Edvard Munch

Norwegian painter and printmaker whose work mapped anxiety, desire, jealousy, illness and death onto the visible landscape with an emotional directness that prefigured Expressionism by a decade. Munch grew up surrounded by death: his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five; his older sister Sophie, to whom he was deeply attached, died of the same disease at fifteen; his father, an army doctor of extreme evangelical piety, responded to these losses with religious intensity that Munch found both suffocating and psychologically formative. The losses saturate the imagery of his mature work in ways that go beyond simple biography — they became the material from which he built a visual vocabulary for universal psychological experience. The Frieze of Life, as he called the connected series of paintings he worked on across the 1890s — The Sick Child, Puberty, The Scream, The Kiss, Jealousy, Madonna, Ashes — was conceived as a poem about love and death, an attempt to chart the full emotional arc of a human life. The Scream (1893), which exists in four versions (two paintings, two pastels), is the most reproduced and parodied image of psychological anguish in Western art; its central figure is not screaming so much as registering the scream of the blood-red sky. Munch himself wrote in his diary that the image came to him in a moment of panic while walking with friends on a road above Christiania (now Oslo). He spent two years in a Copenhagen sanatorium in 1908–09 recovering from what he called a nervous breakdown, and the work after that is noticeably lighter in mood, the figures more stable, the palette warmer. He lived to eighty, surviving the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War by hiding most of his collection at his house at Ekely outside Oslo. He bequeathed more than a thousand works to the city of Oslo, which houses them in the Munch Museum.