Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose psychologically intense imagery made him one of the seminal figures of European Expressionism and one of the most emotionally powerful artists of the modern era. Born in Løten, Hedmark, he grew up in Christiania (Oslo) in a family scarred by illness and death: his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, his beloved sister Sophie died of the same disease at fifteen, and his father and another sister suffered severe psychological crises. These early traumas became the subject matter of his greatest works. He trained at the Royal School of Art and Design in Christiania under Christian Krohg, a naturalist painter who introduced him to contemporary European realism. A state scholarship took him to Paris in 1885 and again from 1889 to 1892, where he absorbed the colour of the Post-Impressionists and the emotional directness of Van Gogh and Gauguin. His 1892 exhibition in Berlin caused a scandal—the conservative Artists' Association closed it after a week—but this notoriety brought him to the attention of the German avant-garde, and he spent much of the 1890s in Berlin and Hamburg, producing the great cycle of paintings known as the Frieze of Life. The Scream (1893), The Madonna (1894), and Anxiety (1894) are among the works from this decade that established his international reputation. Around 1908 he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent six months in a Danish sanatorium; after his recovery his style became less tortured, more colourful, and he received major Norwegian commissions including the murals for the University of Oslo Aula. He spent the last decades of his life in Norway, working in near-isolation at Ekely outside Oslo, surrounded by the vast collection of works he refused to sell.

Munch's style is fundamentally an art of psychological projection: the landscape, figures, and objects in his paintings are distorted, coloured, and composed to externalise inner emotional states rather than describe external reality. His most characteristic early works use undulating, rhythmic lines—derived partly from Art Nouveau, partly from the visual grammar of anxiety itself—to suggest the vibration of emotion through space. Colour is used symbolically and expressively: the lurid reds and yellows of The Scream's sky, the deathly green-white of sick faces, the deep blues of melancholy. His paint surface in the 1880s and 1890s—as in the early beach landscapes and portraits in this batch—is more conventional, showing his naturalist training, but his emotional directness is already present in works like Hans Jæger (1889).

Munch is one of the founders of Expressionism and among the most influential artists in European modern art. His Frieze of Life cycle—including The Scream, which has become one of the most recognisable images in world art—established a visual vocabulary for psychological anxiety, grief, and desire that influenced German Expressionism (especially Die Brücke), the Vienna Secession, and a vast range of twentieth-century art. His printmaking, particularly his innovative woodcuts, was equally influential. With 203 paintings in the Palette database, he is one of the most extensively represented artists in the collection.