Today marks the 162nd anniversary of the birth of Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter. Last summer, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma travelled to Oslo,visited the Munchmuseet and enjoy the works of one of the most incredible, and at the same time, disturbing, painters in history.
The Scream may be his most famous work, but sometimes the most popular or well-known is not what you like the most or necessarily the best. Art is wonderful because it can create different emotions and reactions in people and because we each end up having our own preferences.
Although Claire and The Grandma almost never agree on anything, this time, they both agree that their favourite Munch work is The Sun.
The Grandma has been reading an interesting article written by Tom Gurney (TheHistoryofArt.org) that talks about this fascinating work, whose original version can be seen at the Oslo University assembly hall.
The Sun, by Edvard Munch, is considered by many as one of the greatest works of modern mural paintings. The enormous painting currently occupies a central spot at the Oslo University assembly hall. It stands tall in a central position as an undeniable display of the power of imagery.
The painting pictures the sun as it spreads out large rays of light in every direction to illuminate the entirety of a northern landscape. The rays flow down the ocean, touching bare rocks and a strip of greenery that separates the sea and land. You can almost not distinguish the sun from the waterfall. In a white ball of light, it shines from the heavens and pours to the sea, creating the impression that the sun is melting down to the earth. Munch also manages to capture the rays splitting into different colour variations as they emerge from a bright white ball of light. An observer can clearly see as they change from white to yellow to red, blue then green as they extend towards the vast horizon. If you focus your attention, you'll notice the clear, straight horizon line as well, dividing the sky from the water. The painter also managed to bring out the sun's circular movements, giving out the feeling that the picture is moving back and forth.
It has this pull that almost draws the observer towards it. Initially, the painting was proposed to be a Nietzschean mountain of man, rising towards a sky covered by thesun. However, upon reflection and following advice from friends, the painter relinquished the controversial idea and instead chose to depict the sun in all its glory, in this pure, intense, and powerful form. The painting was clearly more colorful when compared to his previous work, which had a more morbid, melancholic theme. This can be attributed to the fact that it was painted in the year 1909, after Munch has come back from hospital, battling acute anxiety and excessive drinking. His paintings during the time are described as being harmonious with bold, vital brush strokes.
Inspiration for the painting can be said to be drawn from various painters of the time. The shafts of light can be affiliated with the German expressionism of Die Brucke. The symmetry of the painting evokes some elements of Ferdinand Holdler's visions. And Munch's avant-garde and abstractness can also be compared to Wassily Kandinsky, as he symbolically expresses his fascination with the sun as the source of all life. The Godlike complex is apparent as the sun shows its authority as a focal point of life. It has its hand on everything from the sea to the rocks, reaching out to eternity and declaring its stance as the main provider.
Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of her closer friend TinaPicotes.
Tina is a great painter and expert in Art and they have been talking about the incredible Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter, and his amazing and interesting works. EdvardMunch was born on a day like today in 1863 and Tina Picotes and The Grandma have wanted to homage him talking about his life and his universal paintings.
Before Tina's arrival, The Grandma has started to read a new novel titled Treadingon Dreams-Stories from Ireland written by Clare West.
Edvard Munch (12 December 1863-23 January 1944) was a Norwegianpainter, whose best known work, The Scream, has become one of the most iconic images of world art.
His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dread of inheriting a mental condition that ran in the family. Studying at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania, today's Oslo, Munch began to live a bohemian life under the influence of nihilist Hans Jæger, who urged him to paint his own emotional and psychological state, soul painting. From this would presently emerge his distinctive style.
Travel brought new influences and new outlets. In Paris, he learned much from Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, especially their use of colour. In Berlin, he met Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, whom he painted, as he embarked on his major canon The Frieze of Life, depicting a series of deeply-felt themes such as love, anxiety, jealousy and betrayal, steeped in atmosphere.
The Storm by Edvard Munch, 1893
But it was back in Kristiania that his legendary work The Scream was conceived. According to Munch, he was out walking at sunset, when he heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature. That agonised face is widely identified with the angst of modern man.
Between 1893 and 1910, he made two painted versions and two in pastels, as well as a number of prints. One of the pastels would eventually command the fourth highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction.
As his fame and wealth grew, his emotional state remained as insecure as ever. He briefly considered marriage, but could not commit himself. A breakdown in 1908 forced him to give up heavy drinking, and he was cheered by his increasing acceptance by the people of Kristiania and exposure in the city's museums. His later years were spent working in peace and privacy. Although his works were banned in Nazi Germany, most of them survived World War II, ensuring him a secure legacy.
Edvard Munch was born in a farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, to Laura Catherine Bjølstad and Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie, and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas, Laura Catherine, and Inger Marie. Laura was artistically talented and may have encouraged Edvard and Sophie. Edvard was related to painter Jacob Munch and to historian Peter Andreas Munch.
The family moved to Christiania, renamed Kristiania in 1877, and now Oslo, in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard's mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877.
In 1879, Munch enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, where he excelled in physics, chemistry and math. He learned scaled and perspective drawing, but frequent illnesses interrupted his studies. The following year, much to his father's disappointment, Munch left the college determined to become a painter. His father viewed art as an unholy trade, and his neighbors reacted bitterly and sent him anonymous letters. In contrast to his father's rabid pietism, Munch adopted an undogmatic stance toward art. He wrote his goal in his diary: in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.
Anxiety by Edvard Munch, 1894
In 1881, Munch enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania, one of whose founders was his distant relative Jacob Munch. His teachers were sculptor Julius Middelthun and the naturalistic painter Christian Krohg. That year, Munch demonstrated his quick absorption of his figure training at the Academy in his first portraits, including one of his father and his first self-portrait.
In 1883, Munch took part in his first public exhibition and shared a studio with other students. His full-length portrait of Karl Jensen-Hjell, a notorious bohemian-about-town, earned a critic's dismissive response: It is impressionism carried to the extreme. It is a travesty of art. Munch's nude paintings from this period survive only in sketches, except for Standing Nude (1887). They may have been confiscated by his father.
During these early years, Munch experimented with many styles, including Naturalism and Impressionism. Some early works are reminiscent of Manet.
Munch continued to employ a variety of brushstroke techniques and color palettes throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, as he struggled to define his style. His idiom continued to veer between naturalistic, as seen in Portrait of Hans Jæger, and impressionistic, as in Rue Lafayette.
His Inger On the Beach (1889), which caused another storm of confusion and controversy, hints at the simplified forms, heavy outlines, sharp contrasts, and emotional content of his mature style to come. He began to carefully calculate his compositions to create tension and emotion. While stylistically influenced by the Post-Impressionists, what evolved was a subject matter which was symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind rather than an external reality.
In 1889, Munch presented his first one-man show of nearly all his works to date. The recognition it received led to a two-year state scholarship to study in Paris under French painter Léon Bonnat.
Munch arrived in Paris during the festivities of the Exposition Universelle (1889) and roomed with two fellow Norwegian artists. His picture Morning (1884) was displayed at the Norwegian pavilion.
Munch was enthralled by the vast display of modern European art, including the works of three artists who would prove influential: Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec -all notable for how they used color to convey emotion.
The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893
Munch was particularly inspired by Gauguin's reaction against realismand his credo that art was human work and not an imitation of Nature, a belief earlier stated by Whistler. By 1892, Munch formulated his characteristic, and original, Synthetistaesthetic, as seen in Melancholy (1891), in which color is the symbol-laden element.
Considered by the artist and journalist Christian Krohg as the first Symbolist painting by a Norwegian artist, Melancholy was exhibited in 1891 at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo.
The Scream exists in four versions: two pastels (1893 and 1895) and two paintings (1893 and 1910). There are also several lithographs of The Scream (1895 and later).
The 1895 pastel sold at auction on 2 May 2012 for US$119,922,500, including commission. It is the most colorful of the versions and is distinctive for the downward-looking stance of one of its background figures. It is also the only version not held by a Norwegian museum.
The 1893 version was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo in 1994 and recovered. The 1910 painting was stolen in 2004 from The Munch Museum in Oslo, but recovered in 2006 with limited damage.
The Scream is Munch's most famous work, and one of the most recognizable paintings in all art. It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern man. Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms, and employing a high viewpoint, it reduces the agonized figure to a garbed skull in the throes of an emotional crisis.
With this painting, Munch met his stated goal of the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own self. Munch wrote of how the painting came to be: I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature. He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, for several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, 'The Scream?' I was stretched to the limit -nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again.
Separation by Edvard Munch, 1896
In 1896, Munch moved to Paris, where he focused on graphic representations of his Frieze of Life themes. He further developed his woodcut and lithographic technique. In the autumn of 1908, Munch'sanxiety,compounded by excessive drinking and brawling, had become acute.
The outbreak of World War I found Munch with divided loyalties, as he stated, All my friends are German but it is France I love. In the 1930s, his German patrons, many Jewish, lost their fortunes and some their lives during the rise of the Nazi movement. Munch found Norwegian printers to substitute for the Germans who had been printing his graphic work. Given his poor health history, during 1918 Munch felt himself lucky to have survived a bout of the Spanish flu, the worldwide pandemic of that year.
Munch spent most of his last two decades in solitude at his nearly self-sufficient estate in Ekely, at Skøyen, Oslo.
In 1940, the Germans invaded Norway and the Nazi party took over the government. Munch was 76 years old. With nearly an entire collection of his art in the second floor of his house, Munch lived in fear of a Nazi confiscation.Seventy-one of the paintings previously taken by the Nazis had been returned to Norway through purchase by collectors, the other eleven were never recovered, including The Scream and The Sick Child, and they too were hidden from the Nazis.
Munch died in his house at Ekely near Oslo on 23 January 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. His Nazi-orchestrated funeral suggested to Norwegians that he was a Nazi sympathizer, a kind of appropriation of the independent artist. The city of Oslo bought the Ekely estate from Munch's heirs in 1946; his house was demolished in May 1960.
When Munch died, his remaining works were bequeathed to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen, it opened in 1963. The museum holds a collection of approximately 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings, and 18,000 prints, the broadest collection of his works in the world.
.jpg)
