Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch: The Enormous, Infinite Scream of Nature

In 1892 the Union of Berlin Artists invited a little-known Norwegian to exhibit, then closed the show under pressure after a week. The scandal was christened the Munch Affair, and it made him. Munch was delighted — he understood, earlier than most, that in the new century notoriety and reputation had become the same commodity. He stayed in Berlin four years, drank with Strindberg, and sketched out the cycle of paintings about love, jealousy, anxiety and death that he would spend the rest of his life rearranging. One of them was of a figure on a bridge with its hands over its ears.

The Sickroom Childhood

He was born on 12 December 1863 at Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, the second of five children of Christian Munch, a military doctor, and Laura Catherine Bjølstad. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, when he was five. His favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, died of the same disease at fifteen in 1877. His younger sister Laura developed mental illness and was institutionalised. Munch himself was sickly enough that, as the Munch Museum notes, long winters in bed kept him out of school altogether.

His father supplied the rest. "My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious — to the point of psychoneurosis," Munch wrote, and Christian used his dead wife as a disciplinary instrument, telling the children she was watching from heaven and grieving over their misbehaviour. Munch drew the obvious conclusion and never stopped drawing it: "I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies — the heritage of consumption and insanity."

"Soul Painting"

He enrolled in engineering at technical college in 1879 and quit in 1880, to his father's fury — the old man considered art an unholy trade. At seventeen he had already written in his diary: "It is my decision now to become a painter." In 1881 he entered the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania, studying under the sculptor Julius Middelthun and the painter Christian Krohg, who became his mentor and, repeatedly, his public defender.

The decisive influence was not academic. The Kristiania Bohème, the city's nihilist-anarchist literary set, took him up, and its presiding figure Hans Jæger pushed him toward what they called soul painting — the doctrine that an artist's proper subject was his own psychological states. It is the hinge of Munch's entire career, the moment he stopped trying to record appearances and started trying to record feeling, which took him out of Impressionism and toward Symbolism and then Expressionism.

The Sick Child

*The Sick Child* (1886) was the first result and the first disaster. Painting his dead sister's last illness, Munch produced a scraped, worked-over, deliberately unfinished surface that Norwegian critics took as incompetence or provocation. Gustav Wentzel called him a madman. The physician Johan Scharffenberg declared the work insane on the grounds that Munch came from an insane family — an argument whose circularity did not trouble anyone at the time. Krohg alone defended it.

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In Paris between 1889 and 1892 he studied nominally under Léon Bonnat and learned far more from the Post-Impressionists: Gauguin's reaction against realism, and the expressive colour of Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec.

The Frieze of Life, and The Scream

The Berlin years produced *The Frieze of Life*, conceived not as a set of pictures but as a system — love, anxiety, jealousy, betrayal, death, arranged as a single unfolding argument. *Madonna* (1894–95), modelled on Dagny Juel-Przybyszewska, and *Vampire* (1893–94, originally titled *Love and Pain*) belong to it. So does the image that swallowed his reputation.

Munch left an account of where *The Scream* came from: "I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood... Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature." The detail everyone misses is in the sentence. The scream is not the figure's. The figure is stopping its ears against a sound coming out of the landscape, and Munch's formal solution — dissolving sky, fjord and bridge into the same undulating current — makes the environment, not the person, the source of the terror. He made four versions between 1893 and 1910, two in pastel and two painted, plus lithographs. The 1895 pastel sold in 2012 for $119.9 million.

Tulla Larsen, and the Shot

In 1899 he began a relationship with Tulla Larsen, a wealthy and self-consciously liberated woman who wanted to marry him. He did not want to marry anyone. He wrote of himself in the third person: "Ever since he was a child he had hated marriage. His sick and nervous home had given him the feeling that he had no right to get married." An attempted reconciliation around 1902 ended in a violent scene and an accidental shooting that cost him the use of two fingers. Afterwards he took a double portrait of the two of them and sawed it in half. The episode fed directly into *Still Life (The Murderess)* and *The Death of Marat I*.

Dr Jacobson's Clinic

He was by now drinking catastrophically. In the autumn of 1908 he wrote: "My condition was verging on madness — it was touch and go." He committed himself to Dr Daniel Jacobson's clinic in Copenhagen for eight months of diet, rest and "electrification," the fashionable nerve treatment of the day. It worked. Jacobson told him to keep to a few good friends and stop drinking in public, and Munch, remarkably, complied.

The painting changed with him: broad, loose strokes of vibrant colour, plenty of white space, almost no black. Museums began buying. Norway gave him the Order of St Olav. In 1911 he beat Emanuel Vigeland in the competition to decorate the assembly hall of the University of Oslo and produced, between 1914 and 1916, eleven paintings covering some 2,400 square feet, among them *The Sun*, *History* and *Alma Mater*. "I wanted the decorations to form a complete and independent world of ideas," he said, "and I wanted their visual expression to be both distinctively Norwegian and universally human." From 1916 he lived at Ekely outside Oslo, where the garden and surrounding landscape produced what the Munch Museum calls a large and colourful late output.

The Swastikas at the Funeral

The Nazis declared his work degenerate and stripped eighty-two paintings from German museums; Hitler consigned him rhetorically to "the caves of their ancestors." Under the occupation of Norway from 1940 Munch lived in fear that his collection would be seized, hid almost all of it, and refused every attempt to enlist him.

On 19 December 1943 explosions in Oslo blew out the windows at Ekely. The eighty-year-old went outside in the cold to watch and paint the fire, caught a respiratory infection, and died on 23 January 1944. He had wanted a quiet cremation. Instead the occupation government seized the funeral: Quisling announced the state would pay for it, swastika wreaths were placed around the coffin, and Nazi papers eulogised him as "a shooting star of the Norse race" — a final indignity visited on a man whose life's work they had spent a decade calling diseased.

Why Edvard Is Called a Genius

The Munch Museum, which holds the estate, describes him as one of Modernism's most significant artists and a pioneer of Expressionism from the beginning of the 1900s. The specific innovation behind that claim can be stated exactly: Munch worked out how to make the depicted world carry the emotion instead of the depicted face.

This sounds small and is not. Western painting had for centuries conveyed feeling through expression, gesture and allegory — the figure emotes, the setting stays neutral. Munch inverted the relationship. In *The Scream* the sky, water and bridge writhe while the figure is reduced almost to a cipher, so the viewer's anxiety has no safe ground to stand on. In *The Sick Child* the scraped surface itself does the grieving. He also thought serially rather than in single pictures: *The Frieze of Life* treats paintings as movements in one composition, and he returned to the same motifs across decades and media — painting, lithograph, woodcut, photography — not from poverty of invention but because he regarded a motif as something to be worked, not finished. The German Expressionists took the whole method more or less intact.

The counter-case has teeth. Munch repeated himself relentlessly, and it is not always clear where investigation ends and the market begins; there are four Screams and many versions of nearly everything, and a painter making replicas of his hits is doing something other than pure inquiry. His draughtsmanship was never distinguished by academic standards, and his critics from 1886 onward were not wholly wrong that he could not, in the conventional sense, draw. Most awkwardly, the work generally judged strongest is the work made while he was drinking himself toward collapse: the output after Dr Jacobson cured him is brighter, calmer and, by wide consensus, less important, which invites the queasy suggestion that his illness was doing the work — a suggestion that romanticises suffering and that the sources cannot actually prove. And his fame now rests overwhelmingly on one image so thoroughly absorbed into merchandising and emoji that it is nearly impossible to see. Being the author of the most reproduced anxiety in history is not the same as being a great painter, though in his case he happened to be both.

Legacy

Munch left everything to the city of Oslo: roughly 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings and 18,000 prints, the broadest single holding of any major modern artist, which opened as the Munch Museum in 1963. He had said what he was doing plainly enough. "In my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself." And: "I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of Man's urge to open his heart." A century of Expressionism took him at his word.