Edvard Munch Prints

About Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 at Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, and grew up in Kristiania, now Oslo, in a household marked by the early deaths of his mother and sister. He studied at the Royal School of Art and Design from 1881, where Christian Krohg taught him, and a state scholarship in 1889 took him to Paris to study under Léon Bonnat. In 1892 an exhibition of his work in Berlin was shut down after a week, and the scandal made his reputation; he spent much of the following decade between Berlin, Paris and Norway, developing the cycle of paintings he called the Frieze of Life. The Scream exists in four versions, two painted and two in pastel, made between 1893 and 1910, and Madonna was painted in 1894 to 1895; both were also issued as lithographs. From 1916 he lived at Ekely outside Oslo, where he died in January 1944, leaving his remaining work to the city, which opened the Munch Museum in 1963. Munch simplified figures into flowing outlines and set them against bands of sky and water, a vocabulary that still looks modern. On a wall the images hold their charge at any size because the composition, not the detail, carries the feeling.