Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter born in Løten in 1863.
“In my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.”
Edvard Munch’s childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement, and the dread of inheriting a mental condition that ran in his family, and he studied at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania, now Oslo.
Edvard Munch enrolled in a technical college in 1879 to study engineering, where he excelled in physics, chemistry, and math, but frequent illnesses interrupted his studies and he left the college the following year to become a painter, much to his father’s disappointment.
Edvard Munch was influenced by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec during his time in Paris, and in Berlin, Edvard Munch met the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg as he embarked on his major canon “The Frieze of Life.”
Edvard Munch’s best-known work, “The Scream,” was conceived in Kristiania, and according to Edvard Munch, he was out walking at sunset when he heard “the enormous, infinite scream of nature,” and the painting’s agonized face is widely identified with the angst of the modern person.
- Born in Løten, Norway, in 1863.
- Studied at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania.
- His father viewed art as an “unholy trade.”
- Painted “The Scream” in 1893.
- Died in 1944 in Oslo.
In 1881, Edvard Munch enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design, and his teachers were the sculptor Julius Middelthun and the naturalistic painter Christian Krohg, and in 1883, Edvard Munch took part in his first public exhibition.
Edvard Munch’s full-length portrait of Karl Jensen-Hjell earned a critic’s dismissive response: “It is impressionism carried to the extreme. It is a travesty of art,” and his nude paintings from this period survive only in sketches, except for “Standing Nude” from 1887.