Edvard Munch, known for his iconic painting, The Scream, was a Norwegian painter who lived from 1863 to 1944.
Born in the village of Adalsbruk in Loten, Norway, he had one older and three younger siblings. The family moved to Oslo when Edvard Munch was one. He spent most of his formative years in Oslo, where his mother died in 1868 and later his older sister too at the young age of 15. He himself was ill often and kept out of school, tutored by schoolmates, aunt and his father, who was temperamentally nervous. There was a strain of mental illness in the family, which is said to have created fears in Munch about his own sanity. Later in his life he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression according to some biographers.
When he was born, Norway was becoming more industrialized, and in 1860s, large scale migration to North America was taking place. In 1865, Norway had ~1.7 million people. During his lifetime, in 1880s, the king appointed a prime minister establishing parliamentarism in Norway and the union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905, leading to complete independence. Although primarily neutral during the first world war, by the time Munch died, Germany had occupied Norway. Today’s Norway is known as one of the world’s richest countries, Munch lived much before that age of oil.
Edvard Munch had a remarkable talent for drawing from an early age but received minimal artistic training. By his teens, art dominated his interests, and he began to have exposure to other artists as well. He copied paintings to learn from them. Although he initially enrolled in a technical college to become an engineer, he soon quit (to his father’s disappointment) to become a painter. His goal, per his diary: “In my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.”
In Norwegian art, Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857) was
regarded as the father of Norwegian landscape painting. Munch would have
perhaps seen his works. Others included Johannes Flintoe and Adolph Tidemand. During
his growing up period, and his painting period, the impressionists and
neo-romanticists were gaining ground in Norway. He enrolled in an art school in
Kristiania in 1881, much inspired by Impressionism. By the time of his visit to
Paris (1889), just before his father passed away, and then Berlin (1892), Munch
started painting in his own original style, finding that “Impressionist idiom
did not allow sufficient expression”. He
painted many versions of the Scream between 1893 and 1895. He lived in Berlin for four years, and then moved
to Paris in 1896, returning to Kristiania in 1897.
“In Paris, he learned much from Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, especially their use of colour. In Berlin, he met the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, whom he painted, as he embarked on his major canon The Frieze of Life, depicting a series of deeply-felt themes such as love, anxiety, jealousy and betrayal, steeped in atmosphere.”(Google Arts & Culture)
He was a multifaceted artist, working in water colours to oil, etching to painting, symbolism to expressionism. He painted many portraits, self-portraits, landscapes and studies. He never married, and eventually, for the last 20 years of his life, lived in solitude on his estate in Oslo painting to the very end of his life. He left behind a large collection of paintings, of which, The Scream (1895) changed hands at US$ 120 million in 2012. It is 15th most expensive artwork ever sold at an auction, the most expensive being Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (sold for US$450 million in 2017).
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This brief profile (drawn primarily from Wikipedia) is partly an exercise and part
preparation of reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘So Much Longing in So Little Space’, where I wish to understand that the path that Munch set for himself,
that of understanding life and himself through painting, how far could he travel
on the same.
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