Vampire. Edvard Munch · Public domain · source

Edvard Munch

Public domain1863-1944·Norwegian·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born on 12 December 1863 at Adalsbruk in Loten, Norway, and died in Oslo on 23 January 1944. A painter and one of the great printmakers of his time: from the 1890s he worked in etching, lithography and woodcut, often reworking his own painted motifs as prints.

Why they matter

He painted states of mind rather than scenes: illness, jealousy, desire, grief and fear, reduced to a few figures and a charged landscape. The Scream became the image of modern anxiety, and his prints carried those motifs further than any painting could, which is why the printed Munch matters as much as the painted one.

What to buy

Prints: the National Museum in Oslo, which owns the first painted Scream of 1893, sells a 50 x 70 cm poster of it on matte photographic paper, printed for the museum by DAIDDA. That is the museum-made route. Books: the standard work for the prints is Gerd Woll's Edvard Munch: The Complete Graphic Works (revised edition, Philip Wilson, 2012), a catalogue raisonne of all 748 registered prints with their editions, states and reprints; it is also the Munch Museum's reference for authentication. Look for it secondhand. Originals: the paintings are museum pieces, but Munch was a printmaker on a large scale - Woll puts his output at 20,000 to 25,000 impressions - so lifetime prints do come to auction. The iconic motifs (The Scream, Madonna, Vampire) are the costliest; portraits and lesser-known subjects are the way in. Be careful: he usually signed in pencil in the lower margin, but not always, and his numbering is inconsistent, so a signature or a number proves little. Match the sheet to its Woll number, and treat any "Scream lithograph" with suspicion: only about 45 impressions were printed before the stone was resurfaced, and posters and facsimiles of it are everywhere.

Notes

On his death he left the works still in his possession to the city of Oslo; the Munch Museum opened with them in 1963, and holds about 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings and 18,000 prints. The National Museum in Oslo has the other great group, including The Sick Child, Madonna and the 1893 Scream, which was given to the National Gallery in 1910. In the Nazi campaign against "degenerate art", 82 of his works were removed from German museums. The Scream exists as two paintings (1893 and 1910), two pastels (1893 and 1895) and the 1895 lithograph; the 1895 pastel, the only version in private hands, sold at auction on 2 May 2012. The 1893 painting was stolen on 12 February 1994 and recovered that May; the 1910 painting and Madonna were taken from the Munch Museum by armed men in 2004 and recovered in 2006.

Story

In the upper left corner of the 1893 Scream, faint in pencil, is a sentence in Norwegian: "Kan kun vaere malet af en gal Mand!" - "Could only have been painted by a madman!" A Danish critic noticed it when the picture was shown in Copenhagen in 1904 and took it for vandalism by a member of the public. The painting's first Norwegian showing, at Blomqvist in Kristiania in October 1895, had gone badly. The critic Henrik Grosch wrote that one could no longer consider Munch a serious man with a normal brain, and at an evening debate at the Student Society the medical student Johan Scharffenberg pointed to his Self-Portrait with Cigarette as proof that Munch was not a normal human being; the poet Sigbjorn Obstfelder defended him. In 2021 the National Museum in Oslo photographed the inscription in infrared, which makes pencil carbon stand out, and its senior curator Mai Britt Guleng had the handwriting compared with Munch's own. It matched. The vandal was Munch himself, who had taken the insult and written it onto his own finished painting.

Key works

The Sick Child (1885-1886) - Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
The Scream (1893) - Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
Madonna (1894-1895) - Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
Self-Portrait with Cigarette (1895) - Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
The Scream (1910) - Munch Museum, Oslo

Edvard Munch

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

Originals

See also