Modern Age
Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
Norwegian Symbolism painter.
Edvard Munch turned his own grief into the founding language of Expressionism. Raised in Kristiania (now Oslo) in a household marked by death — his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, his beloved sister Sophie when he was fourteen — he came to believe that illness, madness, and death were the black angels that stood over his cradle. Trained in Norway and then drawn to the bohemian and Symbolist circles of Kristiania, Berlin, and Paris, he set out not to paint what he saw but what he had felt.
From the early 1890s he worked on what he called the Frieze of Life, a loosely linked cycle on love, anxiety, and death: 'The Sick Child', 'Madonna', 'Anxiety', 'The Dance of Life', and, most famously, 'The Scream'. His simplified, flowing forms and dissonant colour — a sky the colour of blood, faces reduced to masks — scandalised audiences; his 1892 Berlin exhibition was shut after a week, the resulting uproar helping give birth to the Berlin Secession. He worked his canvases hard, scraping and reworking and even leaving them outdoors in what he called 'the horse cure'.
A breakdown in 1908 and a course of treatment marked a turn toward calmer, brighter late work back in Norway. Munch died near Oslo in January 1944 and left his enormous remaining output to the city, the core of the Munch Museum. 'The Scream' — of which he made several painted and printed versions — has become one of the few images in modern art recognised almost everywhere on earth.
The words the record keeps using: anguished, haunted, raw, melancholic, expressive, introspective.
At a glance
- Lived 1863–1944
- Origin Norwegian
- Worked in Paris, Oslo (Kristiania)
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Symbolism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Polychrome woodblock print, Engraving and etching
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- The Sick Child, 1885 (National Museum, Oslo)
The first, painfully personal breakthrough of Munch's career, drawn from the death of his sister Sophie: a red-haired girl props herself against a pillow beside a grieving woman who bows her head and cannot look up.… - The Scream, 1893 (National Museum / National Gallery, Oslo)
The 1893 version in Oslo of the most famous image of modern anxiety. A hairless, skull-like figure stops on a bridge, hands pressed to its head, mouth open, while a blood-red sky writhes above a blue-black fjord. Munch… - Madonna, 1894 (National Museum, Oslo)
Munch's radically modern Madonna: not a serene virgin but a woman in the ecstasy and vulnerability of sexual love, eyes closed, a red halo above her, at the fused moment of desire, conception, and mortality. Some… - Anxiety, 1894 (Munch Museum, Oslo)
Munch fuses the setting of 'The Scream' with the crowd of his Kristiania street scenes: under the same blood-red, undulating sky, a procession of mask-faced figures in dark clothes advances straight toward the viewer,… - The Dance of Life, 1899 (National Museum, Oslo)
A summarising work of the Frieze of Life: on a moonlit shore couples dance, while the same woman appears three times — in white as innocent youth reaching for a flower, in red as the dancing lover in a man's arms, and…
What was said
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.
Munch recalled repainting 'The Sick Child' again and again over that year, scratching it out and letting the paint run, trying endlessly to recapture the first impression he had seen — the transparent pale skin, the trembling mouth, the tired eyes — rather than a finished picture.
Munch described his linked paintings as a Frieze of Life — a poem of life, love, and death — meant to be seen together as a single sequence drawn from lived experience rather than as separate pictures.
Lineage
Learned from Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Félix Vallotton
What would Edvard make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Edvard Munch", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Edvard · Keep a life moment the way Edvard would · Pictures made after Edvard