Edvard Munch biography

Synopsis

Biography

Edvard Munch was born on December 12, 1863, in Löton, Norway, the second of five children. In 1864, Munch moved with his family to the city of Oslo, where his mother died four years later of tuberculosis. This was the beginning of a series of familial tragedies in Munch’s life: His sister Sophie also died of tuberculosis in 1877 at the age of 15, another of his sisters spent most of her life institutionalized for mental illness, and his one brother died of pneumonia at age 30.

In 1879, Munch began attending a technical college to study engineering but left just a year later when his interest in art overtook his interest in engineering. In 1881, he enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design. The next year, he rented a studio with six other artists and entered his first show, at the Industries and Art Exhibition.

Three years of study and practice later, Munch received a scholarship and traveled to Paris, where he spent three weeks. After returning to Oslo, Munch began working on new paintings, one of which was The Sick Child, which he would finish in 1886. In what would be seen as the first work to represent Munch’s break from the realist style, the painting symbolically captures intense emotion on the canvas—that surrounding the death of his sister some eight years before.

From 1889 (the year his father died) to 1892, he lived mainly in France, funded by state scholarships, embarking on the most productive, and troubled, period of his artistic life. It was at this stage that he undertook a series of paintings that he called the Frieze of Life, for which he created 22 works for a 1902 Berlin exhibition. With paintings bearing such titles as Melancholy, Jealousy, Despair, Anxiety and The Scream—the last of which, painted in 1893, would go on to become one of the most famous paintings ever produced—Munch’s mental state was on full display, and his style varied greatly depending on which emotion had taken hold of him while working on each particular painting. The collection was a huge success, and Munch soon became a known entity in the art world, finding brief happiness in a life otherwise colored by excessive drinking, family misfortune and mental distress.

Success was not enough to tame Munch’s inner demons for long, and as the 1900s began, his drinking became out of control. In 1908, hearing voices and suffering paralysis on one side, he collapsed and soon checked himself into a private sanitarium, where he drank less and regained some mental composure. In spring of 1909, he checked out, eager to get back to work, but as history would show, most of his great works were behind him.