Edvard Munch

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Born: 1863

Died: 1944

Summary of Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a productive yet disturbed artist who was obsessed with human mortality issues including chronic sickness, sexual liberty, and religious ambition. These obsessions were manifested in works of vivid colour, semi-abstraction, and enigmatic subject matter. Following the triumph of French Impressionism, Munch adopted the influential Paul Gauguin’s more graphic, symbolist sensibility, and became one of the most divisive and eventually recognised artists among a new school of continental Expressionist and Symbolist painters.

Munch was born in the first decade of the twentieth century, during the height of the Art Nouveau style, which was known for its emphasis on all things organic, evolutionary, and curiously instinctive. Munch started to consider the visible as if it were a window into a not completely developed, if not essentially unsettling, human mind, in keeping with these motifs but moving away from their ornamental uses.

Edvard Munch was up in a home plagued by life-threatening diseases and the deaths of his mother and sister at an early age, all of which Munch’s father, a Christian fanatic, explained away as acts of divine punishment. This strong matrix of random tragic occurrences and their fatalistic interpretation stayed with the young artist for the rest of his life, influencing his future obsession with themes of anxiety, emotional anguish, and human fragility.

Munch hoped that his vibrant colours, semi-abstraction, and enigmatic, often open-ended topics would serve as universal symbols. As a result, Munch’s drawings, paintings, and prints take on the qualities of psychological talismans: despite their origins in Munch’s personal experiences, they have the potential to communicate, and maybe alleviate, any viewer’s emotional or psychological state.

Munch’s frequent use of sexual imagery stems from his bohemian view of sex as a weapon for emotional and physical emancipation from societal conformity, as well as his contemporaries’ obsession with sexual experience as a window into the subconscious, often darker parts of human psyche.

Munch attempted to capture a type of marriage between the subject as seen in the world around him and his own psychological, emotional, and/or spiritual perspective, in a manner akin to Vincent van Gogh.

Childhood

Edvard Munch was born in a rural farmhouse in the village of Adalsbruk, Loten, Norway, in the year 1863. Christian Munch, his father, was a professional physician who married Laura Catherine Bjolstad. Following Christian’s employment as medical officer at Akershus Fortress, a military location that was being used as a jail at the time, the family migrated to Oslo in 1864, including sisters Johanne Sophie, Laura Catherine, Inger Marie, and brother Peter. Inger Marie Munch was born in 1868, the same year her mother died of TB. Munch’s favourite sister, Sophie, who was only a year his senior and a brilliant young artist, died of TB a decade later.

The family relocated frequently and lived in relative poverty as a result of Christian’s military medical profession. Christian would frequently read to his children Edgar Allan Poe’s ghost stories, as well as history and religion lectures, developing in young Munch a general fear of (and sick fascination with) death. Furthermore, Munch’s weakened immune system was no match for the harsh Scandinavian winters, and he was frequently sick, missing months of school. Munch used to pass the time by sketching and painting with watercolours.

During Munch’s adolescent years, art became a constant obsession. He was introduced to the works of the budding Norwegian Art Association at the age of thirteen, and was particularly moved by the group’s landscape paintings. In the process of replicating these masterpieces, he learned himself oil painting skills.

Early Life

Munch encountered the writings of anarchist philosopher Hans Jger, head of a group known as the “Kristiania-Boheme” in the 1880s while looking for a bohemian lifestyle (as a central principle of a larger anti-bourgeois agenda, the group advocated liberal sexual behavior, or “free love,” and the abolition of marriage). Munch and Jger became good friends, and Jger pushed Munch to include more personal experience into his work.

The Sick Child (1885-1886), a solemn piece written as a homage to Munch’s departed sister Sophie, demonstrates Jger’s enduring effect on Munch at this time. When the painting was first shown as A Study in Kristiania in 1886, it was panned by reviewers and Munch’s own colleagues for its openly unusual features, such as the chipped paint surface and the overall unfinished appearance of the piece.

Munch received a state grant to study in Leon Bonnat’s workshop in Paris in 1889. Morning (1884) was shown at the Norwegian pavilion at the Universal Exposition of the same year. Munch began drawing in Paris after Impressionists like Manet and Post-Impressionists like Gauguin, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose sometimes light-hearted compositions contrasted sharply with Munch’s recurrent themes of death and personal grief. Munch’s father died the following year, a terrible occurrence that sparked a renewed interest in spirituality and symbolism in the artist.

Mid Life

Munch was asked to be the focus of the Union of Berlin Artists’ first solo show in 1892. Because of the extreme colour and gloomy subject matter of the pieces on display, the exhibition was prematurely shuttered. Munch took advantage of the lingering attention, and his career soared as a consequence. He showed a set of six love-themed paintings in Berlin a year later, which would subsequently grow into the bigger, renowned series Frieze of Life – A Poem about Life, Love, and Death (1893).

Munch’s Frieze series and associated works from the 1890s are among his most aesthetically significant and well-known works throughout his career. The Scream (1893), Love and Pain (1893-94), Ashes (1894), Madonna (1894-95), and Puberty (1894-95) were all painted in rapid succession by Munch (1895). While these paintings only represent a small fraction of Munch’s oeuvre, they all convey his usually profound, lyrical sadness, which is based on themes of solitude, death, and the loss of innocence. Munch became interested in photography in the late 1890s, though he never believed it to be on par with painting or printing as an aesthetic medium.

Late Life

Munch had a mental breakdown in 1908, following his time in Berlin and subsequent return to Paris. The anguish and worry brought on by the loss of his sister and father, as well as a bohemian lifestyle of heavy drinking and brawling, had taken their toll. Munch was taken to a hospital in Copenhagen and subjected to a severe food and “electrification” programme for eight months. Munch created the lithography series Alpha and Omega (1908) while he was in the hospital, illustrating the artist’s interactions with numerous friends and adversaries.

Munch was discharged from the hospital the following year and went to Norway, as instructed by his doctor, to live a life of peaceful seclusion. Munch was inspired by the Norwegian countryside and the daily routines of farmers and labourers after that. Munch’s work during this time used a brighter palette (including white or negative space, a feature practically absent from previous works), free brushstrokes, and motifs centred on life, labour, and pleasure on the farm, reflecting a newfound cheerful attitude. The Sun (1912), Spring Ploughing (1916), and Bathing Man (1916) are examples of works from this time (1918).

Munch continued to take inspiration from his own life and experiences, avoiding overt themes of loss and death. Munch’s concentration on his own death, as shown in numerous melancholy self-portraits from the 1930s and 1940s, was an exception. He also created a lot of landscape drawings and paintings.

After the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940, several of Munch’s paintings were declared “degenerate” by Hitler and were taken from German museums. Seventy-one of the eighty-two pieces taken during the war were finally saved by Norwegian collectors and benefactors and returned to Munch’s native Norway, including The Scream.

Munch died in the village of Ekely, just outside of Oslo, at the age of 80, his vision having failed him periodically since the early 1970s, and suffering from a protracted sickness brought on by an explosion of a nearby munitions plant.

Even though his specific style aged fast after the First World War, Munch had a tremendous influence on later artists in Europe and the United States. Munch’s sorrowful but strident canvases inspired pioneering German Expressionist artists such as Kirchner, Kandinsky, Beckmann, and others interested in expressing the individual psyche via strong colour and semi-abstraction.

Famous Art by Edvard Munch

The Sick Child

1886

The Sick Child is one of Munch’s first works, and it is regarded as a “a breakthrough” by the artist for establishing the tone for his early career, which focused on death, grief, anxiety, lunacy, and the preoccupations of a tormented soul. The picture, dedicated to his departed sister Johanne Sophie, portrays the sick fifteen-year-old with a mourning lady beside her, the latter most likely a depiction of Munch’s mother, who had died of TB eleven years before Sophie. This painting’s scratchy brushstrokes, scraped surface, and melancholy tones all convey a deeply personal remembrance.

The Scream

1893

The importance of Munch’s The Scream in contemporary art history cannot be emphasised. It belongs to a select group of works that includes Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Matisse’s Red Studio, all of which are considered to be the archetypal works of modernist experimentation and lasting invention. The fluidity of Munch’s lateral and vertical brushwork mirrors the sky and clouds in Starry Night, yet this same surface also contains aesthetic aspects of Fauvism, Expressionism, and maybe even Surrealism.

Spring Ploughing

1918

In the years after his hospitalisation, Munch gave up his nightlife of carousing and excessive drinking and dedicated his days to his work and the countryside of his hometown. Munch’s paintings had previously been referred to as “my children,” but by this time he was referring to them as “my children with nature.” This newfound inspiration, in the form of farm hands, animals, and the Norwegian landscape, took Munch’s art in an entirely new direction, one that celebrated life and work rather than anxiety and loss.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• Edvard Munch was a productive yet disturbed artist who was obsessed with human mortality issues including chronic sickness, sexual liberty, and religious ambition.
• These obsessions were manifested in works of vivid colour, semi-abstraction, and enigmatic subject matter.
• Following the triumph of French Impressionism, Munch adopted the influential Paul Gauguin’s more graphic, symbolist sensibility, and became one of the most divisive and eventually recognised artists among a new school of continental Expressionist and Symbolist painters.
• Munch was born in the first decade of the twentieth century, during the height of the Art Nouveau style, which was known for its emphasis on all things organic, evolutionary, and curiously instinctive.
• Munch started to consider the visible as if it were a window into a not completely developed, if not essentially unsettling, human mind, in keeping with these motifs but moving away from their ornamental uses.
• Edvard Munch was up in a home plagued by life-threatening diseases and the deaths of his mother and sister at an early age, all of which Munch’s father, a Christian fanatic, explained away as acts of divine punishment.
• Munch hoped that his vibrant colours, semi-abstraction, and enigmatic, often open-ended topics would serve as universal symbols.
• As a result, Munch’s drawings, paintings, and prints take on the qualities of psychological talismans: despite their origins in Munch’s personal experiences, they have the potential to communicate, and maybe alleviate, any viewer’s emotional or psychological state.
• Munch’s frequent use of sexual imagery stems from his bohemian view of sex as a weapon for emotional and physical emancipation from societal conformity, as well as his contemporaries’ obsession with sexual experience as a window into the subconscious, often darker parts of human psyche.
• Munch attempted to capture a type of marriage between the subject as seen in the world around him and his own psychological, emotional, and/or spiritual perspective, in a manner akin to Vincent van Gogh.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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