Edvard Munch: A Biography

Edvard Munch: A Biography

Edvard Munch is regarded as a pioneer in the Expressionist movement in modern painting. At an early stage Munch was recognized in Germany and central Europe as one of the creators of a new movement in art. Munch and many artists of the time needed to express their feelings about all the change that was happening around.

Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863; he knew how a person's emotional pain feels. He was the son of an Army Medical Corp doctor who brought patients at home all the time. His mother died when he was only five years of age. His oldest sister died of disease at the age of fifteen. Edvard himself was often ill. One of his youngest sisters was also diagnosed with a mental illness at an early age. With death and illness as a major factor in his life he turned that into his own work.

After a year at Technical school to study engineering, Munch became dedicated to his artwork. He left Technical school and entered into a school of design.

Sometime in 1886 he produced the painting titled The Sick Child. In this painting his thoughts of the death of his older sister were let out and they were rather haunting. Around this same year Munch finished a series of paintings title The Sick Child. In this same year when all this occurred another catastrophe happened in Munch's life, the death of his father.

After having a one-man exhibition at Oslo, he managed to gain state scholarships, which enabled him to move to France. He had a way with French Impressionist techniques and while living in Paris he explored a way of painting that would focus on the art symbolism and expressing of emotions through applications of paint and certain techniques.

Munch had a series of paintings that were exhibited in a major art show in Berlin. The series was entitled The Frieze of Life, all six of these paintings caused such shock that the show was forced to shut down. Munch had so much feelings, passions, anguish, stress, sorrow, and pain in his paintings that people just didn't understand what was going on. He thought that people were just afraid of the truth. Munch had let his feelings out, not through rage or anger, but through art, some people that attended the show saw more than just art they saw one mans feelings. Munch's painting began having a big part in German Expressionism.

Over the years Munch was considered to be in an expressionist group called Der Blaue Reiter,

...