What makes edvard munch unique

The thefts have only added posthumous misfortune and notoriety to a life filled with both, and the added attention to the purloined image has further distorted the artist's reputation. With the aim of correcting the balance, a major retrospective of Munch's work, the first to be held in an American museum in almost 30 years, opened last month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The Munch who materializes in this show is a restless innovator whose personal tragedies, sicknesses and failures fed his creative work. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. As demonstrated in a recent exhibition of self-portraits at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, much of Munch's work can be seen as self-portraiture.

Even for an artist, he was exceptionally narcissistic. Although he began his artistic career as a student of Norwegian painter Christian Krohg, who advocated the realistic depiction of contemporary life known as Naturalism, Munch developed a psychologically charged and expressive style to transmit emotional sensation. Indeed, by the time he raised his brush to the easel, he typically no longer paid attention to his model.

Influenced as a young man by his exposure in Paris to the work of Gauguin and van Gogh, who both rejected the academic conventions of the official Salon, he progressed toward simplified forms and blocks of intense color with the avowed purpose of conveying strong feelings. In early , in a huff, Munch quit the class of an esteemed Parisian painting teacher who had criticized him for portraying a rosy brick wall in the green shades that appeared to him in a retinal afterimage.

In ways that antagonized the contemporary art critics, who accused him of exhibiting "a discarded half-rubbed-out sketch" and mocked his "random blobs of color," he would incorporate into his paintings graffiti-like scrawls, or thin his paint and let it drip freely.

The radical simplicity of his woodcut technique, in which he often used only one brilliant color and exposed the grain of the wood on the print, can still seem startlingly new.

For the woodcuts, he developed his own method, incising the image with rough broad strokes and cutting the finished woodblocks into sections that he inked separately. His printmaking style, as well as the bold composition and color palette of his paintings, would deeply influence the German Expressionists of the early 20th century, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and August Macke.

Characteristically, though, Munch shunned the role of mentor. He preferred to stand apart. He embraced chance fearlessly. Visitors to his studio were shocked when they saw that he had left his paintings out of doors in all kinds of weather. But he wanted them to look unfinished. He wanted them to be raw and rough, and not smooth and shiny. One of Munch's earliest memories was of his mother, confined with tuberculosis, gazing wistfully from her chair at the fields that stretched outside the window of their house in Kristiania now Oslo.

She died in , leaving Edvard, who was 5, his three sisters and younger brother in the care of her much older husband, Christian, a doctor imbued with a religiosity that often darkened into gloomy fanaticism.

Edvard's aunt Karen came to live with the family, but the boy's deepest affection resided with Sophie, his older sister. Her death nine years later at age 15, also of tuberculosis, lacerated him for life. Dying, she asked to be lifted out of bed and placed in a chair; Munch, who painted many compositions of her illness and last days, kept that chair until his death.

Today it is owned by the Munch Museum. Compounding Edvard's misery was his own fragile health. His father's expressed preference for the next world an alarming trait in a physician only amplified the son's sense of death's imminence. One of Munch's finest self-portraits, a lithograph of , depicts his head and clerical-looking collar materializing out of a black background; a thin white band at the top of the work contains his name and the year, and a corresponding strip below features a skeletal arm.

In a never-ending saga of woe, one of Edvard's sisters spent most of her life institutionalized for mental illness, and his one brother, who had seemed atypically robust for a Munch, died suddenly of pneumonia at Only his youngest sister, Inger, who like him never married, survived into old age.

Edvard's precocious talent was recognized early. How quickly his art and his personality evolved can be seen from two self-portraits. A small, three-quarters profile on cardboard, painted in when he was only 18, depicts the artist's classic good looks—straight nose, cupid's-bow mouth, strong chin—with a fine brush and academic correctness.

Five years later, Munch's palette-knife work in a larger self-portrait is impressionistic and splotchy. His hair and throat blur into the background; his lowered gaze and outthrust chin lend him an insolent air; and the red rims of his eyes suggest boozy, sleepless nights, the start of a long descent into alcoholism.

For a full-length portrait in of Hans Jaeger, the nihilist at the heart of the bohemian crowd in Kristiania with whom Munch increasingly fraternized, the artist posed the notorious writer in a slouch on a sofa with a glass tumbler on the table in front of him and a hat low on his forehead.

Jaeger's head is aslant and his eyes jut forward in a pose both arrogant and dissolute. Along with psychological astuteness, the compelling portrait demonstrates Munch's awareness of recent developments in painting. For Christian Munch, who was struggling to pay the expenses of his son's education, Edvard's association with dubious companions was a source of anguish. Edvard, too, was torn. Though he lacked his father's faith in God, he had nonetheless inherited his sense of guilt.

Reflecting later on his bohemian friends and their embrace of free love, he wrote: "God—and everything was overthrown—everyone raging in a wild, deranged dance of life But I could not set myself free from my fear of life and thoughts of eternal life. Munch saw his mother die of tuberculosis when he was 5, and his sister Sophie died of the same disease when he was Munch gives the By the Death Bed and Death in the Sickroom a universal cast by not specifically depicting what he had witnessed.

Several versions of The Sick Child are surely his sister. Edvard Munch passed away in , in a small town which was just outside of his home town in Oslo.

Upon his death, the works which he had created, were not given to family, but they were instead donated to the Norwegian government, and were placed in museums, in shows, and in various local public buildings in Norway. In fact, after his death, more than paintings that Edvard Munch had created were donated to the government.

In addition to the paintings that he had created during the course of his career, all other art forms he created were also donated to the government. A total of 15, prints were donated, drawings and water-color art was donated, and six sculptures which Edvard Munch had created, were all turned over to the Oslo government, and were used as display pieces in many locations.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color. Due to the fact that all of this work which Edvard Munch had created, was donated to the Norwegian government, the country decided to build the Munch Museum of Art. This was done to commemorate his work, his life, and the generosity which he showed, in passing his artwork over to the government, so that it could be enjoyed by the general public, rather than be kept locked up by the family.

Although the art which he did donate, was spread throughout a number of museums and art exhibits, a majority of them were kept in Oslo. And, most of the works which were donated by Munch, were placed in the Munch Museum of Art , to commemorate the work he did, as well as the unique style, and the distinct movements which he introduced to the world, through the creations which he had crafted.

All Rights Reserved. Frail health and depression plagued the artist throughout his life, leaving him with a firm determination to create art that addressed universal conditions of modern life as distilled from memories of his troubled past.

This work had a profound effect on the young artist, and he gradually abandoned his former Impressionist style in favor of a boldly painted, introspective form of Symbolism. Munch declared in his oft-cited St. There should be living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love. Over the next three years, while living in the Parisian suburb of St.

He exhibited his paintings in Kristiania and Copenhagen, and the success of these exhibitions led to a solo presentation at the prestigious Berlin Artists Association in The exhibition featured a series of six provocative paintings that included early versions of Kiss , Jealousy , and Despair , collectively titled Study for a Series: Love.

The ensuing scandal made the artist an overnight sensation in German modernist circles and led to further exhibitions throughout Germany. Capitalizing on his newfound notoriety, Munch moved to Berlin in With the death of his father in , Munch had become responsible for supporting his family financially.

Although he was exhibiting widely, painting sales were scarce, and his income was largely derived from the admission fees he charged for his controversial exhibitions.