Works by Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch made his own state of mind the subject of his art, painting love, anxiety and jealousy, and he remade many of those pictures as woodcuts and lithographs.

In Kristiania, now Oslo, the nihilist Hans Jæger urged the young Munch to make his inner life the subject of his painting. In Summer Evening, painted in 1889 at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo fjord, his sister Inger and the critic Sigurd Bødtker stand in the shade of a porch, she with her arms folded, while the right half of the canvas opens onto a sunlit garden and a blue sea.

In Berlin in the 1890s he began the cycle he later named The Frieze of Life, about love, anxiety, jealousy and betrayal. Munch disliked parting with his paintings, so he turned many of them into prints. His 1895 lithograph of The Scream is printed in black on cream paper, the sky in long waves, the figure's hands pressed to a bald, oval head. In the hand-coloured woodcut Evening, Melancholy I of 1896, a scene on the shore at Åsgårdstrand, the heavy grain of the board shows in the print, and watercolour and gouache, added by hand, make each impression different.

After a breakdown in 1908 his painting grew brighter, with broad, loose strokes and little black. In Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu of 1919 he sits wrapped in a brown robe in a wicker chair, mouth slightly open, before an orange wall. Paintings make up nearly everything below, many from the 1910s and 1920s, several of them self-portraits.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Cleveland Museum of Art.