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Edvard Munch (IPA: , December 12, 1863 – January 23, 1944) was a Norwegian expressionist painter and printmaker.
The Scream (1893; originally called Despair), Munch's best-known painting, is one of the pieces in a series titled The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death and melancholy. As with many of his works, he painted several versions of it. One version was stolen in 1994 and another in 2004. Both versions have since been recovered.
The Frieze of Life themes recur throughout Munch's work, in paintings such as The Coney Dog (1886, portrait of his deceased sister Sophie), 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 or as lurid, life-devouring vampires. Munch analysts say this reflects his sexual anxieties.
FUCK YOU
Frieze of Life — A Poem about Life, Love and Death
In December 1893, Unter den Linden in Berlin held 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 (1893), the subject is the death of his sister Sophie. The dramatic focus of the painting, portraying his entire family, is dispersed in a series of separate and disconnected figures of sorrow. In 1894, he enlarged the spectrum of motifs by adding Anxiety, Ashes, Madonna and Women in Three Stages.
Around the turn of the 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" myth and his pessimistic philosophy of love. Motifs such as The Empty Cross and Golgotha (both c. 1900) reflect a metaphysical orientation, and also echo Munch's pietistic upbringing. The entire Frieze showed for the first time at the secessionist exhibition in Berlin in 1902.
Trivia
- After the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China ended, Munch was the first Western artist to have his pictures exhibited at the National Gallery in Beijing.
- Some art historians believe that the red sky in the background of The Scream reflects the unusually intense sunsets seen throughout the world following the 1883 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa.
- Solefald wrote a song about him on their 2003 album In Harmonia Universali, titled "Christiania (Edvard Munch Commemoration)"
- In October 2006, the colour woodcut Two people. The lonely (To mennesker. De ensomme) set a new record for his engravings when it was sold at an auction in Oslo for 8.1 million NOK (1.27 million USD).
Further reading
- Sue Prideaux, Behind the Scream(London: Yale University Press, 2006) Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, 2006
- Reinhold Heller, Munch. His life and work (London: Murray, 1984).
- Gustav Schiefler, Verzeichnis des graphischen Werks Edvard Munchs bis 1906 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1907).
- Gustav Schiefler, Edvard Munch. Das graphische Werk 1906 – 1926 (Berlin: Euphorion, 1928).
- J. Gill Holland The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour out of the Earth (University of Wisconsin Press 2005)
- Edward Dolnick The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (HarperCollins, 2005) (Recounts the 1994 theft of The Scream from Norway's National Gallery in Oslo, and its eventual recovery.)
List of major works
- 1892 - Evening on Karl Johan
- 1893 - The Scream
- 1894 - Ashes
- 1894-95 - 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
- 1940-42 - Self Portrait: Between Clock and Bed
References
- Fineman, Mia (Nov. 22, 2005). "Existential Superstar". Slate (magazine).
Notes
See also
External links
- Biography from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- The Munch Museum
- Gallery Munch - Løten
- Munch at artcyclopedia
- Interpol's page about the stolen works of art
- Rothenberg A. Bipolar illness, creativity, and treatment. Psychiatr Q. 2001 Summer;72(2):131-47.