstroke techniques 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 seems to have been an early critic of photography as an art form, and remarked that it "will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell!" Munch's younger sister Laura was the subject of his 1899 interior
Melancholy: Laura. Amanda O'Neill says of the work, "In this heated claustrophobic scene Munch not only portrays Laura's tragedy, but his own dread of the madness he might have inherited."
Paris 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 female models) and afternoons at the exhibition, galleries, and museums (where students were expected to make copies as a way of learning technique and observation). 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 de Toulouse-Lautrec—all notable for how they used color to convey emotion. As one of his Berlin friends said later of 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." Influenced by Gauguin, as well as the etchings of German artist
Max Klinger, Munch experimented with prints as a medium to create graphic versions of his works. In 1896 he created his first woodcuts—a medium that proved ideal to Munch's symbolic imagery. 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.
Berlin '', 1891, oil, pencil and crayon on canvas, 73 × 101 cm,
Munch Museum, Oslo in
Lübeck; in the background is a cast of
Auguste Rodin's sculpture
The Age of Bronze By 1892, Munch had formulated his own characteristic, and original,
synthetist style, as seen in
Melancholy (1891), in which color is the symbol-laden element. Considered by the artist and journalist
Christian Krohg as the first
symbolist painting by a Norwegian artist,
Melancholy was exhibited in 1891 at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo. 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. In Berlin, Munch became involved in an international circle of writers, artists and critics, including the Swedish dramatist and leading intellectual
August Strindberg, whom he painted in 1892. He also met Danish writer and painter
Holger Drachmann, whom he painted in 1898. Drachmann was 17 years Munch's senior and a drinking companion at
Zum schwarzen Ferkel (At the Black Piglet) in 1893–94. In 1894 Drachmann wrote of Munch: "He struggles hard. Good luck with your struggles, lonely Norwegian." During his four years in Berlin, Munch sketched out most of the ideas that would be comprised in 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. Munch began allowing the appearance of drips in his paintings, as first subtly seen in the painted version of "At the Deathbed" (1895). This effect resulted from the use of highly diluted paint and the deliberate inclusion of drips. Initially, this effect was visible at the edges of his work, but later, the drips became more central, as seen in "By the Deathbed" (1915). The effect of running paint was later adopted by many artists. 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 began to 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."
The Scream '' (1893),
National Gallery, Oslo
The Scream exists in four versions: two pastels (1893 and 1895) and two paintings (1893 and 1910). There are also several
lithographs of
The Scream (1895 and later). The 1895 pastel sold at auction on 2 May 2012 for
US$119,922,500, including commission. It is the most colorful of the versions and is distinctive for the downward-looking stance of one of its background figures. It is also the only version not held by a Norwegian museum. The 1893 version was stolen from the
National Gallery in Oslo in 1994 and was recovered. The 1910 painting was stolen in 2004 from the
Munch Museum in Oslo, but recovered in 2006 with limited damage.
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. 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 2003, comparing the painting with other great works, art historian
Martha Tedeschi wrote: ''
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.
Frieze of Life – A Poem about Life, Love and Death might be of the
Virgin Mary. Whether the painting is specifically intended as a representation of Mary is disputed. Munch used more than one title, including both
Loving Woman and
Madonna. In December 1893,
Unter den Linden in Berlin was the location of 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
Love and Pain. In
Death in the Sickroom, the subject is the death of his sister Sophie, which he re-worked in many future variations. The dramatic focus of the painting, portraying his entire family, is dispersed in the 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 start of the 20th century, Munch worked to finish the "Frieze". He painted a number of pictures, several of them in bigger 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 pre-occupation with the "fall of man" and his pessimistic philosophy of love. Motifs such as
The Empty Cross and
Golgotha (both ) reflect a metaphysical orientation, and also reflect Munch's pietistic upbringing. The entire
Frieze was shown for the first time at the
secessionist exhibition in Berlin in 1902. "The Frieze of Life" themes recur throughout Munch's work but he especially focused on them in the mid-1890s. In sketches, paintings, pastels and prints, he tapped 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 are expressed in paintings such as
The Sick Child (1885),
Love and Pain (retitled
Vampire; 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 (see
Puberty and
Love and Pain) or as the cause of great longing, jealousy and despair (see
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 represent 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 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." While attracting strongly negative reactions, in the 1890s Munch began 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
Walther Rathenau, later the German
foreign minister, who strongly contributed to his success.
Landscapes and Nature Despite over half of his painted works being landscapes, Munch is rarely seen as a landscape artist. However, Munch had a fixation on several elements of nature that resulted in recurrent motifs throughout his work. The shoreline and the forest are both significant settings of Munch's work. A focus on Munch's use of nature to convey emotion is the topic of
Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth at the
Clark Art Institute.
Paris, Berlin and Kristiania '' (1907) 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,
concerning tuberculosis, which sold well, as well as several nudes and multiple versions of
Kiss (1892). Still, many of the Parisian critics still considered Munch's work "violent and brutal" even if his exhibitions received serious attention and good attendance. His financial situation improved considerably and, in 1897, Munch bought himself a summer house facing the fjords of Kristiania, 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. In 1899, 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). Larsen was eager for marriage, but Munch was not. 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. 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 20 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 led him first to a violent quarrel with another artist, then to an accidental shooting in the presence of Tulla Larsen, who had returned for a brief reconciliation, which injured two of his fingers. Munch later sawed
a self-portrait depicting him and Larsen in half as a consequence of the shooting and subsequent events. 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 1906–07, clearly reference the shooting incident and the emotional after-effects. In 1903–04, 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. In 1906, he painted the screen for an
Ibsen play in the small Kammerspiele Theatre located in Berlin's
Deutsches Theater, in which the
Frieze of Life was hung. The theatre's director
Max Reinhardt later sold it; it is now in the Berlin
Nationalgalerie. After an earlier period of landscapes, in 1907 he turned his attention again to human figures and situations.
Breakdown and recovery In the autumn of 1908, Munch's anxiety, compounded by excessive drinking and brawling, had become acute. As he later wrote, "My condition was verging on madness—it was touch and go." Subject to hallucinations and feelings of persecution, he entered the clinic of 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. Further brightening his mood, the general public of Kristiania 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. from 2001 to 2019. As part of his recovery, Jacobson advised Munch to only socialize with good friends and avoid
drinking in public. 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 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 I love." 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. 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.
Later years in Oslo 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 several in which he used his work horse "Rousseau" as a model. Without any effort, Munch attracted a steady stream of female models, whom he painted as the subjects of numerous nude paintings. He likely had sexual relationships with some of them. 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 takes on his emotional and physical states. In the 1930s and 1940s, the
Nazis labeled Munch's work "
degenerate art" (along with that of
Picasso,
Klee,
Matisse,
Gauguin and many other modern artists) and removed his 82 works from German museums.
Adolf Hitler announced in 1937, "For all we care, those pre-historic Stone Age culture barbarians and art-stutterers can return to the caves of their ancestors and there can apply their primitive international scratching." In 1940, the
Germans invaded Norway and the Nazi party took over the government. Munch was 76 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 been returned to Norway through purchase by collectors (the other 11 were never recovered), including
The Scream and
The Sick Child, and they too were hidden from the Nazis. However, despite his work being removed from Norwegian museums during the
Nazi occupation of Norway, Munch's art work was not entirely portrayed negatively in Nazi propaganda, with regular attempts even made by some in the German and Norwegian press sympathetic to Nazism to in fact rehabilitate his work and portray his life as being exemplary of
Nordic traits. Despite this major recruiting effort, Munch would refuse to participate in these or other efforts to recruit him in the cause of the
Third Reich and its allies. Shortly after Munch's death several men, including
Fritz Jenssen, the NS-mayor of Oslo, arrived at his Ekely house to offer his family a state funeral. His family refused this offer, but to no avail – the Nazis insisted. Despite Munch's wish for a private cremation with nobody present, his funeral was hijacked by the Nazis and turned it into a propaganda opportunity. During Munch's life Nazis struggled to appropriate him as a heroic figure within the Germanic cultural sphere, but in death he became easy prey for
Josef Terboven and the
NS. Three days after Munch's death,
Vidkun Quisling could on behalf of the state, boast in the newspapers that they would be paying for Edvard Munch's funeral. Munch's funeral took place on 31 January 1944 in Oslo. His casket was surrounded in a well of flowers and wreaths, with two enormous wreaths decorated with swastikas placed prominently on either side of his casket. These wreathes were personally signed by Terboven, Quisling, and the NS leader for Public Information and Propaganda
Georg Wilhelm Müller. Between the coverage of Edvard Munch's death in newspapers and his Nazi-orchestrated state funeral, the Nazis were successful in creating the impression that Munch supported Nazi ideologies and methods. This led many Norwegians to question whether or not Munch harboured Nazi sympathies. The city of Oslo bought Edvard Munch's Ekely estate from his heirs in 1946; the house was demolished in May 1960. ==Legacy==