Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter, born near Løten, in eastern Norway, on December 12, 1863. He died on January 23, 1944, at Ekely, his estate on the edge of Oslo. He is best known for The Scream, painted in 1893.
His pictures of grief, love and jealousy show what a person feels rather than what the eye sees, and that makes him a forerunner of Expressionism, the art of raw inner feeling that took hold in Germany after him.
The Scream itself is often misread. Under a blood-red sky, on a road above a dark fjord, a figure in the foreground presses its hands to its head. In Munch's own account, the scream belongs to nature, and the figure hears it.
When the picture went on show in Germany, its title said as much: Der Schrei der Natur, the scream of nature.
Munch knew that kind of fear from the inside. Death took his mother and his sister while he was still a boy, and in his forties drink and anxiety drove him into a clinic for eight months.
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The family lived in Kristiania, the Norwegian capital, which took the name Oslo only later. Tuberculosis, a slow disease of the lungs, took his mother, Laura Cathrine, in 1868, when Edvard was five. Her sister, Karen Bjølstad, came to run the household.
In 1877 the same disease reached his older sister, Sophie, and she died at fifteen. Her sickroom would come back in his paintings again and again.
The first of them was The Sick Child, painted in 1885 and 1886. A pale girl rests against a large white pillow, and a woman bows her head beside her, their hands joined. The whole canvas is built of whites, grays and greens.
Munch worked on it from memory for more than a year, painting, scrubbing out and painting again. The surface ended up worn and hazy, as if seen through tears.
The Sick Child and a jeering Kristiania
Kristiania hated it. At the Autumn Exhibition of 1886, the yearly show of Norwegian art in the capital, visitors jeered in front of the canvas. The critics wanted clear outlines, and where the joined hands should have been they found little more than blobs of paint.
Andreas Aubert, one of those critics, called it "merely a discarded half-rubbed-out sketch." Munch did not give in. The girl on her pillow would come back to his easel for decades.
What You'll Discover
Why he kept painting the same sick girl.
What he heard on that road.
Why Berlin shut his show.
Who wrote on the painting.
What eight months in a clinic did.
How his last winter ended.