Edvard Munch ( Norwegian: ; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) Norwegian Artist

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (/mʊŋk/; Norwegian: [ˈedvɑʈ ˈmuŋk] ; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced German Expressionism in the early 20th century. One of his best known works is The Scream of 1893.

Life

Childhood

Edvard Munch was born in a farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, United Kingdoms of Sweden and 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. Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherited their artistic talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch and historian Peter Andreas Munch.
The family moved to Christiania (renamed Kristiania in 1877, and 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. 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 American writer Edgar Allan Poe.
As Edvard remembered it, Christian's positive behavior toward 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 oppressive religious milieu, Edvard's poor health, and the vivid ghost stories helped inspire his macabre visions and nightmares; the boy felt that death was constantly advancing on him. 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. They moved frequently from one cheap 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.

Studies and influences

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. He wrote his goal in his diary: "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 Kristiania, one of whose founders was his distant relative Jacob Munch. His teachers were sculptor Julius Middelthun and the 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). They may have been confiscated by his father.
During these early years, 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 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. 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 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.

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 live 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. 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 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. Together with his contemporary Nikolai Astrup, Munch is considered an innovator of the woodcut medium in Norway.
In December 1889 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.

Berlin

By 1892, Munch formulated his characteristic, and original, Synthetist aesthetic, 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. 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 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. 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 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

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 (shown here) was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo in 1994 and 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. Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms, and employing a high viewpoint, it reduces the agonized figure 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 effects, 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."

Frieze of Life—A Poem about Life, Love and Death

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 Vampire. 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 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" and his pessimistic philosophy of love. Motifs such as The Empty Cross and Golgotha (both c. 1900) 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 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."
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.

Paris, Berlin and Kristiania

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). 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 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. It was this place he missed when he was abroad and when he felt depressed and exhausted. "To walk in Åsgårdstrand is like walking among my paintings—I get so inspired to paint when I am here".

In 1897 Munch returned to Kristiania, where he also received grudging acceptance—one critic wrote, "A fair number of these pictures have been exhibited before. In my opinion these improve on acquaintance." 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, 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 Secession, 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. 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 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. 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.^[
As part of his recovery, Dr. 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 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.

Later years

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, Paul 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 prehistoric 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 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 23 January 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. His Nazi-orchestrated funeral suggested to Norwegians that he was a Nazi sympathizer, a kind of appropriation of the independent artist. The city of Oslo bought the Ekely estate from Munch's heirs in 1946; his house was demolished in May 1960.

Legacy

When Munch died, his remaining works were bequeathed to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen (it opened in 1963). The museum holds 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 serves as 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's advertising 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. Munch was still 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. His cabin, "the Happy House", was given to the municipality of Åsgårdstrand in 1944; it serves as a small Munch Museum. The inventory has been maintained 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 (US$1.27 million). It also set a record for the highest price paid in auction in Norway. On 3 November 2008, the painting Vampire set a new record for his paintings when it was sold for US$38.162 million at Sotheby's New York.
Munch's image appears on the Norwegian 1,000 kroner note, along with pictures inspired by his artwork.
In February 2012, a major Munch exhibition, Edvard Munch. The Modern Eye, opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the exhibition was opened by Mette-Marit, Crown Princess of Norway.
In May 2012, The Scream sold for $119.9 million, and is the second most expensive artwork ever sold at an open auction. (It was surpassed in November 2013 by Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold for $142.4 million).
In 2013, four of Munch's paintings were depicted in a series of stamps by the Norwegian postal service, to commemorate in 2014 the 150th anniversary of his birth.
On 14 November 2016 a version of Munch's The Girls on the Bridge sold for US$54.5 million at Sotheby's, New York, making it the second highest price achieved for one of his paintings.^{[citation needed]}

University Aula

In 1911 the final competition for the decoration of the large walls of the University of Oslo Aula (assembly hall) was held between Munch and Emanuel Vigeland. The episode is known as the Aula Controversy. In 1914 Munch was finally commissioned to decorate the Aula and the work was completed in 1916. This major work in Norwegian monumental painting includes 11 paintings covering 223 m². The Sun, History and Alma Mater are the key works in this sequence. Munch declared: “I wanted the decorations to form a complete and independent world of ideas, and I wanted their visual expression to be both distinctively Norwegian and universally human.” In 2014 it was suggested that the Aula paintings have a value of at least 500 million kroner.

Major works

• 892: Evening on Karl Johan
• 1893: The Scream
• 1894: Ashes
• 1894–1895: Madonna
• 1895: Puberty
• 1895: Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette
• 1895: Death in the Sickroom
• 1899–1900: The Dance of Life
• 1899–1900: The Dead Mother
• 1903: Village in Moonlight
• 1940–1942: Self Portrait: Between Clock and Bed

Edvard Munch - Young Man and Prostitute 1893/94

Quotes

1880 - 1895

• I am at work on a girl. It is quite simple a girl getting up on the edge of her bed and pulling on her stockings. The bed is whitish, and in addition there are white sheets, a white nightdress, a bedside table with a white cover, white curtains and a blue wall. [as model for his painting 'Morning', 1884]
  • In his letter to Olav Paulsen, September 1884; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, w:Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 53

• Life here [in Paris, 1885] is quite different. You hardly ever see a dog on a lead; you come across little wagons being pulled by dogs that are often so small that you can’t imagine how on earth they manage to shift such enormous weights. You see shepherdesses in the middle of the street herding goats and sometimes playing on their flutes. I think I’ll go to the Louvre and the Salon today.
  • In a letter (1885); as quoted in Edvard Munchs Brev, Familien, Oslo: Tanum, 1949, p. 57

• No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
  • In his text (1889) 'Impressions from a ballroom, New Year's Eve in St. Cloud' - also known as 'The St. Cloud Manifesto'

• I thought I should make something – I felt it would be so easy – it would take form under my hands like magic.

Then people would see!

A strong naked arm – a tanned powerful neck a young woman rests her head on the arching chest.

She closes her eyes and listens with open and quivering lips to the words he whispers into her long flowing hair.

I should paint that image just as I saw it – but in the blue haze.

Those two at that moment, no longer merely themselves, but simply a link in the chain binding generation to generation.

People should understand the significance, the power of it. They should remove their hats like they do in church.

There should be no more pictures of interiors, of people reading and women knitting.

There would be pictures of real people who breathed, suffered, felt, loved.

I felt impelled – it would be easy. The flesh would have volume – the colours would be alive.

There was an interval. The music stopped. I was a little sad. I remembered how many times I had had similar thoughts – and that once I had finished the painting – they had simply shaken their heads and smiled.

Once again I found myself out on the Boulevard des Italiens. [written in Saint Cloud, 1889]

• • In 'Saint Cloud Manifesto', Munch (1889): as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 120 -121

• The point is that one sees things at different moments with different eyes. Differently in the morning then in the evening. The way in which one sees also depends on one's mood.. ..coming in from a dark bedroom in the morning into the sitting room one will, for example, see everything in a bluish light. Even the deepest shadows are topped with bright light. After a while one will accustom oneself to the light and the shadows will be deeper and everything will be seen more sharply. If an atmosphere of this kind is being painted it won't do merely to sit and gaze at everything 'just as one sees'. One must paint precisely the fleeting moment of significance – one must capture the exact experience separating that significant moment from the next – the exact moment when the motif struck one.. .In some circumstances a chair may seem to be just as interesting as a human being. In some way or another it must have caught the interest in which case the onlooker's interest must somehow be engaged in the same way. It's not the chair that should be painted, but what the person has felt at the sight of it [written in Saint Cloud, 1890 - probably related to the chair of Vincent van Gogh
  • In: T 2770, (1890); as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 83-84

• When seen as a whole, art derives from a person’s desire to communicate himself to another. I do not believe in an art which is not forced into existence by a human being’s desire to open his heart. All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart’s blood. Art is your heart’s blood.
  • Manuscript (1891); as quoted in Edvard Munch and the Physiology of Symbolism (2002) by Shelley Wood Cordulack

• I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
  • Quote in an entry in his Diary (22 January 1892), on the experience which inspired his famous painting, '(The Scream)' ('Shrik'), originally titled: 'Der Schrei der Natur' ('The Cry of Nature')

• Realism's 'truth' as embodied in painting and literature now solely consists of things capable of being seen by the eye or heard by the ear. Realism is concerned only with the external shell of nature. People content with the discoveries they have made ignore the fact that there are other things to be discovered, even broader avenues to be explored. They have found bacteria, but not what they consist of. [quote of 1892)
  • OKK 1760 (Nice, January 1892); as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 81

• Nothing ceases to exist – there is no example of this in nature.. .There is an entire mass of things that cannot rationally explained. There are newborn thoughts that have not yet found form. How foolish to deny the existence of the soul. After all, that a life has begun, that cannot be denied. It is necessary to believe in immortality, insofar as it can be demonstrated that the atoms of life or the spirit of life must continue to exist after the body’s death. But of what does it exist, this characteristic of holding a body together, causing matter to change and develop, this spirit of life? I felt it as a sensual delight that I should become one with – become this earth which is forever radiated by the sun in such a constant ferment and which lives – lives – and which will grow plants from my decaying body – trees and flowers – and the sun will warm them and I will exist in them – and nothing will perish – and that is eternity.
  • T 2760 (January 1892); as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 119

1896 - 1930

• By painting colours and lines and forms seen in a quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does.
  • In: Diary Saint Cloud, 1898; Munch, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 105

• And I live with the dead – my mother , my sister [Sophie], my grandfather, my father [who died in 1889, when Munch was in France].. .Every day is the same – my friends have stopped coming – their laughter disturbs me, tortures me.. ..my daily walk round the old castle becomes shorter and shorter, it tires me more and more to take walks. The fire in the fireplace is my only friend – the time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace gets longer and longer.. ..at its worst I lean my head against the fireplace overwhelmed by the sudden urge – Kill yourself and then it’s all over. Why live? I light the candle – my huge shadow springs across half the wall, clear up to the ceiling and in the mirror over the fireplace I see the face of my own ghost.
  • a note from Saint Cloud, 1898; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 115

• No one in art has yet penetrated as far [as Dostoyevsky into the mystical realms of the soul, towards the metaphysical, the subconsciousness, viewing the external reality of the world as merely a sign, a symbol of the spiritual and metaphysical.
  • As quoted in Edvard Munch, Hans Dedekam, Kristiana 1909, p. 4

• When I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look on these notes as confessions. I have chosen – in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard – to split the work into two parts; the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonarda da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is the universal in the soul [written after 1908]
  • In: The Mad Poet’s Diary, T 2734

• My ideas developed under the influence of the bohemians or rather under Hans Jager [leader of the 'Kristiania Bohemia' since 1883]. 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.
  • Quote in a draft letter to Broby-Johansen, Berlin, 11 December 1926, Munch Museum

• At first when I saw 'The Sick Child' [in his imagination] her pallid face and the vivid red hair against the pillow – I saw something that vanished when I tried to paint it. I ended up with a picture on the canvas which, although I was pleased with it, bore little relationship to what I had seen.. ..In the space of that year [1885 – 1886], scratching it out, just letting the paint flow, endlessly I tried to recapture what I had seen for the first time – the pale transparent skin against the linen sheets, the trembling lips, the shaking hands. I repainted the painting numerous times – scratched it out – let it become blurred in the medium – and tried again and again to catch the first impression – the transparent pale skin against the canvas – the trembling mouth – the trembling hands. I had done the chair [in which his sister Sophie had died] with the glass too often. It distracted me from doing the head. – When I saw the picture I could only make out the glass and the surroundings. – Should I remove it completely? – No, it had the effect of giving depth and emphasis to the head. – I scared off half the background and left everything in masses – one could now see past and across the head and the glass.. .I had achieved much of that first impression, the trembling mouth – the transparent skin – the tired eyes – but the picture was not finished in its colour – it was pale grey – the picture was then heavy as lead. [Munch showed the painting on the Autumn Exhibition 18 October 1886; it was criticized severely, even by his bohemian art-friend Jager]
  • Quote in 'Livsfrisen tilblivelse', Blomqvist, Oslo 1929, p. 9

• One sunny spring day I heard the music coming down Karl Johan [street] and it filled me with joy. The spring, the sun, the music, all blended together to make me shiver with pleasure. The music added colour to the colours. I painted the picture [his painting 'Music on Karl Johan'] allowing the colours to reverberate with the rhythm of the music. I painted the colours as I saw them at that moment.
  • Quote in 'Livsfrisen tilblivelse', Blomqvist, Oslo 1929, p. 12

• Behind the top hats, a little lady wearing lila-coloured tights was balancing on a tightrope in the middle of all that blue-grey tobacco-laden air. I sauntered in among the standing clientele. I was on the lookout for an attractive girl. Yes – that one wasn’t bad. When she became aware of my gaze her facial expression changed to that of a frozen mask and she stared emptily into space. I found a stair – and collapsed into it – tired and listless. Everyone clapped. The Lila-clad tightrope-walker curtsied, smiled and disappeared. A group of Romanian singers took her place. There was love and hate – and longing and reunion – and lovely dreams – and that soft music melting together with the colours. The melted notes became green palm trees and steely blue water floating in the blue haze of the room. An artwork is a crystal. A crystal has a soul and a mind, and the artwork must also have these.
  • a note of Munch, written in Ekely, 1929; Munch Museum

1930 and later

• The strange light illuminated all those night-time meetings that took place in every imaginable sort of café; the lips mouthing defiant words, heedless of restraint or consequence, often overbearing and brutal as only Norwegians can be, vast shadows of impotence misery and shabbiness – spirits training for fulfillment, striving in vain to be great, complete, unique. [Munch describes the environment and atmosphere of the Norwegian bohemia in Kristiana, where he himself lived and worked when he was about 23] And at the center of all the faces there would be Jaeger, whose logic was as sharp as a scythe and as cold as an icy blast..
  • In: Edvard Munch, Pola Gaugain, Oslo Aschehoug, 1933, p. 15

• The only influences in [the painting 'The sick Child', Munch painted in his elderly home, remembering very accurate the last days of his dying little sister Sophie] 'The sick Child'.. ..were the ones that come from my home.. ..my childhood and my home. Only someone who knew the conditions at home could possibly understand why there can be no conceivable chance of any other place having played a part – my home is to my art as a midwife is to her children.. ..few painters have ever experienced the full grief of their subject as I did in 'The sick child'. It was not just I who was suffering; it was all my nearest and dearest as well.
  • Edvard Munch talks to Jens Tiis, (c. 1933), Munch Museum; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 85-86

• One evening I came to have a discussion with my father on the subject how long unbelievers are tormented in Hell. I maintained that no sinner could be so guilty that God would let him suffer longer than a thousand years. Father said that they would suffer for a thousand times a thousand years. We would not give up the argument. I became so irritated.. .I returned home to make my piece with him. He had gone to bed so I quietly opened his bedroom door. He was on his knees in front of the bed, praying.. .I closed the door and went to my own room but I could not get to sleep.. ..eventually I took out my drawing block and started to draw. I drew my father kneeling by his bed, with the light from the bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over his nightshirt. I fetched my paintbox and colored it in. Finally I achieved the right pictorial effect, and I was able to go to bed happy and slept soundly.
  • In: 'Close Up of a Genius', Rolf E. Stenersen; Sem and Stenersen, Oslo 1946, pp. 10 – 11

• Could only have been painted by a madman.
  • His inscription, written in pencil, between the red clouds on at least one of his paintings of The Scream (c. 1893 - 1910), as quoted in Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art (1977) by Ragna Thiis Stang, p. 106

• My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? ..my art gives meaning to my life.
  • Quote in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression (2001) by Jeffery Howe

• From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
  • Quoted in Sustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide to Green Building Outdoors (2007) by William Thompson and Kim Sorvig, p. 30

• Grey dawn was seeping into the sick room [around Christmas 1867, Munch was almost dying then and spitting blood when he was 13; but he recovered]. I lay in the middle of the bed with my hands outside the bedclothes, looking straight ahead. Now I was in a pact with God. I had promised to serve him if I survived, if he allowed me to escape the tuberculosis. Now I could never be as before.
  • T 2771, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 26

• There must be no more pictures covered in brown sauce [c. 1880, when Munch started to paint series of landscapes in fresh colors]
  • a written note; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 41

• Far out there – that

Soft line where the air meets

The sea – it is as incomprehensible as

existence – it is incomprehensible as

death – as eternal as longing.

• • N 613, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, w:Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 79

• My afflictions belong to me and my art - they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship.. .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.
  • As quoted in 'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity', Potter P. Emerg Infect Dis, 2011

• it was the period I think of as the age of the pillow.. .What I wanted to bring out - is that which cannot be measured - I wanted to bring out the tired movement in the eyelids - the lips must look as though they are whispering - she must look as though she is breathing - I want life - what is alive. [on his painting 'The sick Child']
  • As quoted in 'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity', Potter P. Emerg Infect Dis, 2011

• What is art really? The outcome of dissatisfaction with life, the point of impact for the creative force, the continual movement of life.. ..in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.
  • N 45, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 35

Quotes about Edvard Munch

• The creator of the 'Frieze of Life' was almost blind [in 1938, when Hodin visited Munch]. He had completely lost the sight of one eye a year before through the bursting of a blood vessel that flooded the eyeball, and now the other was threatened in the same way, as a result of one of the severe illnesses which had so often endangered his life. The seventy-five-year-old artist had for months been confined to his sick bed, unable to lift a finger to give the much desired finishing touches to the vast edifice of his life’s work.
  • w:J. P. Hodin, in 'The Forerunner', published in 'The Dilemma of Being Modern', 1956
  • Hodin had met Munch during 1938, a year after the retrospective exhibition at the Academy of Arts in Stockholm. Hodin described this meeting in his essay 'The Forerunner'.

The Scream, undated drawing Edvard Munch, Bergen Kunstmuseum

Edvard Munch (norvegese: [ˈɛdvɑʈ muŋk]; Løten, 12 dicembre 1863 – Oslo, 23 gennaio 1944) è stato un pittore norvegese.

Biografia

Giovinezza

Edvard Munch nacque a Løten, in Norvegia, il 12 dicembre 1863 da Laura Catherine Bjolstad (1837-1868), figlia di Andreas Larsen Bjølstad (1806-1888) e Inger Marie Hansdotter (1799-1844), e Christian Munch (1817-1889), figlio del pastore Edvard Storm Munch (1780-1847) e di Johanne Sophie Hofgaard (1791-1860). Edvard era il secondo di cinque figli: Johanne Sophie (1862-1877), la sorella maggiore con la quale instaurerà un rapporto di grandissimo affetto, Peter Andreas (1865-1895), Laura Catherine (1867-1926), e Inger Marie (1868-1952). Suoi parenti erano anche il pittore Jacob Munch e lo storico Peter Andreas Munch, fratello del padre.
La famiglia si trasferì a Christiania (l'odierna Oslo) nel 1864, quando Christian Munch venne impiegato come medico presso la fortezza di Akershus. Sin dalla fanciullezza, Edvard fu provato da una serie interminabile di disgrazie familiari: la madre morì di tubercolosi nel 1868, seguita da Johanne Sophie nel 1877, che spirò stroncata dalla stessa malattia. A curarsi del giovane Munch, dopo la morte della madre, vi erano il padre e la zia Karen; fu in questo periodo che il giovinetto iniziò ad interessarsi all'arte, disegnando per tenersi occupato nei momenti di stasi. Nel frattempo Christian Munch, per sopperire alle varie assenze fatte dal figlio a scuola per motivi di salute, avviò la sua formazione in ambito storico-letterario, introducendolo anche alla dimensione horror-psicologica dello scrittore statunitense Edgar Allan Poe.
Edvard, però, non fu l'unico a rimanere afflitto dai due gravi lutti: anche il padre Christian iniziò a diventare più malinconico, cadendo vittima di un pietismo morboso e di una sindrome maniaco-depressiva. Lo spirito di Edvard non giovò di quest'ambiente; i vari incubi e le numerose malattie, così come il comportamento quasi psiconevrotico del padre, lo segnarono profondamente, inculcandogli quella visione macabra del mondo che lo renderà poi celebre. Quest'interpretazione della realtà fu stimolata anche dalla pazzia di Laura, che iniziò ad essere affetta da crisi psichiche, e dal trapasso del fratello Andreas, che morì immediatamente dopo il suo matrimonio. Munch avrebbe poi scritto: «ho ereditato due dei più spaventosi nemici dell'umanità: il patrimonio del consumo e la follia».
La paga percepita dal padre era molto bassa e, pur essendo sufficiente per i bisogni primari, mantenne la famiglia in uno stato di perenne povertà. Le primissime esperienze artistiche di Munch riprendono i disagi economici che affliggevano la famiglia, raffigurando gli interni di quegli appartamenti degradati dove erano costretti a vivere.

Formazione a Christiania

Nel 1879, Munch iniziò a frequentare un istituto tecnico per studiare ingegneria, disciplina in cui eccelleva, ottenendo risultati ottimi in fisica, chimica e matematica. Fu qui che il giovane Edvard familiarizzò con il disegno di prospettiva; ciononostante, il ragazzo poco apprezzava l'ambiente scolastico. Infatti, il padre Christian vide ben presto con suo grande disappunto, che quel suo figliolo non si trovava a suo agio dietro i banchi del collegio, e di come preferisse dedicarsi agli studi artistici. Pertanto, dopo aver cercato di distoglierlo da questi interessi del tutto estranei all'ingegneria, lo autorizzò ad iscriversi alla Scuola di Disegno di Oslo, dove rimase per un anno, prima di trasferirsi alla Scuola d'Arte e Mestieri nel 1881. Qui Munch seguì le lezioni dello scultore Julius Middelthun e dell'artista Christian Krohg. Sotto questi influssi, Edvard realizzò le sue primissime opere d'arte, fra cui un ritratto del padre, un autoritratto e una raffigurazione del bohémien Karl Jensen-Hjell; quest'ultima opera fu poco gradita dalla critica, che fu sprezzante nel definirla «l'impressionismo portato all'estremo: è una parodia dell'arte». A questi anni risalgono anche vari nudi, che però oggi sopravvivono solo nei bozzetti; con tutta probabilità, sono stati sequestrati dal padre, che considerava l'arte «un empio commercio». Durante la permanenza alla Scuola d'Arte e Mestieri, Munch fuse varie influenze, fra cui quelle esercitate dal Naturalismo e dall'Impressionismo; non a caso, molte delle sue prime opere ricordano molto da vicino quelle di Monet.
In questo periodo Munch entrò in contatto anche con i circoli bohémien della città, presieduti dall'amico Hans Jæger, scrittore dallo spirito anticonformista ed anarchico che esortava i discepoli con l'imperativo «Scrivi la tua vita!». Munch prese questa massima alla lettera: trasse proprio da questa cerchia di intellettuali ribelli (che l'artista sovente raffigurò in varie opere, come il succitato ritratto a Karl Jensen-Hjell) lo spirito autobiografico che avrebbe poi permeato la sua attività artistica, mezzo con il quale riscrisse la propria vita.
Prendendo spunto dalla dottrina di Jæger, il giovane artista intraprese un percorso di riflessione e crescita personale, con il supporto di un «diario dell'anima» dove scriveva i suoi pensieri. Questo si rivelò un periodo di svolta per la produzione artistica di Munch, che già con La fanciulla malata, dove viene risvegliato il ricordo della malattia della sorella Sofie, iniziò a dipingere le prime «tele dell'anima», un decisivo punto di rottura con l'Impressionismo. L'opera, accolta impietosamente sia dalla critica che dalla famiglia, fu la causa di un altro «violento scoppio di indignazione morale» nella società.

L'unico a difenderlo fu l'amico Christian Krohg, che scrisse un memorabile articolo volto a prendere le parti il suo ex allievo:

« Dipinge le cose, o piuttosto, le vede, in maniera diversa da altri artisti. Vede solo l'essenziale, che naturalmente è solo quello che dipinge. Proprio per questo motivo, le immagini di Munch sono in genere «incomplete», come le persone hanno già avuto modo di constatare da soli. Oh, sì che sono complete invece! [...] Un'opera d'arte è completa solo quando l'artista riesce ad esprimere tutto quello che aveva in mente: è proprio questo che colloca Munch all'avanguardia rispetto alla sua generazione... Riesce veramente a mostrare i suoi sentimenti, le sue ossessioni, e a questo subordina tutto il resto. »

Nel frattempo, Munch continuava a ricercare la propria identità artistica: il suo idioma recava sia impronte naturalistiche, ben visibili nel Ritratto di Hans Jæger, che impressioniste, come in Rue Lafayette. Soprattutto nella tela Inger sulla spiaggia (1889), dove è ritratta la sorella Inger (immagine di vitalità per eccellenza) da sola nella spiaggia di Åsgårdstrand, Munch iniziò a costruire il proprio stile: dietro una composizione apparentemente realistica, infatti, l'artista vi cela la raffigurazione di un determinato stato d'animo. Munch, insomma, preferiva l'immaginazione piuttosto che la raffigurazione, con un'ideologia simbolista che rese insignificante il patetico inseguimento della realtà.
Munch ebbe l'opportunità di mostrare il suo operato al grande pubblico nel 1889, in una grande mostra: per le sue capacità tecniche, tutt'altro che comuni, vinse una borsa di studio a Parigi, per studiare arte sotto la guida di Léon Bonnat.

Soggiorno a Parigi

Munch si recò a Parigi nell'autunno del 1889, nel giubilo generale per l'appena inaugurata Exposition Universelle; uno dei suoi quadri, Il mattino (1884), venne subito inserito fra le eccellenze da esporre nel padiglione della Norvegia, nell'ambito dell'Expo. Durante il soggiorno parigino, Munch trascorreva la mattina nel trafficato atelier di Bonnat, che gli trasmise i rudimenti del nudo artistico, mentre il pomeriggio si aggirava per la città, frequentando sia l'Esposizione Universale che i musei più prestigiosi. Molto presto, tuttavia, Edvard iniziò ad annoiarsi del corso d'arte di Bonnat: «mi stanca e mi annoia» scrisse «anzi, mi intorpidisce».

Per questo motivo, Munch, che si era distinto fra gli allievi più dotati, dopo qualche mese si trasferì a Saint-Cloud, un sobborgo sulle rive della Senna. Dalla finestra al secondo piano dell'hotel Belvedere, dove soggiornava, il pittore poté osservare il movimento incessante delle barche, nelle diverse condizioni di luce: dipinse questo scenario in tutti i modi possibili, anche con un atteggiamento forse inconsapevole da impressionista francese, che emerge soprattutto ne La senna a Saint-Cloud del 1890.
Durante la parentesi parigina, infatti, Munch ebbe modo di ammirare le opere di molti artisti influenti: i suoi prediletti furono Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh e Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, accomunati dal loro sapiente uso del colore per trasmettere emozioni. Munch trovò particolarmente degna di nota la «reazione contro il realismo» di Gauguin, e il suo credo secondo cui «l'arte è frutto dell'uomo e non un'imitazione della natura», seguendo quel filone già timidamente annunciato da Whistler.
Sempre a Parigi, a dicembre, Munch apprese della morte del padre Christian, evento che lo fece cadere in un profondo stato di afflizione. Nonostante il rapporto fra i due fosse conflittuale, Edvard poneva molta attenzione sull'importanza dei legami familiari; tra l'altro, questo lutto andava ad accodarsi a quelli precedenti, suscitando sentimenti molto negativi nel suo animo: «vivo con la morte - mia madre, mia sorella, mio nonno, mio padre [...] ucciditi, e poi è finita. Perché vivere?» si domandò poi. I sensi di colpa nutriti dal poeta emergono nel dipinto Notte a Saint-Cloud, dove Munch si drappeggia nelle vesti del padre scomparso, diventandone quasi l'alter ego. L'occhio dell'osservatore qui si addentra nell'ambiente scuro della stanza, spiando l'uomo nella penombra intento ad osservare il via vai della Senna; l'ambiente è permeato da un'atmosfera triste e malinconica, accentuata da simbologie occulte (come la croce proiettata a terra) e dalla bicromia azzurro-marrone, che domina la quasi totalità della tavolozza. Del resto, Munch fu categorico nel suo Manifesto di Saint Cloud, scritto proprio in quei mesi, ove annunciò:

« Non ci saranno più scene d'interni con persone che leggono e donne che lavorano a maglia. Si dipingeranno esseri viventi che hanno respirato, sentito, sofferto e amato... »

Scandalo a Berlino

In Francia, come già accennato, Munch ebbe modo di apprezzare l'avanguardia francese, ma soprattutto le opere di Paul Gauguin, e il suo modo di interpretare l'accordo cromatico, permeandolo di ardite simbologie. Furono proprio i modi di Gauguin ad influenzare Malinconia (1891). In quest'opera le sensazioni sono affidate, come già accennato, ai colori, ma anche all'atteggiamento del giovane in primo piano, rivolto all'esterno della scena ed immerso in profondi pensieri, e dal paesaggio, che riflette indirettamente lo stato d'animo del protagonista. La tela si propone quindi di essere un'interpretazione universale della malinconia non solo per l'artista, ma per tutta l'umanità, nonostante l'episodio prenda spunto da una circostanza autobiografica.
Il maestro Krohg apprezzò particolarmente Malinconia, ponendola come prima tela del sintetismo norvegese; ormai, il linguaggio di Munch si era definitivamente allontanato dal Naturalismo e dall'Impressionismo degli esordi. Ecco cosa disse Krogh in un'entusiasta recensione, dove apprezzò particolarmente l'armoniosità delle linee paesaggistiche e la sonorità del colore:
« La lunga spiaggia si incurva nella pittura per concludersi in una linea armoniosa. È musica. In un gentile intaglio si tende laggiù contro l'acqua quieta, con piccole interruzioni discrete, il tetto di una casa e un albero, di cui molto abilmente il pittore ha omesso di suggerire pur un singolo ramo, perché ciò avrebbe guastato la linea. Fuori sull'acqua quieta c'è una barca parallela all'orizzonte - una magistrale ripetizione della linea di fondo. Dobbiamo ringraziare Munch se la barca è gialla; se non fosse stata gialla, egli non avrebbe mai dipinto questo quadro [...] C'è qualcuno che ha mai sentito un simile suono nel colore come in questa pittura? »
Il magnetismo della critica di Krogh fece diventare Munch noto anche in Germania, dove non sfuggì all'intellettuale Adelsteen Normann, che invitò l'artista norvegese ad esibirsi a Berlino a novembre. Il clima artistico della capitale tedesca era tuttavia molto teso a causa della contrapposizione tra i tradizionalisti e gli artisti disponibili agli influssi francesi e naturalistici. La mostra di Munch non fece che acuire questi dissidi, e gli accademici ottennero la chiusura della mostra; lo scandalo venne definito dalla stampa teutonica «Der Fall Munch» (L'affare Munch). Munch ne fu sorpreso: «Non mi sono mai divertito così tanto - è incredibile quanto una cosa innocente come un dipinto possa creare un simile trambusto», scrisse.
Gli artisti più aperti alle novità vennero comunque influenzati dalle opere di Munch; fra questi vi fu il poeta August Strindberg, legato al pittore da un saldo vincolo d'amicizia. Fu proprio a Berlino tra l'altro, sull'esempio di Strindberg, che iniziò a prendere forma il suo progetto del Fregio della vita, un concetto utopico secondo cui le opere erano tessere di un progetto unitario, volto a simboleggiare il destino dell'uomo.
Molti sono i quadri dipinti in questa parentesi berlinese. Fra questi, degno di nota è La morte nella stanza della malata (1893), dove si materializza nuovamente il fantasma della morte della sorella: non a caso, ad esser raffigurato non è il dolore fisico, ma quello psicologico. Il pittore qui non vuole narrare all'interlocutore la scomparsa di Sophie (che si intravede a malapena), bensì mostrargli la reazione dei singoli familiari di fronte a un evento tanto misterioso quanto la morte: questi risultano distanziati, e non uniti, dal dolore, che li intrappola e li svuota nei loro rispettivi cordogli.
A Berlino Munch dipinse anche quello che sarebbe diventato il suo capolavoro: L'urlo, che più di tutti riesce a condensare con inaudita violenza la disperazione esistenziale dell'artista norvegese.

L'urlo

«Camminavo lungo la strada con due amici quando il sole tramontò, il cielo si tinse all'improvviso di rosso sangue. Mi fermai, mi appoggiai stanco morto ad una palizzata. Sul fiordo nero-azzurro e sulla città c'erano sangue e lingue di fuoco. I miei amici continuavano a camminare e io tremavo ancora di paura... E sentivo che un grande urlo infinito pervadeva la natura»: queste furono le circostanze che portarono Munch a dipingere L'urlo, uno dei quadri più celebri dell'arte mondiale ed ineguagliabile emblema dell'angoscia dell'uomo.
Ispiratosi a una mummia ritrovata in Perù, il messaggio che Munch ci ha voluto dare emerge già nel nome della tela: L'urlo, titolo che dà alla luce lo spirito dell'artista. Il protagonista della scena è, infatti, proprio l'uomo urlante, nel quale Munch infonde tutto il suo crudo stile pittorico. Il suo grido, lancinante ed unico nel trasferire angoscia allo spettatore, sembra con la sua sonorità deformare l'innaturale paesaggio, composto da un cielo striato da venature color rosso sangue e da un mare nero ed oleoso.
Oltre al personaggio al centro, che più che a un uomo fa pensare a uno spirito (al posto del corpo, infatti, ha un'ombra sinuosa, nera e molle) vi sono le sagome di due uomini sullo sfondo, che sembrano ignorare completamente quel lancinante grido di disperazione: anche la loro collocazione, posta ai margini della tela, suggerisce questa loro sordità e impassibilità di fronte all'angoscia del pittore, che così ha deciso di tradurre in immagini la falsità dei rapporti umani.
L'urlo di quest'opera, insomma, è un'esplosione di energia psichica di inaudita potenza, che rende la tela una metafora della morte che spazza via, travolge, il senso della vita: proprio come fa questo grido sordo, un effimero modo di guardare dentro di sé, ritrovandovi solo sofferenza.

Il Fregio della vita

« In generale l'arte nasce dal desiderio dell'individuo di rivelarsi all'altro. Io non credo in un'arte che non nasce da una forza, spinta dal desiderio di un essere di aprire il suo cuore. Ogni forma d'arte, di letteratura, di musica deve nascere nel sangue del nostro cuore. L'arte è il sangue del nostro cuore »

(Edvard Munch)

Nel dicembre 1893, Berlino fu teatro di un'altra mostra di Munch: a Unter den Linden, infatti, vennero esposte sei opere, facenti parte di una serie detta Studio per una serie evocativa chiamata Amore. Fu così che ebbe inizio Il Fregio della vita, dove l'impeto visionario di Munch esplora i temi di vita, amore, paura, morte, malinconia e ansia.
Già nei primi anni novanta, infatti, sorse in Munch la necessità di riunire tutti i dipinti in un progetto unitario, dove potesse esprimere agevolmente il proprio pensiero sulla pittura. Quest'ultima, infatti, la intendeva non come mera arte di decorazione, ma come un approfondimento e chiarimento della propria vita e dei segreti più reconditi dell'animo umano: una sorta di autoanalisi ante litteram.
Munch inserì molte opere degne di nota in questo ciclo. Fra queste, vi è Il Monte Calvario, detto Golgota (1900), dominato dalla figura del Cristo crocifisso, solo tra la folla: qui Munch si identifica con il Cristo in Croce, per ribadire le numerose tragedie che ha sofferto nella vita, ma anche per sottolineare il difficile ruolo del poeta del Novecento, una figura quasi cassandrica, un profeta inascoltato. In Sera sul viale Karl Johan (1892), invece, l'ectoplasma de L'urlo lascia il posto ad una massa di uomini borghesi, immersi in un'atmosfera allucinante: gli uomini sono tutti pallidissimi, hanno tutti gli occhi sbarrati. È così che un'attività piacevole, come il passeggio, si trasforma in un lugubre corteo spettrale: con questa metamorfosi si manifesta il pensiero di Munch, che intravede nella borghesia un'umanità vuota, priva di sentimenti, che si limita ad esistere e non a vivere. Quest'opera riprende il pensiero di Ibsen e di Strindberg, i due drammaturghi che pure ripugnavano l'alienamento dell'uomo moderno; allo stesso modo, però, anticipa anche il tema dei morti viventi, creature mostruose animate solo da uno stato di vita apparente, intente nella ricerca di qualcosa di indefinito.
Il ciclo venne esposto interamente nel 1902, in occasione della quinta edizione del Berliner Secession, suddiviso in quattro tappe definite dallo stesso Munch:

1. Seme dell'amore (con i dipinti: Notte stellata, Rosso e bianco, Occhi negli occhi, Danza sulla spiaggia, Il bacio, Madonna);
2. Sviluppo e dissoluzione dell'amore (con i dipinti Ceneri, Vampiro, La danza della vita, Gelosia, La donna, Malinconia);
3. Angoscia (con i dipinti Angoscia, Sera sul viale Karl Johan, Edera rossa, Golgota, L'urlo);
4. Morte (con i dipinti Il letto di morte, La morte nella stanza della malata, Odore di morte, Metabolismo. La vita e la morte, La madre morta e la bambina).

Furono in molti a manifestare il proprio disappunto, soprattutto verso le tele più provocatorie, colpevoli di aver messo in dubbio le istanze dell'epoca. Camille Mauclair fu categorica nel definire i quadri «senza disegno e di un colore barbaro, di una materia ributtante per impaccio e pesantezza». Per l'Aftenposen, storico giornale di Oslo, Munch era «un artista allucinato e allo stesso tempo uno spirito cattivo che si prende gioco del pubblico e si burla della pittura come della vita umana». L'artista fu accusato da William Ritter addirittura di «trasformare troppo semplicisticamente oggetti e persone in una bruttezza indecente, con una esecuzione troppo naive, a scapito di una forte educazione artistica». Analogamente, il giornale tedesco Magdeburgische Zeitung riprese alcune critiche già mosse negli esordi, affermando che l'artista «dipinge come in passato; gli stessi quadri non finiti, appena abbozzati».
Non mancarono, tuttavia, i ferventi ammiratori: Yvanhoe Rambosson, per esempio, capì che «il suo pensiero, complesso e ossessionato, si traduce spesso in un'espressione speciale e impressionante», per poi ammettere che «il solo rimprovero che si può muovere a Munch è che egli ottiene gli effetti desiderati attraverso un modo di procedere troppo diretto. Giunge a trasmettere un senso di terrore attraverso un colore o una combinazione di segni che, pur giustificati esteticamente, risultano sgradevoli». Anche Walther Rathenau sostenne il pensiero di Munch: «Con un disprezzo spietato per la forma, la chiarezza, l'eleganza, la completezza, ed infine il realismo, dipinge con un intuitivo talento le più sottili visioni dell'anima».

Il crollo nervoso

Nell'autunno del 1908 le condizioni di salute di Munch si aggravano, a causa della sua dipendenza dall'alcool e di un litigio in un bar nel quale si vide coinvolto. Lo stesso artista ebbe modo di constatare: «ero al margine della follia, sul punto di precipitare». Divenuto preda di devastanti allucinazioni e sentendosi perseguitato, decise di entrare nella clinica del dottor Daniel Jacobson. Sotto le sue cure devote Munch migliorò la salute del suo corpo e del suo spirito; la degenza durò otto mesi, e nel 1909 l'artista poté fare ritorno in Norvegia. In patria finalmente fu felice: le sue opere si tinsero di cromie più vivaci, meno pessimistiche, e a rafforzare ulteriormente il suo umore vi furono i plausi del pubblico di Christiania, che - riconoscendo il suo successo - iniziò a comprare i suoi dipinti. Frattanto, Munch venne fatto Cavaliere dell'Ordine Reale norvegese di Sant'Olav per i suoi «servizi nell'arte».
I disturbi nervosi, tuttavia, erano sempre dietro l'angolo: ne era consapevole il dottor Jacobson, che raccomandò al paziente di «frequentare solo buoni amici, e di evitare di consumare alcolici in pubblico». Munch seguì questo consiglio: prova della fiducia che l'artista riponeva nel proprio medico curante è la serie di ritratti ritraenti amici e mecenati; degni di nota sono anche i vari paesaggi che Munch ricolmò di ottimismo mediante l'utilizzo di pennellate leggere e cromie vibranti. Con la situazione economica resasi rosea, Munch divenne finalmente in grado di comprare diverse proprietà, in modo da fornire degna collocazione alle proprie opere d'arte, provvedendo anche alla sua famiglia.

Ultimi anni

Munch trascorse gli ultimi anni della sua vita nella sua proprietà di 45 ettari di Ekely, a Skøyen, Oslo. Gran parte dei suoi ultimi dipinti celebrano l'idillio della vita agreste; a posare per queste scene bucoliche, spesso vi era anche il suo cavallo, Rousseau. Senza sforzo alcuno, inoltre, Munch attirò intorno a sé un gruppo di fanciulle ardenti, che ritrasse come soggetti di numerosi nudi artistici; non è da escludere che l'artista abbia intrattenuto rapporti sessuali con alcune di queste ragazze. In questo periodo Munch si cimentò anche nella pittura murale, decorando una delle sale mensa dell'antica fabbrica di cioccolato Freia, sempre a Oslo. Ciò malgrado, le sue energie creative erano esaurite, tanto che riuscì a portare a termine solo una serie di arditi autoritratti.
Negli anni trenta e quaranta, la propaganda nazionalsocialista perseguì le opere di Munch, definendole «arte degenerata»: queste misure vessatorie, che vennero adottate anche con le tele di Picasso, Paul Klee, Matisse, Gauguin ed altri artisti moderni, comportarono l'immediata rimozione delle 82 opere munchiane esposte nei musei tedeschi. Munch ne soffrì amaramente, e a ciò si aggiunse la paura, sorta nel 1940 con l'occupazione nazista della Norvegia, di un imminente sequestro della sua opera omnia. Munch allora aveva 76 anni, e non era consapevole che ben settantuno sue opere avrebbero fatto poi ritorno in Norvegia, acquistate da collezionisti privati.
Munch morì nella tenuta a Ekely il 23 gennaio 1944, appena un mese dopo il suo ottantesimo compleanno.

Retaggio

Alla sua morte, Munch donò alla città di Oslo tutte le sue opere rimanenti, che vennero raccolte in un museo appositamente costruito, il Museo Munch, inaugurato nel 1963. Si tratta questo del principale organo di tutela del patrimonio munchiano, attivo anche nel campo del diritto d'autore, disciplinando le eventuali violazioni del copyright (come avvenne con la Mars, che nel 2006 rielaborò L'urlo creando una grafica per una propria campagna pubblicitaria).
Il linguaggio pittorico di Munch, carico di simbolismi «privati», si colloca in una dimensione molto più personale rispetto agli stili di altri pittori simbolisti, quali possono essere Gustave Moreau e James Ensor. Munch esercitò un'influenza determinante sull'arte a lui coeva, specialmente sull'espressionismo tedesco e nord-europeo, che pure rifiutava di credere «in un'arte che non nasce da una forza, spinta dal desiderio di un essere di aprire il suo cuore». Molte delle tele di Munch, prima tra tutte L'urlo, devono il proprio successo proprio grazie al loro pregnante simbolismo.

«Dal mio corpo in putrefazione cresceranno dei fiori e io sarò dentro di loro: questa è l'eternità»

— Edvard Munch

A testimonianza del suo riconoscimento artistico, una delle redazioni de L'urlo è stata battuta dalla casa d'asta londinese Sotheby's per la somma di 119.9 milioni di sterline, divenendo uno dei quadri più costosi al mondo. Ma non solo: Munch è effigiato in moltissimi contesti nazionali, dai francobolli alle monete, passando per i monumenti. Per esempio, Munch venne raffigurato sulla banconota da 1000 kroner, il taglio con il valore più alto; similmente, in occasione del centocinquantesimo anno della nascita di Munch, le Poste Norvegesi gli hanno dedicato una serie di francobolli commemorativi.

Opere significative

• 1889: Inger sulla spiaggia
• 1892: Sera sul viale Karl Johan
• 1892: Il bacio con la finestra
• 1893: L'urlo
• 1894–1895: Madonna
• 1895: La pubertà
• 1895: Autoritratto con sigaretta
• 1895: La morte nella stanza della malata
• 1897: Il bacio
• 1885–1886: La fanciulla malata
• 1899–1900: La danza della vita
• 1899–1900: La madre morta e la bambina
• 1902: Ragazze sul ponte
• 1903: Chiaro di luna
• 1907: La morte di Marat I
• 1940–1942: Tra il letto e l'orologio

Mostre

Fra il 1999 e il 2000 Palazzo Pitti dedica una mostra al pittore curata da Marit Lange e Sidsel Hellilesen, allestita presso la Sala Bianca.

Christiania Bohemen by Edvard Munch 1895

Citazioni di Edvard Munch

• Camminavo lungo la strada con due amici, quando il sole tramontò. Il cielo si tinse all'improvviso di rosso sangue. Mi fermai. Mi appoggiai, stanco morto a un recinto. Sul fiordo nero azzurro e sulla città, c'erano sangue e lingue di fuoco. I miei amici continuavano a camminare e io tremavo ancora di paura e sentivo che un grande urlo, infinito, pervadeva la Natura.
• Dopo aver acceso la lampada vedo improvvisamente la mia ombra enorme che va dalla parete al soffitto. E nel grande specchio sopra la stufa vedo me stesso, il mio stesso volto spettrale. E vivo con i morti, con mia madre, mia sorella, mio nonno e mio padre, soprattutto con lui. Tutti i ricordi, le più piccole cose, vengono alla superficie.
• Senza paura e malattia la mia vita sarebbe una barca senza remi. (citato in Itinerario nell'Arte: Volume 3)

Citazioni su Edvard Munch

• La poetica di Munch è direttamente o indirettamente collegata con il pensiero di Kierkegaard, che soltanto nei primi decenni del Novecento comincerà ad essere conosciuto in Germania: si deve dunque a Munch, che soggiornò più volte in Germania, la spinta "esistenzialista" che farà nascere l'Espressionismo, che è nato infatti nel nome e sotto il segno della sua pittura. (Giulio Carlo Argan)
• Nessun artista del secolo scorso ha vissuto fino in fondo con eguale consapevolezza la crisi della coscienza e della cultura occidentale: tale consapevolezza è poi la condanna che ha dannato l'arte del nostro secolo. In Munch la tragicità e la dissoluzione della propria vita si fondono e si combinano con la tragicità e la dissoluzione della propria opera. Proprio questa consapevolezza ha consentito all'artista di presentarsi nel nuovo secolo tra i protagonisti di una nuova, desolata visione. (G. Bruno, Edvard Munch, 1986)
• Come Kafka, anche Munch non cessa mai di sentirsi misteriosamente colpevole e perseguitato dai propri spettri. E nei suoi quadri non farà altro che "scrivere" e "riscrivere" la sua vita: un'autobiografia dell'anima per immagini, o meglio un'anatomia delle catastrofi dell'Io, impridente nell'intensità, provocante nei mezzi. Chi guarda sbatte contro quell'ansia e vi riconosce la propria: non vi è dubbio che tra i pittori, Edvard Munch è colui che più di ogni altro, ha saputo dare volto alla psiche moderna. (E. di Stefano, Munch, 1994)
• Il suo pitto-segno, ondulato e fluttuante, non cerca una definizione naturalistica della realtà, piuttosto ne ricerca le dinamiche interiori che in una continua espansione, determinano quello che poi ne costituisce l'essenza. (A.G. Benemia, L'arte al nuovo, 2009)

 Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait 1882

 Edvard Munch - The Seine at Saint-Cloud 1890

 Edvard Munch - At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo 1892

Edvard Munch - Death in the Sickroom 1893

Edvard Munch - The Hands (1893)

 Anxiety 1894

 Edvard Munch - Death and Life 1894

 Edvard Munch - Madonna 1894

 Edvard Munch - The Woman in Three Stages (1894)

Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait (1895)

 Edvard Munch - Vampire (1895)

Edvard Munch - The Mermaid (1896)

 Edvard Munch - Separation 1896

 Edvard Munch - Evening. Melancholy I 1896

 Edvard Munch - The Urn 1896

Edvard Munch - The Voice , Summer Night 1896

 Edvard Munch - The Kiss 1897

Edvard Munch - Inheritance 1897/99

Edvard Munch - Metabolism 1898/99

Edvard Munch - Red and White 1899/900

Edvard Munch - Consul Christen Sandberg 1901

Edvard Munch - Madonna  1895-1902

 Edvard Munch - The Sin 1902

 

Edvard Munch:Die vier Söhne des Dr. Linde (1902). Schiefler 180; OKK G/r 80 A-2.

Edvard Munch - own Scan from Arne Eggum: Der Linde-Fries, Lübeck 1982, p. 19

 Edvard Munch - Kiss IV 1902

 Munch Edvard Weiblicher Halbakt Sprengel Museum 1902

 Edvard Munch - Four Girls in Åsgårdstrand 1903

 Edvard Munch - The Brooch. Eva Mudocci 1903

 Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait in Hell 1903

Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine 1906

 Edvard Munch - The Death of Marat II 1907

 Edvard Munch - Jealousy 1907

 Edvard Munch - Bathing Men, Ateneum (1907)

 Edvard Munch, Gråtende kvinne1907/09

 The Scream, by Edvard Munch. This version, executed in 1910 in tempera on cardboard, was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004, and recovered in 2006.

Edvard Munch - The Sun 1910/11

Edvard Munch - Galloping Horse1910/12

 Edvard Munch - On the Sofa 1913

Edvard Munch - Weeping Nude 1913/14

 Edvard Munch - Workers on their Way Home 1913/14

Edvard Munch - The Haymaker 1917

 "Model by the Wicker Chair" by Edvard Munch, 1919–1921

 Edvard Munch - Rosa Meissner at the Hotel Rohn in Warnemünde 1907

 Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait Somewhere on the Continent I 1906

Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait Somewhere on the Continent II 1906

Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait at 53 Am Strom in Warnemünde 1907

 Edvard Munch - Edvard Munch at the Beach in Warnemünde 1907

 

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Hat Outside the Winter Studio at Ekely, 1930. Munch-Museet, Oslo.

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