Edvard Munch Research

I started by doing some research about Leonid Stroganov but I did not find much information so, since  I also had to do research about an expressionist artists I used this opportunity to do it. Later on I will do some research about Leonid Stroganov. But for today I chose the artist Edvard Munch due to colour palette that he uses and the way he used distortion in his paintings.

Edvard Munch was born on December 1863 in Loten, Norway. He is a Norwegian painter and printmarker whose artworks deeply influenced Symbolism and German Expressionism. His paintings, which inludes the famous painting The Scream (1893), are one of the most significant contributions to the development of the Modernism in the 20th Century.  Munch, as an artists was extremely original, as he has helped to construct our perception of the human nature and experience and expressed it visually.

Munch E. (1895) Self-Portrait with Cigarette [oil on canvas] 

Munch was born into a middle-class family that was pursed with illness and death. Munch once said "Illness, insanity, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompained me all my life". When he was still very young his parents, one sister and one brother died and another sister developed mental illness. This sense of death and illness influenced a lot his style and art in his future years.

Only about 1892 his unique style assumed a shape. The distortion of line that he ussed in his paintings was similar to the one used on Art Noveau, but Munch used it not as decoration but as a revelation.  The brutal emotion and atypical imagery created a fuss, especially in the paintings that had some representation of sexuality, as in "Madonna" (1895). His contemporaries were outraged by his technique, which for the most of them looked incomplete, but these critics only helped him to make his name known throughout Germany.

"No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love." - Edvard Munch

His artowrks were included in the Nazi exhibition of "degenerate art" in 1937. Upon his death, Edvard Munch leaved all his paintings, prints and drawings in his possession to the city of Oslo, in which was created the Munch Museum in 1963, Many of his artworks are in the National Gallery in Olso.

Madonna (1895)

An example of the trancendene of individuality is Madonna (1895), in which is represented a naked woman with her head thrown back, her eyes closed, and a red halo above her black hair. This painting might appear as it was in the moment of conception, but there is also an idea of death in the woman's face, specially due to her serene and calm expression. For Munch's art, woman is an "other" with whom union is desired. However, it is also feared given that it threatens the creative ego.

Munch E. (1895) Madonna [Lithograph and woodcut] The Museum of Modern Art

Munch described Madonna as the “pause when the world stops revolving.... Your lips, as red as ripening fruit, gently part as if in pain. Now the hand of death touches life. The chain is forged that links the thousand families that are dead to the thousand generations to come.”

Madonna is a masterpiece of Edvard Munch's graphic oeuvre. In this painting it is believed that he represented an erotic rendition of the Virgin Mary, completed between 1892 and 1895. The original title was Loving Woman, a reference to the Virgin Mary, which makes this painting one of the most provocative in his portfilio - "Madonna, an erotic nude floating inside a blood-red border full of wiggling spermatozoa and, at the lower left, a ghoulish fetus" (MoMA, n.d.). The figure of Munch's Madonna is placed between the symbolist art of 19th Century and the modernism of t20th Century.

Munch develop many other interpretations of his paintings, not only differing the colour palette but also the media he uses. The painting The Scream (1893) had three different versions and the painting Madonna was no different, having at least 5 versions made between 1892 and 1895.

Munch E. (1895), Madonna [oil on canvas] National Gallery of Norway, Oslo

In this painting, the color palette consists in yellow ochre, prussian blue, ultramarine and black charcoal. In other words it is presented a more variety of colors than in the previous lithograph. On my point of view, although this is not mentioned in any website, the Loving Woman almost seem like it was in the surface of the water due the distortion of the lines and how she is posed. It is an interesting feature of the painting that I would like to recreate in my project.

Vampire (1983)

Munch E. (1893), Vampire [oil on canvas] Munch Museum, Oslo

Love and Pain, how it was originally entitled,  has a huge number of differnet interpretations since its first appearance in Berlin in 1902. Starting with the interpretation that it was a vampire and her victim - this interpretation was proposed by Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Polish art critic and Munch's friend, who, in the instant he saw the image, he thought it was a woman sinking her teeth into the neck of a man. Munch accepted his friend's interpretation and renamed it Vampire, although it has nothing to do with the attention of the artists when created it. However, there are many other interpretations, some see it as a man hugging  a prostitute, given her hair, others see it as a peculiar representation of his sister's death, like in Sick Child, and so on. This painting remained controversial the artist's life and was eventually banned by the Nazis for "being morally degenerate".

I chose these two paintings due to their collor palette and style. I pretend to represent violent emotions the same way he did, through distorted lines and intense colors. I really liked the contrasts of the colors he used and how it changes the interpretation, or meaning, of the painting. Therefore, I believe that Edvard Munch is going to be my main inspiration in these features for the outcome of my project. This might change in the process but for now this is my idea.

Reference:

Edvard Munch (n.d.), Vampire, 1893 by Edvard Munch [online] Available from: https://www.edvardmunch.org/vampire.jsp [Accessed 06.02.2021]

Gallardo G. (2019), Painful Love Explained In 6 Works Of Art By Edvard Munch [online] Cultura Coletiva, Available from: https://culturacolectiva.com/art/edvard-munch-love-art-paintings [Accessed 06.02.2021]

Edvard Munch (n.d.), Edvard Munch Biography [online] Available from: https://www.edvardmunch.org/biography.jsp [Accessed 06.02.2021]

Watson G. (2021), Edvard Munch [online], Britannica, Available from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edvard-Munch [Accessed 03.02.2021]

Bassie A., Ingles E. (2016) Edvard Munch, Vietnam, Parkstone International

MoMA(2019) , Madonna [online] Available from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/62017 [Accessed 03.02.2021]

Edvard Munch (n.d.), Madonna [online] Available from: http://www.edvard-munch.org/madonna/ [Accessed 03.02.2021]

Christie's (n.d.),  Exhibition of Munch's work at P.H. Beyer & Sohn, Leipzig. 1903. Featuring The Sick Child I, and two Madonnas [online] Available from: https://www.christies.com/features/Lot-60-Edvard-Munch-Madonna-11160-1.aspx [Accessed 06.02.2021]