All oil paintings of Edvard Munch (19 Century, Norwegian,
Symbolism) will be hand painted by our professional artists. Let HandmadePiece help you bring better museum quality art reproductions of Edvard Munch to home. Photo preview of the finished art will be offered before delivery, global free shipping.
1863-1944 • Norwegian • Painter • Symbolist
" Do not think that my art is sick despite what Scharffenberg and many others believe. Those kind of people do not understand the true function of art, nor do they know anything about its history." - Munch
The Scharffenberg mentioned in the quotation above was a 26-year-old medical student who connected Munch's radical images with the incidence of mental illness in his family. Munch's considered reply is quoted above, though he also wrote, at one time, illness, madness and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle." The 1895 exhibition that drew attention to both his art and his sanity included Munch's best-known work, The Scream (1893). Also in that exhibit was a self-portrait in which he is smoking a cigarette. Late- I 9th-century moralists saw social decline in indulgences such as smoking: "A race which is regularly addicted, even without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form . . . begets degenerate descendants who, if they remain exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend to the lowest degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc.," as the physician Max Nordau wrote in his study of deviancy, Degeneration (1894). Such was the backlash to the literary likes of Oscar Wilde (in whose The Picture of Dorian Gray, smoking is synonymous with eroticism), BAU DELAIRE, and Mallarme, and artistic themes explored by SYMBOLISTS like BEARDSLEY. Cigarette smoking was still rare in Norway, and Munch's self -portrait could only reflect his belief that the creative artist found inspiration in living outside the boundaries of ordinary, "healthy" bourgeois life. It also allied him with the Bohemians of Paris, where he went to work and where he was much influenced by TOULOUSE-LAUTR EC, van GOGH, and GAUGUIN. The Scream shows a figure on a bridge whose open mouth lets out some primal sound that seems to express unbearable terror and pain. (In 1994 The S cream was stolen from the National Art Museum in Oslo. During negotiations the thieves, who attempted to ransom the painting for $400,000, left fragments of its frame at various places around Oslo over a period of 10 days preceding the May 7 recovery.) Munch was also taken with the late-19th-century obsession with evil, especially the destructive FEMMEFATALE, whom Munch portrayed in Madonna (1895). Munch sought the core of emotion and bore the brunt of that quest with a complete mental breakdown in1908. After that, he returned home to Norway, and to paint less wrenching, anguished pictures.