Sunday, July 23, 2017

Artist of the day, July 24: Edvard Munch, Norwegian expressionist painter



















Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced German Expressionism in the early 20th century. One of his best known works is The Scream of 1893.

Edvard Munch was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist preoccupied with matters of human mortality such as chronic illness, sexual liberation, and religious aspiration. He expressed these obsessions through works of intense color, semi-abstraction, and mysterious subject matter. Following the great triumph of French Impressionism, Munch took up the more graphic, symbolist sensibility of the influential Paul Gauguin, and in turn became one of the most controversial and eventually renowned artists among a new generation of continental Expressionist and Symbolist painters. Munch came of age in the first decade of the 20th century, during the peak of the Art Nouveau movement and its characteristic focus on all things organic, evolutionary and mysteriously instinctual. In keeping with these motifs, but moving decidedly away from their decorative applications, Munch came to treat the visible as though it were a window into a not fully formed, if not fundamentally disturbing, human psychology.

Edvard Munch grew up in a household periodically beset by life-threatening illnesses and the premature deaths of his mother and sister, all of which was explained by Munch's father, a Christian fundamentalist, as acts of divine punishment. This powerful matrix of chance tragic events and their fatalistic interpretation left a lifelong impression on the young artist, and contributed decisively to his eventual preoccupation with themes of anxiety, emotional suffering, and human vulnerability.

The frequent preoccupation in Munch's work with sexual subject matter issues from both the artist's bohemian valuation of sex as a tool for emotional and physical liberation from social conformity as well as his contemporaries' fascination with sexual experience as a window onto the subliminal, sometimes darker facets of human psychology.



self-portrait, 1881
The Scream, 1893

Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895

 Spring Day, 1890

 Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1892

Inger på Stranden.1889

 Night in Saint-Cloud, 1890.

At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo, 1892

 Kiss by the window, 1892

 Death in the sickroom, 1893.

 Girl Looking out the Window, 1893

 Starry Night, 1893

Vampire, 1893

Anxiety, 1894

 Eye in Eye, 1894

Kvinnen i tre stadier, 1894

Melankoli, 1894

Add caption

 Ashes, 1895

1895 Madonna

Puberty, 1895

 Sjalusi, 1895

 Ved dødssengen, 1895.

Separation. 1896

Sittende ryggvendt kvinneakt, 1896

 Summer Night. The Voice, 1896

The Kiss, 1897

Mann og kvinne, 1898


The dance of life, 1900

Train smoke, 1900

 Consul Christen Sandberg, 1901

The girls on the bridge, 1901


Landgangsbroen, 1903

Self-Portrait in Hell, 1903

The Brooch. Eva Mudocci, 1903

Galloping horse, 1912

The Yellow Log, 1912

 Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed, 1940



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