M2-Expressionism & Edvard Munch

EDVARD MUNCH & EXPRESSIONISM
Edvard Munch is a Norwegian born expressionist painter. His best-known work, The
Scream, has become one of the most iconic images of world art. In the late 20th century, he
played a great role in German expressionism and the art form that later followed; namely
because of the strong mental anguish that was displayed in many of the pieces that he
created.
Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863, and was raised in Christiania (known as Oslo
today). He was related to famous painters and artists in their own right, Jacob Munch
(painter), and Peter Munch (historian). Only a few years after he was born, Edvard Munch's
mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, and he was raised by his father. Edvard's father suffered
from mental illness, and this played a role in the way he and his siblings were raised. Their
father raised them with the fears of deep-seated issues, which is part of the reason why the
work of Edvard Munch took a deeper tone, and why the artist was known to have so many
repressed emotions as he grew up.
In 1885, Edvard Munch traveled to Paris, and was extremely influenced

by Impressionistssuch as Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, and followed by the post-
impressionism artists Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin. In fact, the main
style of Munch's work is post-impressionism, and focused on this style.
A majority of the works which Edvard Munch created, were referred to as the style known as
symbolism. This is mainly because of the fact that the paintings he made focused on the
internal view of the objects, as opposed to the exterior, and what the eye could see. Symbolist
painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural
world in the objective, quasi-scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism.
Many of Munch's works depict life and death scenes, love and terror, and the feeling of
loneliness was often a feeling which viewers would note that his work patterns focused on.
These emotions were depicted by the contrasting lines, the darker colors, blocks of color,
somber tones, and a concise and exaggerated form, which depicted the darker side of the art
which he was designing.
Edvard Munch passed away in 1944, in a small town which was just outside of his home
town in Oslo. Upon his death, the works which he had created, were not given to family, but
they were instead donated to the Norwegian government, and were placed in museums, in
shows, and in various local public buildings in Norway. Due to the fact that all of this work
which Edvard Munch had created, was donated to the Norwegian government, the country
decided to build the Munch Museum of Art. This was done to commemorate his work, his
life, and the generosity which he showed, in passing his artwork over to the government, so
that it could be enjoyed by the general public, rather than be kept locked up by the family.
The Scream, 1893 by Edvard Munch
Essentially The Scream is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on

Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk, after his two
companions, seen in the background, had left him. Fitting the fact that the sound must have
been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal state, Munch renders it in a style
which if pushed to extremes can destroy human integrity. As previously noted, the flowing
curves of art nouveau represent a subjective linear fusion imposed upon nature, whereby the
multiplicity of particulars is unified into a totality of organic suggestion with feminine
overtones. But man is part of nature, and absorption into such a totality liquidates the
individual.
Several facts indicate Munch was aware of the danger of art of this sort for a neurotic
humanist like himself. He soon abandoned the style and rarely if ever again subjected a
foreground figure to this kind of radical and systematic distortion. At the top of another
version of the subject (National Gallery, Oslo) he wrote: 'Can only have been painted by a
madman.' He certainly had a horror of insanity, which had afflicted his sister Laura. Within
the picture, he has set up a defence, in the form of the plunging perspective of the roadway
and its fence, which preserves a rational world of three dimensions, holding at bay the swell
of art nouveau curves. Safe in this rational world, the two men in the distance remain
unequivocally masculine. In the foreground unified nature has come close to crossing the
fence, close enough to distort the form and personality of the protagonist. But the fence still
protects it from total absorption into subjective madness.
EXPRESSIONISM:
Expressionism is a modernist movement that first developed around 1905 and continued until
around the end of World War II. Expressionist artists sought to represent the world from a
subjective perspective by using color and distortion of the subject to evoke moods and
achieve an emotional effect. Expressionism was initially very popular as an avant-garde style
of painting and expanded to other art forms including poetry, architecture, dance and music,
with influences intermingling at various points in history.
https://www.edvardmunch.org
https://www.artlex.com/art-movements/expressionism/

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EDVARD MUNCH & EXPRESSIONISM

In 1885, Edvard Munch traveled to Paris, and was extremely influenced

Essentially The Scream is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on

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