Delphi Collected Paintings of Edvard Munch (Illustrated)

By Peter Russell and Edvard Munch

The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch produced some of the most intensely evocative images of modern art. Building upon nineteenth century Symbolism and greatly influencing German Expressionism, masterpieces such as ‘The Scream’ have left a lasting impression on the history of art. Munch’s harrowing and unique paintings present a paranoid, troubled world, revealing the importance of art for expressing human experience. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing readers to explore the works of great artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Munch’s complete pre-1923 works in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)

* All the Munch paintings in the US public domain — over 1250 paintings, fully indexed and arranged in chronological and alphabetical order
* Includes reproductions of rare works
* Features a special ‘Highlights’ section, with concise introductions to the masterpieces, giving valuable contextual information
* Enlarged ‘Detail’ images, allowing you to explore Munch’s celebrated works in detail, as featured in traditional art books
* Hundreds of images in colour – highly recommended for viewing on tablets and smart phones or as a valuable reference tool on more conventional eReaders
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the paintings
* Easily locate the paintings you wish to view
* Includes a selection of Munch's drawings - explore the artist’s varied works

Please note: to comply with US copyright law, this eBook cannot feature Munch’s post-1922 paintings. When new works enter the public domain, they will be added to the eBook as a free update.

Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting e-Art books

CONTENTS:

The Highlights
FROM MARIDALEN
THE SICK CHILD
SPRING
NIGHT IN SAINT-CLOUD
MELANCHOLY
EVENING ON KARL JOHAN STREET
PUBERTY
SELF PORTRAIT WITH A CIGARETTE
SUMMER NIGHT
PORTRAIT OF HANS JÆGER
DEATH IN THE SICKROOM
VAMPIRE
THE VOICE
MADONNA
THE DANCE OF LIFE
THE SCREAM
JEALOUSY
GIRLS ON THE BRIDGE
PORTRAIT OF WALTER RATHENAU
PORTRAIT OF DR. DANIEL JACOBSON
THE SUN
WORKERS ON THEIR WAY HOME

The Paintings
THE COLLECTED PAINTINGS
DETAILED LIST OF PAINTINGS
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS

The Drawings
LIST OF DRAWINGS

Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to buy the whole Art series as a Super Set

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: May 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786565112

Book preview

Edvard Munch

(1863-1944)

Contents

The Highlights

FROM MARIDALEN

THE SICK CHILD

SPRING

NIGHT IN SAINT-CLOUD

MELANCHOLY

EVENING ON KARL JOHAN STREET

PUBERTY

SELF PORTRAIT WITH A CIGARETTE

SUMMER NIGHT

PORTRAIT OF HANS JÆGER

DEATH IN THE SICKROOM

VAMPIRE

THE VOICE

MADONNA

THE DANCE OF LIFE

THE SCREAM

JEALOUSY

GIRLS ON THE BRIDGE

PORTRAIT OF WALTER RATHENAU

PORTRAIT OF DR. DANIEL JACOBSON

THE SUN

WORKERS ON THEIR WAY HOME

The Paintings

THE COLLECTED PAINTINGS

DETAILED LIST OF PAINTINGS

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS

The Drawings

LIST OF DRAWINGS

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

© Delphi Classics 2017

Version 1

Masters of Art Series

Edvard Munch

By Delphi Classics, 2017

COPYRIGHT

Masters of Art - Edvard Munch (US)

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 9781786565112

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

Contact: [e-mail]

www.delphiclassics.com

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The Highlights

Ådalsbruk, a village in the municipality of Løten, Norway — Munch’s birthplace

Munch, c. 1899

THE HIGHLIGHTS

In this section, a sample of Munch’s most acclaimed works is provided, with concise introductions, special ‘detail’ reproductions and additional biographical images.

FROM MARIDALEN

Edvard Munch was born in a farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, then part of the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, to Laura Catherine Bjølstad and Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura, a woman half his age, in 1861. The family moved to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Early tragic events would have a lasting influence on the mental well-being and subsequent art of Edvard Munch. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did his favourite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. After his mother’s death, the Munch children were raised by their father and their aunt Karen. Often ill for much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard would draw to keep himself occupied. He was tutored by his school friends and his aunt. Christian Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained the children with vivid ghost-stories and the tales of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe.

As Edvard remembered his childhood, Christian’s positive behaviour toward his children was overshadowed by his morbid religious attitude. Munch later reminisced, My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious — to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born. His father reprimanded the children by telling them that their mother was looking down from heaven and grieving over their misbehaviour. The oppressive religious environment, exacerbated by Edvard’s poor health and the narrating of vivid ghost stories, likely served as stimulation for some of his famous macabre visions; the boy felt that death was constantly advancing on him. One of Munch’s younger sisters, Laura, was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Of the five siblings, only Andreas married, but he died a few months after the wedding. Munch later wrote, I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies — the heritage of consumption and insanity.

Christian Munch’s military pay was very low and his attempts to develop a private side practice ultimately failed, keeping his family in genteel poverty. They moved frequently from one inexpensive apartment to another. Munch’s early drawings and watercolours represent these impoverished interiors and the mean objects that haunted them, with such examples as medicine bottles and drawing implements.

By his teenage years, art dominated Munch’s interest. At the age of thirteen, he was entranced by the work of other artists at the newly formed Art Association, where he admired examples from the Norwegian landscape school. He returned to copy the paintings and soon began to experiment in oils. By 1879 he had enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, where he excelled in physics, chemistry and mathematics. He learned scaled and perspective drawing, though frequent illnesses were to interrupt his studies. The following year, much to his father’s displeasure, Munch left the college determined to become an artist.

His father viewed art as an unholy trade and his neighbours reacted bitterly, sending him anonymous letters. In contrast to his father’s austere piety, Munch adopted an undogmatic stance toward art. He wrote his goal in his diary: In my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself. In 1881, Munch enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania. His teachers were sculptor Julius Middelthun and the naturalistic painter Christian Krohg. That year, Munch demonstrated his quick learning of figure training at the Academy in his first portraits, including one of his father and his first self portrait. Another tutor at the Academy was Frits Thaulow, who was a keen admirer of plein air painting in the spirit of the Barbizon school in France. Thaulow particularly prized the landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), a French painter whose vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the innovations of Impressionism. In Munch’s early canvas From Maridalen (1881) we can see the early influence of Corot’s landscapes in the use of pale blue, grey and silver tones, modulated and echoed by details in the road and accompanying wall. In Corot’s landscapes of Avignon he similarly bonds the composition by fusing colour tones of the various features of the composition.

Several key traits in From Maridalen would dominate Munch’s canvases in later years.  Notably, we can see the taut and distant figures, completely separate from each other. The male figure to the right, adopting a brooding attitude, will reappear often in later works, including the famous series Melancholy. Munch was also interested in strong dynamics, as demonstrated by the abnormally long shadow of the tree stretching across the road. Also, the slanting diagonal of the railing cuts down at a severe angle, suggesting an awkward feeling, while the roofs of both buildings project out into the sky straight on, with no three-dimensionality. This direct and abrupt use of delineation evokes a sense of unease that would become a hallmark of the artist’s work.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

‘Villeneuve-les-Avignon’ by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1836

Akershus Fortress, a medieval castle that was built to protect Oslo, the capital of Norway

THE SICK CHILD

In the late 1890’s Munch began to introduce themes of tension and emotion in his compositions. Stylistically influenced by the Post-Impressionists, his evolved subject matter was symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind rather than an external reality. In 1885 Munch’s friend Frits Thaulow gave him the opportunity to travel to Paris, the centre of European artistic life. Though his visit lasted only three weeks, his first exposure to the Parisian art scene would exert a lasting influence on the twenty-one-year old’s career.

Munch was entranced by the avant-garde work of the Impressionists, which were creating a great stir at the time.  He was particularly influenced by the canvases of Pissarro and Monet. However, unlike the Impressionists, that were often inspired to paint what was literally before them, depicting scenes of joy and frivolity, Munch would only borrow from these artists their use of technique. Studying their broad and expressive brushstrokes, while also lightening his palette, Munch continued his practice of producing paintings of sombre and melancholic themes. The shimmering scenes of bourgeois leisure would hold no interest for the young Norwegian artist.

Between 1885 and 1926 Munch produced a series of six paintings under the title The Sick Child. Exploring the theme of the fragility of life, the paintings draw upon Munch’s personal traumatic experiences, especially the loss of his sister to tuberculosis at the age of fourteen, as well as several haunting visits to dying patients with his father. Munch later described the first work in the series, completed in oil in 1885, as ‘a breakthrough in my art’ and it is now generally regarded as his first major work. In the series of paintings, Sophie is typically portrayed on her deathbed, accompanied by a dark-haired, grieving woman assumed to be her aunt Karen. The surviving studies often show her in a cropped head shot. In all the painted versions Sophie is sitting in a chair, obviously suffering from pain, propped by a large white pillow, looking towards an ominous curtain, likely intended as a symbol of death. She is represented with a haunted expression, clutching at the hands of the grief-stricken older woman, whose head is bowed, unable to look upon the suffering girl.

Munch himself nearly died from tuberculosis as a child and so the subject of The Sick Child would become a resonant theme, as a means to record his feelings of despair and guilt that he had been the one to survive and to confront his feelings of loss for his late sister. The six painted works were executed over a period of more than forty years, using a number of different models. The following plate is the original 1886 canvas, housed today in the Oslo’s National Gallery. Munch was only twenty-six when he completed this canvas, which took over a year to finish, and at the time he felt uncertain of his own ability, giving the painting the tentative title Study.

Each version in the series is strongly influenced by the conventions of German Expressionism, while several are heavily impressionistic in technique. The painted versions are built up from thick layers of impasto paint and typically reveal strong broad vertical brushstrokes, suggestive of Monet’s work. The emphasis on verticals gives the work a hazy impression, producing an emotive power — an effect that the art critic Michelle Facos described as presenting the viewer with a scene experienced at close range but hazily, as if viewed through tears or the veil of memory.

When the original version was first exhibited at the 1886 Autumn Exhibition in Christiania, it was ridiculed by spectators, drawing a veritable storm of protest and indignation. Critics were appalled with Munch’s use of impressionistic techniques and his seeming abandonment of line, making the painting appear unfinished. Before long, Munch became known as Norway’s only Impressionist painter.

Detail

Detail

Detail

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The 1907 version, London’s Tate Gallery

SPRING

Many of Munch’s early artworks concern themes of the deathbed and the sick room, influenced by the sad events of his youth. The following plate, completed in 1889, highlights the artist’s morbid fascination with subjects of decay. We are transported once again to the sickroom, ironically playing upon the title of Spring. Our attention is immediately drawn to the sickly young woman, off centre, her face cast down, tinged with green, unhealthy tints. These shades are echoed in her pillow and the shadows on the nearby wall, adding to the sense of decay. The girl’s hands lifelessly grasp a piece of fabric, their pallid colour more in keeping with the portrayal of a corpse. A medicine bottle on the table is almost empty, hinting at the futility of healing.  The attending older female holds some meagre needlework, unable to look at the sickly woman, peering outside instead.

The right side of the canvas offers a stark contrast, as spring sunshine fights its way into the morbid scene. In opposition to the dying girl, a plant, budding with flowers stands tall on the window, enjoying the warming beams of the life-giving sun. The spring serves as a potent symbol of life, represented by the light, the breeze filtering in from the window and the flowers. Nevertheless, the frail girl is not looking at the window, as she already appears resigned to her fate. She is dying, while everything outside is coming to life.

In 1889, Munch presented his first one-man show of nearly all his works to date and Spring figured prominently at the exhibition. The canvas attracted a great deal of critical attention, winning many new admirers for Munch. The recognition received by the show led to a two-year state scholarship to study in Paris.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

NIGHT IN SAINT-CLOUD

Munch’ second visit to Paris would last much longer than his first, as he studied under the French painter Léon Bonnat, one of the leading artists of the day, who had won the Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. However, Munch was soon exasperated by the formal nature of the master and pupil relationship and the conservative practice of Bonnat; Munch left the Ecole des Beaux Arts after only four months of study.

When cholera broke out in Paris at the end of 1889, the artist moved to Saint-Cloud, a commune in the western suburbs of the city, six miles from the centre. In Saint-Cloud he rented the floor above a café, offering a beautiful view of the Seine. The atmospheric canvas Night in Saint-Cloud (1890) portrays the scene inside Munch’s dark room and his view through the window late at night. By the window we can see a man lost in thought, his head held by a hand, as he gazes out at the river. It has been suggested the figure is the artist’s friend, the Danish poet Emanuel Goldstein.