Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in Løten, Norway, into a family stalked by illness and death — his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, his sister Sophie when he was thirteen, and his father’s religious fanaticism cast a shadow of guilt and anxiety over his childhood. These experiences fuelled an art of raw emotional power that broke decisively with the naturalistic conventions of nineteenth-century painting and laid the groundwork for Expressionism.
The Scream (1893), depicting a figure on a bridge clasping its head as the sky writhes in bands of orange and red, has become the universal symbol of modern anxiety — an image so embedded in popular culture that its power can seem diminished, until one stands before the original and feels the full force of Munch’s desperation. It was part of a larger cycle of paintings he called “The Frieze of Life,” exploring love, anxiety, and death through images of haunting intensity: Madonna, The Sick Child, Puberty, The Dance of Life.
Munch’s influence on German Expressionism — Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter — was direct and acknowledged. His woodcuts and lithographs, with their raw, gouged surfaces and stark contrasts, revolutionized printmaking. After a nervous breakdown in 1908, Munch’s art became calmer and more monumental, and he spent his last decades in relative seclusion near Oslo, producing a vast body of work. He bequeathed his entire estate — over a thousand paintings and thousands of prints and drawings — to the city of Oslo.