Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was born December 12, 1863 at Engelhaugen Farm in Loten, Norway. He was the son of an Army Medical Corps doctor and one of five children. In 1899, he entered technical college to study engineering, but the following year, his love of art took hold and he began to concentrate on his painting,leaving Technical College.

In 1881 he entered the School of Design, studying freehand drawing and modeling under sculptor Julius Middelthum. A year later, Munch and six other artists rented a studio together and began to exhibit their work. In 1883, the group exhibited in Oslo and Munch quickly became comfortable in the avant garde in Norway. Munch received a scholarship for study and travel led to Paris, where he was impressed by Manet's work at The Louvre. During this time, Munch began work on three of his best known canvases on his return to Norway: "The Sick Child," "The Morning After" and "Puberty." His first one man exhibit followed in 1889 in Oslo.

In 1892, Munch exhibited paintings in Berlin that caused such violent outcry that the exhibit closed after only a week. During this time, Munch also began work on his famous series of paintings, "The Frieze of Life," a thematic series he described thusly: "The Frieze is conceived as a series of decorative pictures which will collectively present a picture of life. They are traversed by the curved shoreline; beyond lies the ever-moving sea, and under the tree-tops is life in all its fullness, its variety, its joys and its sufferings." Munch used the beach at Aagaarstrand as his setting, which can be seen in "Starry Night."

The most famous canvas from the "Frieze" series is "The Scream" (1893), a canvas which depicts the anguish of alienation and loneliness as no other painting ever has. With swirling textures and bold colors, the painting captures a moment of anxiety and terror. Munch described the origin of the work: "One evening I was walking along a path - on one side lay the city and below me the fjord. I was tired and ill - I stopped and looked out across the fjord - the sun was setting - the clouds were dyed red like blood. I felt a scream pass through nature; I painted this picture - painted the clouds as real blood. The colors were screaming." Munch returned to this subject in "Anxiety," a similar canvas executed in 1984.

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