Edvard munch biography handout

Edvard Munch was born in Norway in and, with the notable exception of the two decades from to spent traveling, studying, working and exhibiting in France and Germany, he lived there until his death in He was active as a painter from the s until shortly before his death, though the greater part of his oeuvre, and certainly the better-known part, was produced before the early s.

During his lifetime of work, he made one of the most significant and enduring contributions to the development of Modernism in the twentieth century.

Edvard munch gallery

In his themes and subject matter, in the manner in which he gave voice to these, and in his handling of paint and the graphic media especially woodcut and lithography , Munch was profoundly original and radical. He is one of the handfuls of artists who have shaped our understanding of the human experience and transformed the ways in which it might be visually expressed.

Munch's nomadic and self-imposed exile's life in Europe, from his mid-twenties to mid-forties - especially in the cosmopolitan, creatively fertile centers of Paris and Berlin - was undoubtedly vital to the shape of his art. It established the necessary detachment from the 'untroubled communal myths' of his homeland and the troubled passage of his young manhood.

On the one hand, he was freed from the constraints of his past, and the real and perceived limitations of provincial life. On the other hand he was closely associated with the largely Nordic avant-garde writers and artists of his day who shared and promoted his belief in the necessity of using private, subjective experience to create 'universal' statements and imagery.

His was the beginning of an age that celebrated the life of the individual rather than of community or society. Perhaps more than any other artist, Munch has given pictorial shape to the inner life and psyche of modern man, and is thus a precursor in the development of modern psychology. His images of existential dread, anxiety, loneliness and the complex emotions of human sexuality have become icons of our era.