The Scream
Edvard Munch · 1893
Edvard Munch
Norway · 1863–1944
The Norwegian who painted his own fear so exactly that the whole century recognised itself, and modern art got its most famous scream.
- 80
- Self-portraits across his life
- 1,100
- Paintings in the Munch Museum, Oslo
- 18,000
- Prints in the Munch Museum, Oslo
Soul painting
Munch was a Norwegian born in 1863 and raised in Kristiania, the town that is Oslo today. At the state school of art and design there he drifted into Bohemia, and the circle of the writer Hans Jæger pressed on him the idea that mattered most: put yourself, your own inner weather, on the canvas. He would later coin a name for the result, soul painting.
Paris gave him the means. Looking hard at Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec taught him how much colour alone can carry, and back home The Sick Child, haunted by the death of his sister, opened the run of soul paintings and cut him loose from Impressionism.
The Frieze of Life
Berlin was where the great project took shape: the cycle of pictures he named the Frieze of Life, a poem of love, anxiety and death worked and reworked across decades. There he also met Strindberg and painted him. The whole Frieze hung together for the first time in 1902, at the Berlin Secession.
The motifs return across oils, pastels and prints: the femme fatale, jealousy, the stages of a life, the parting of lovers. Shadow and colour ring the figures like weather made visible, signalling menace, fear or desire, until the people themselves read as symbols rather than portraits.
Breakdown and late years
Collapse came in 1908, a crisis of the nerves that took the alcohol with it. After it, slowly, came the world: his city began to like him, and its museums began buying. The Nazis later struck his pictures from German galleries as degenerate, but most survived the war. He died peacefully, asleep, in January 1944, having signed nearly everything he owned over to the city of Oslo; the museum that grew from the bequest keeps close to 27 000 of his works, among the largest such collections anywhere.
Known works
Puberty
Edvard Munch · 1895
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design
A girl naked on the edge of a bed, arms crossing her body, her shadow spreading on the wall; a Frieze of Life image standing where Symbolism ends and the Expressionism he helped found begins.
Dance of Life
Edvard Munch · 1899–1900
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design
Dancers on a bright shore, a woman in white, a woman in black, the embracing pair between them; a key Frieze canvas of love, its fears and its endings, given to Norway's National Gallery in 1910 the year it was bought.
Ashes
Edvard Munch · 1895
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design
After the embrace in the wood: he bends, finished, and she stands staring, hair undone; the title says the fire is out.
Melancholy
Edvard Munch · 1891
A bowed head on a shore at dusk, a couple making for a boat behind; shown in Oslo in 1891 and counted the first Symbolist picture by a Norwegian, a motif he carried through five canvases and two woodcuts.
Kiss by the Window
Edvard Munch · 1892
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design
Two faces merged into one dark shape against the night-lit pane; part of the life-cycle series of love, death and return.
Self-Portrait with Cigarette
Edvard Munch · 1895
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design
Smoke and shadow, the face surfacing between them; the cigarette read in the 1890s as a mark of the deviant and the dissolving, and the picture stirred trouble at its first showing in 1895.
Bathing Men
Edvard Munch · 1908
Upper Belvedere
Two men facing front at the water's edge and a third plunging headlong into the waves; the theme came to him at the Baltic bathing resort of Warnemünde, and it is his first open treatment of the naked male body.
Park in Kösen
Edvard Munch · 1906
Upper Belvedere
The spa park of Bad Kösen, where Munch spent a cure for his nerves across 1906 and 1907, pulled apart into veils of green, trunks leading the eye down corridors of colour.
Paul Herrmann and Paul Contard
Edvard Munch · 1897
Upper Belvedere
Two men at a café table caught in a fizz of painted hatching, the etcher's line gone loose in oil; it belonged to Walther Rathenau in Berlin before Vienna's Neue Galerie acquired it from his estate.
Night in Saint-Cloud
Edvard Munch · 1890
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design
A dark room in Saint-Cloud outside Paris, a man lost in thought at the window, the town's lights scattered through the blue night; painted on a state bursary during his French years, and bought for the National Gallery in 1917.
Sources
- MUNCH, Oslo, “Who was Edvard Munch?”
- MUNCH, Oslo, “5 things you should know about The Scream”
- Wikipedia, “Edvard Munch”
- Wikipedia, “The Scream”
- Wikipedia, “Puberty (Munch)”
- Wikipedia, “The Dance of Life (Munch)”
- Wikipedia, “Ashes (Munch)”
- Wikipedia, “Melancholy (Munch)”
- Wikipedia, “Kiss by the Window”
- Wikipedia, “Self-Portrait with Cigarette”
- Belvedere, Vienna, “Park in Kösen”
- Belvedere, Vienna, “Bathing Men”
- Belvedere, Vienna, “Paul Herrmann and Paul Contard”
- Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, “Night in Saint-Cloud”
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