MUNCH, Edvard (Løten, 1863 – Oslo, 1944)
Edvard Munch was born into a wealthy family on 12 December 1863 in the farm “Engelhaug”, about 50 km north of present day Oslo, then called Christiania, where they moved to in 1864.
In 1869 his mother died of tuberculosis and nine years later Sophie, Edvard’s eldest sister, died of the same illness. He himself grew up with poor health. On the advice of his father, he began studying engineering in 1879 at the Technical Institute in Oslo, but he left after one year, when he decided to train as an artist. In 1881 he enrolled at the Royal Drawing School in Oslo, where he remained until 1886. As a student, he stood out among the young painters, like Bertrand Hansen and Karl Nordberg, influenced by Christian Krohg, the great Norwegian Naturalist painter, and Frits Thaulow. He presented his work for the first time in 1883 at the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Oslo, and began to participate in the Autumn Exhibitions in that city. He also attended courses with landscape artist Frits Thaulow at the open-air art academy founded by him. In addition, he joined the group of young artists headed by the writer Hans Jaeger.
In 1885, thanks to a scholarship, he travelled to Antwerp and Paris, where he came across symbolist painting, essential in Munch’s artistic world. The innovations he brought to his art meant that, when in 1889 he held his first personal exhibition with 110 works and participated again in the Autumn Exhibition, his works were strongly criticised. That same year, which coincided with the death of his father, he returned to Paris. There, he pursued his training in Léon Bonnat’s academy. He spent the following years travelling between France, Norway and Germany, where in 1892 he was invited to hold an exhibition with the Artists’Association of Berlin, and where his work had an enormous influence, thanks to the Berliner Secession, created in that period. Until the year 1908, he spent most of his time in Germany, where he met August Strindberg, Arno Holz and the historian and critic Julius Meier-Graefe, and contributed to the magazine Pan. Those were crucial years in his art: in 1893 he painted The Scream, Vampire, The Voice, the first version of Madonna, and began the famous Frieze of Life. In 1894 he started making etchings and lithographs. In 1897 he participated in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris with ten paintings from the Frieze of Life. Important paintings such as Girls on the Bridge and The Dance of Life date from 1899 and 1900. In 1900 he exhibited eighty-five paintings and ninety-five graphic works in Oslo. In 1902 he showed twenty-two paintings from the Frieze of Life at the Berliner Secession.
In 1908 the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo, at the request of its director Jens Thiis, acquired five paintings by Munch. By then, Munch’s fame was well established. In the autumn of that year he was admitted to Dr Jacobson’s neurological clinic in Copenhagen, where it took him eight months to recover from his alcohol addiction, which had already made him seek treatment on previous occasions. In the spring of 1909 he wrote the poem Alpha & Omega, which he illustrated with lithographs. He bought a property in Hvitsten, in the fjord of Oslo, where he worked the following years on the panels for the decoration of the Main Hall of the University of Oslo. In 1912 Munch was given a whole room at the Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne, and held many personal and group exhibitions.
In 1916 he purchased the property named Ekely, in the surroundings of Oslo, where he spent much of his time up until the end of his life, although he continued to travel tirelessly during the following decades. In 1922, the Kunsthaus in Zurich held a retrospective exhibition with 462 works, gathering paintings and graphic work. The following year he was granted membership to the Deutsche Akademie der Künste. In 1927 the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo held an important retrospective exhibition, commissioned by Jens Thiis. In 1930, became almost totally blind in his right eye due to bursting of a blood vessel. This circumstance made him reduce, and finally interrupt, his devotion to work. When, in 1937, the national-socialist government organised the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Munich and in other German cities, Munch was among the humiliated painters. In 1942, two years before his death, the first retrospective exhibition of the Norwegian painter took place in America. The artist died on 23 January 1944, at the age of eighty. He donated all his works to the city of Oslo, where the Munch-Museet opened in 1963.
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