Edvard Munch (1863-1944), a great Norwegian oil painter and printmaker, is recognized as a master of modern art in the world and a pioneer of expressionism in the 20th century. Most of his works have a strong anti-naturalistic style, describing people's emotional lives for love and death.
Melancholy attitude to life
"From the moment I was born, the three angels of restlessness, restlessness and death stood by my side. They followed me from beginning to end when I played, in the spring sun and in the bright summer. Follows me all the time. When I close my eyes at night, they stand by my side and threaten me with death, hell and eternal damnation. I often wake up at night and look around the house: I am in hell Is it?"
- Edvard Munch
Munch has experienced many ups and downs in his life, so he always treats life with a pessimistic attitude.
Edvard Munch was born on December 12, 1863 in the town of Redden, not far from Christiania (now Oslo). Death and illness in his childhood experiences greatly influenced his later emotional and mental development.
Munch's mother, Laura, died of tuberculosis when he was 5 years old, and Munch was raised by his father alone after his mother's death. Munch's father, a fervent Christian and mentally ill, instilled in his children a deep-seated fear of hell, telling them over and over again if they were guilty of sin under any circumstances and in any way. Will be doomed to hell and never have any chance of forgiveness. In 1877, Munch's favorite sister Sophie and one of his brothers died one after another. Twelve years later, his father also fell ill and died. Meanwhile, Munch himself was frail and sickly. Seeing the deaths of relatives around him one after another, Munch's spirit was severely hit. One grief has not yet passed, and another grief followed. The cruel imprint of death is forever engraved in Munch's young and sensitive soul, making his life full of melancholy.
Rich artistic experience
In 1880, Munch began to study art and became a member of the Kristiania bohemian group of realist painters. Munch's artistic thought at that time was strongly influenced by Hans Jager. Yager is an anarchist writer who intends to build an ideal society based on materialistic atheism and free love. The hopeless love affair between the mentor Yager and the wife of the leading bohemian painter Christian Kroger and his short love experience further strengthened Munch's pessimistic views on women, love and death.
Most of Munch's works in the 1880s used realistic art forms to express the strong desire of his subjective ideas. In his depiction of The Sick Child, he used artistic motifs popular among Norwegian realist writers to vividly create a mournful, melancholic atmosphere in memory of his dead sister. Later, due to widespread criticism, Munch changed to a more conservative style. The huge oil painting "Spring" can be seen as a more traditional version of "Sick Child", through which Munch received government funding to study in France.
Soon after studying at an art school in France, Munch began to explore his own artistic style based on French Post-Impressionism. The death of his father in 1889 caused him to fall into great grief again, and he no longer believed in the philosophy of his mentor Yager. The oil painting "Night of St. Cloud" marks Munch's new interest in displaying spiritual content. This painting expresses the author's low mood and is made in memory of his dead father. When summing up his creative intentions, Munch said: "I paint what I saw in the past, not what I see now." At the same time, he positioned his creative style as: "Symbolism: Observing through the mind nature".
In 1892, Munch was invited by the Berlin Artists Association to hold an exhibition in Germany. However, his paintings caused huge social disgust in Berlin, the capital of German art, and the exhibition was forced to close by the government. But Munch took advantage of the show's attention to organize other exhibitions and start selling paintings. He decided to stay in Germany. In Germany, Munch continued his work, this time on love, anxiety and death. This series of creations, later known as The Ribbon of Life, included many of Munch's famous works, and was finally completed in 1893.
In order to make his artistic creation known to the public, Munch began to make prints in 1894, and most of the themes of the prints came from his oil paintings.
In 1908, Munch's depression, which had been suppressed for more than 40 years, finally broke out. Due to a nervous breakdown, he was admitted to a sanatorium in Copenhagen. A year later, after gradually recovering, he returned to his native Norway and began to live in seclusion. In Norway's beautiful landscapes and observations of the lives of local farmers and workers, Munch continued to search for new artistic themes. The seclusion made his melancholy a little more optimistic, which is reflected in the wall paintings he painted for the Ola Lecture Hall at the University of Oslo.
After the outbreak of the First World War, Munch's negativity grew again, and his works returned to the original theme of love and death. Therefore, in the 1920s, some of Munch's symbolist oil paintings and prints appeared together with stylistic landscape paintings and nude paintings. At the same time, he began to illustrate the works of Henrik Ibsen, but this important project was never completed. Munch was nearly blind in his later years. In this case, he also organized his diary of his youth and painted self-portraits recalling his early life. On January 23, 1944, Munch died in Akley, near Oslo.
The cry of life
Munch expresses his personal experience of life and death through the themes of life, love and death, such as "Sick Child" (portrait of Munch's dead sister Sophie), "Death in the Ward", " Vampire", "Fatigue", "Dance of Life", each painting strongly conveys his feelings and emotions. Although the details of the specific objects depicted are simplified, the emotions are exaggerated, which makes these paintings shocking to the soul. strength. Behind all this, we can still see the scene of the "end of the century", where the anxiety and helplessness of life are intertwined. The astonishing expressiveness of Munch's work stems from his unabashedly faithful expression of his inner world, and his works are created with the whole mind.
In 1890, with the pain of having just lost his father, Munch began to create the most important works in his life, the series of paintings "The Ribbon of Life". This set of paintings has a wide range of subjects, but still takes life, love and death as the basic themes, using symbols and metaphors to reveal the worries and fears of human beings. Munch's oil painting "The Scream" in 1893 is the most intense and exciting one in this group of paintings, and one of his important representative works.
In this painting, Munch depicts a deformed and screaming figure with extremely exaggerated brushwork, expressing the extreme loneliness and anguish of human beings, as well as the fear in front of the infinite universe, vividly and vividly. .
Munch himself recounted the origin of the painting:
"One night I was walking along a path with the city on one side and the fjord on the other. I stopped and looked over the fjord, the sun was setting and the clouds were dyed It was red, like blood."
"I felt a piercing scream through the sky, and I could hear it. So I drew this picture, and painted the real Clouds of blood. Those colors screaming, that's this Scream from 'The Ribbon of Life.'"
There is nothing concrete in the painting that hints at the horror that caused the scream. The image in the center of the picture is creepy. He seemed to be walking past us, about to turn toward the railing that stretched out into the distance. Covering his ears, he could hardly hear the footsteps of the two passing pedestrians, nor could he see the two boats and the steeple of the church in the distance; otherwise, the whole loneliness that clung to him might have been somewhat reduced. This loner, completely isolated from reality, seems to have been completely conquered by the extreme fear in his own heart. The image is highly exaggerated, with the deformed and twisted screaming face, completely caricatured. Those round eyes and sunken cheeks reminded people of skeletons associated with death. "It can only be drawn by a lunatic," Munch wrote on the sketch for the painting.
There is nothing in this painting that is not full of turbulence. The twisting curves of the sky and the water flow in stark contrast to the sturdy, straight slashes of the bridge. The whole composition is full of rough and strong rhythm in the rotating dynamic. All the formal elements seem to convey that piercing scream. Here Munch uses visual symbols to convey the feeling of hearing, turning the miserable screams into visible vibrations, boldly visualizing the sound waves, and transforming the extreme inner anxiety generated by the screams into a kind of dread. Abstract image of man convincing. It is in this way that he pushes the emotional expression on the screen almost to the extreme.
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