Eduard munch biography
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Edvard Munch
Norwegian
1863, Loten, Norway
1944, Oslo, Norway
Edvard Munch, Edvard Munch at Ekely, 1938; photo: courtesy the Munch Museum, Oslo
Biography
Originally published in Oxford Art Online.
by Reinhold Heller
Norwegian painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Especially concerned with the expressive representation of emotions and personal relationships, he was associated with the international development of Symbolism during the 1890s and recognized as a precursor of Expressionism, particularly in his paintings and woodcuts.
Childhood and early work, to 1884
Edvard Munch was born the second of five children to Laura Cathrine Bjølstad and Dr. Christian Munch, a military doctor. Living in tenement houses in the workers’ suburbs of Christiania (which became Kristiania in 1877 and Oslo in 1925), the family, descended from Norway’s cultural aristocracy but economically impoverished, was doubly alienated. Unable to move freely among the educated and
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Edvard Munch
Norwegian painter (1863–1944)
For the film, see Edvard Munch (film).
Edvard Munch (MUUNK;Norwegian:[ˈɛ̀dvɑɖˈmʊŋk]ⓘ; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter. His 1893 work The Scream has become one of Western art's most acclaimed images.
His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dread of inheriting a mental condition that ran in the family. Studying at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania (Oslo), Munch began to live a bohemian life beneath the influence of the nihilist Hans Jæger, who urged him to paint his own emotional and psychological state ('soul painting'); from this emerged his distinctive style.
Travel brought new influences and outlets. In Paris, he learned much from Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri dem Toulouse-Lautrec, especially their use of color. In Berlin, he met the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, whom he painted, as he embarked on a major series of paintings he woul
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Edvard Munch Biography
Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863 and, with the notable exception of the two decades from 1889 to 1909 spent traveling, studying, working and exhibiting in France and Germany, he lived there until his death in 1944. He was active as a painter from the 1880s until shortly before his death, though the greater part of his oeuvre, and certainly the better-known part, was produced before the early 1920s. During his lifetime of work, he made one of the most significant and enduring contributions to the development of Modernism in the twentieth century. In his themes and subject matter, in the manner in which he gave voice to these, and in his handling of paint and the graphic media (especially woodcut and lithography), Munch was profoundly original and radical. He is one of the handfuls of artists who have shaped our understanding of the human experience and transformed the ways in which it might be visually expressed.
Munch's nomadic and self-imposed ex