Why the artist Munch was guarded by black angels and other little-known facts from the life of the "nervous genius"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Edvard Munch was one of the few artists whose intimate self-expression laid the foundation for a new direction in modernist art. Drawing on his own hectic life, his world famous works blur the fine lines between fear, desire, passion and death, thereby evoking all sorts of memories, thoughts and sensations.

1. Difficult childhood

He was born in Adalsbruck and about a year later the family moved to Oslo. When Edward was five years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, and nine years later his older sister died. His younger sister suffered from mental disorders and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, while his oppressive father was prone to fits of rage.

All these unpleasant events led to the fact that the artist often began to depict them in his works, mentioning that illness, madness and death were black angels who guarded his cradle, accompanying him throughout his life.

As a fragile child, Edward often had to leave school for months, but he found salvation in the ghost stories of Edgar Allen Poe and in the fact that he learned to draw.

2. Bohemia of Christiania

Edward first studied engineering, but eventually dropped out, much to the dismay of his father, and entered the Royal Oslo School of Art and Design. While living in Oslo, he became friends with a bohemian group of artists and writers known as La Boheme Christiania.

The group was led by the writer and philosopher Hans Henrik Jaeger, who believed in a spirit of free love and creative expression. Edward's artistic interests were encouraged by various senior club members, who urged him to paint based on personal experience, as seen in early grief-stricken works such as Sick Child, a tribute to Munch's deceased sister.

3. Influence of impressionism

After a trip to Paris, Edward adopted the French Impressionist style, painting with lighter colors and loose, flowing brush strokes. Just a year later, he was attracted to the Post-Impressionist style of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec, adopting their heightened sense of reality, bright colors and free, wandering lines.

Interest in synthetism and symbolism prompted him to penetrate even deeper into himself in search of artistic inspiration and the study of inner fears, as well as the innermost desires. After the death of his father, he wrote in his memory the introspective and melancholic "Night at Saint-Cloud".

4. Scandal in Berlin

By 1892, Edward had developed a signature style of free flowing lines combined with intense, heightened colors and expressively crafted colors, elements that added dramatic effect to his emotional subjects.

After moving to Berlin, he held a solo exhibition at the Union of Berlin Artists, but explicit images of nudity, eroticism and death, combined with crudely applied paints, caused such a stir that the exhibition had to be closed. However, the artist benefited from the scandal that made him quite famous in Germany. He continued to develop and showcase his work in Berlin over the next several years.

5. Frieze of life

The 1890s were the most fruitful period of Edward's career, as he cemented his obsessions with eroticism, isolation, death, and loss in a vast array of paintings and drawings. He used a variety of new media to express his ideas, including engraving in the form of etchings, woodcuts and lithographs, and photography.

From 1893 he began to work on his huge suite of twenty-two paintings, entitled The Frieze of Life. The series followed a narrative sequence from the awakening of love between a man and a woman to the moment of conception, as seen in the erotic Madonna, to their decline into death.

In the late 1890s, he preferred to depict figures in imaginary, symbolic landscapes that came to represent the journey of life, although the locations were often based on the countryside around Oslo, to which he often returned.

6. Fickle art

Edward never married, but he often portrayed relationships between men and women that were filled with tension. In works such as Two Men, each figure stands apart, as if an abyss lay between them. He even portrayed women as menacing figures, as seen in his vampire series, where a woman bites a man's neck.

His art reflected the changing times in which he lived, as traditional religious and family values were replaced by a new, bohemian culture throughout Europe. Munch's most famous motif "The Scream", from which he made several versions, became the embodiment of the cultural concerns of the time and was compared with the existentialism of the twentieth century.

7. Nervous breakdown

Edward's decadent lifestyle and overworking eventually overtook him, causing him to suffer a nervous breakdown. The artist was hospitalized in Copenhagen and spent eight months on a strict diet and electroshock therapy.

While in the hospital, he continued to create various works of art, including the Alpha and Omega series, in which he explored his relationships with those around him, including friends and lovers. After leaving the hospital, Edward returned to Norway and lived in quiet isolation at the direction of his doctors.

His work moved into a more relaxed, less stressful style as he captured the natural light of the Norwegian landscape and its beauty, as seen in the painting The Sun.

Various self-portraits of the time had a darker, melancholy tone, showing his constant preoccupation with death. Despite this, he lived a long, fruitful life and died at the age of eighty in the small town of Eckeli near Oslo. The Munch Museum was built in Oslo in 1963 in his honor, celebrating the vast and vast legacy he left behind.

8. Legacy

Munch's work is in museum collections around the world, and his paintings, drawings and prints reach staggeringly high auction prices, reaching several million per painting, making him a favorite with public and private collectors.

Despite the fact that Edward was never married, he had a tumultuous personal life. One day, due to his relationship with a wealthy young woman named Tulla Larsen, the artist was shot in the left arm.

He bought his first camera in Berlin in 1902 and often photographed himself, both naked and clothed, in what may be one of the earliest examples of selfies ever recorded.

During his career, Edward created a huge number of works, including over a thousand paintings, four thousand drawings and almost sixteen thousand prints. Although he is best known as a painter, Edward has revolutionized modern printmaking by opening the environment to a new generation. The techniques he researched included etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs.

An avid writer, he wrote diaries, stories and poems, reflecting on topics such as nature, relationships, and loneliness. Edward's most famous motif, The Scream, has been the subject of over four different works. There are two colored versions, and two more are done in pastels on paper. He also reproduced the image in the form of a lithographic print, with a small print run.

In 1994, two men broke into the Oslo Museum in broad daylight, stealing the painting The Scream and leaving a note ridiculing the guards. The criminals demanded a $ 1 million ransom, which the museum refused to pay, and the Norwegian police eventually returned the undamaged work that same year.

Along with many of his avant-garde contemporaries, Munch's art was recognized as "degenerate art" by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, with the result that eighty-two of his paintings were confiscated from German museums at the outbreak of World War II. Seventy-one of the works have been recovered in Norwegian museums after the war, while the last eleven have never been found.

Many years after his death, the artist was honored at home in Norway by the fact that his image was printed on a thousand kronor banknote in 2001, and on the reverse was a detail of his iconic painting "The Sun".

Undoubtedly, the work of Edvard Munch is priceless, and his contribution to art is undeniable. But nonetheless, the works of Paolo Veronese to this day leave few people indifferent … Perhaps he is one of the few artists who can boast of such immense popularity both during his lifetime and after it, and Goethe himself admired his paintings.