Edvard Munch: The Life Story Behind the Scream Painter
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Edvard Munch painted a scream that the whole world recognises, even though the picture itself is small and the figure in it has no real face. The Scream shows a pale person standing on a bridge, holding the sides of a skull-like head, while the sky burns red and orange behind them. People who have never been to a museum know that image, and they know what it means without being told. It means fear, it means being alone in a crowd, it means a moment when the world feels too loud to bear. Munch painted that feeling more than a century ago, and it has not gone away.
His life was shaped by loss in a way that few artists’ lives have been. His mother died when he was five, his favourite sister died when he was a teenager, and his father was a deeply religious man who filled the house with talk of sin and death. Munch grew up with illness in the family, with funerals, and with a fear that he himself would die young. He did not die young. He lived to eighty, and he painted the same fears again and again, not because he enjoyed them, but because painting them was the only way he knew to live with them.
What makes Munch different from other painters of sadness is that he did not paint sadness to make people feel sorry for him. He painted it because he thought it was true, and because he thought that other people felt it too. His pictures are about love, jealousy, separation, and death, the things that most of us feel but rarely talk about in public. He painted them in a rough, direct style, with colours that do not look like real life but feel like real feeling. That honesty is why his work still matters, and why The Scream still stops people in their tracks.
A Childhood Marked by Death in Norway
Edvard Munch was born on 12 December 1863 in Løten, a village in Norway, the second of five children. His father, Christian Munch, was a doctor in the army, and his mother, Laura, came from a family of some standing. The family moved to Christiania, now called Oslo, when Edvard was a baby, and he grew up in the capital, in a house that was often full of illness. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, when Edvard was five, and his sister Sophie, whom he loved deeply, died of the same disease in 1877, when she was fifteen and he was thirteen. Those two deaths shaped his whole life, and he painted them again and again.
His father was a strict and religious man, and after his wife’s death he became even more serious, talking to his children about hell, sin, and the need for prayer. Edvard later wrote that his father was a good man, but that his religion made the house feel dark and fearful. The children were taught to be afraid of death, and they had good reason to be afraid, because death kept visiting their house. Edvard himself was often ill as a child, with bronchitis and fever, and he spent long stretches in bed, listening to the sounds of the house and worrying about his own health. He later said that illness and death were present at his birth, and that they followed him through life.
School was not easy for him, and he did not do well in the usual subjects. He was good at drawing, and he filled his notebooks with sketches, but his father wanted him to become an engineer, a safe and respectable job. Edvard studied engineering for a time at the technical school in Christiania, but he was unhappy, and in 1880, at the age of sixteen, he left engineering to become a painter. His father was disappointed, and the decision caused tension in the family, but Edvard had made up his mind. He wanted to paint, and he wanted to paint the things that mattered to him, not the things that a teacher told him to paint.
He studied at the Royal School of Art and Design in Christiania, and he learned to draw from life, to paint portraits, and to work in the style of the time, which was realistic and careful. But he was already different from his classmates. He was interested in feeling, not in making a perfect copy of what he saw. He painted his family, he painted the sickroom where his sister had died, and he painted the faces of people who were grieving. Those early pictures were not pretty, and they were not meant to be. They were honest, and honesty was the quality that would define his whole career.
The Sick Child and the First Breakthrough
In 1885 and 1886 Munch painted The Sick Child, a picture of his sister Sophie in bed, dying, with her aunt Karen sitting beside her. He painted it over and over, in several versions, and each time he tried to capture the feeling of that room, the pale light, the sick girl, the woman who could do nothing but sit and watch. The picture is rough, with scratchy brushwork and colours that seem to melt into each other, and when it was shown in public, people were shocked. They thought it was unfinished, and they thought it was ugly. Munch did not care. He had painted what he felt, and he had painted it as well as he could.
The Sick Child was a breakthrough, even though it was not a success in the usual sense. It showed Munch that he could paint a memory, not only a scene in front of him, and that a picture could be about a feeling rather than about a likeness. He began to work in that way, painting from memory, from dreams, and from the strong feelings that stayed with him long after an event had passed. He also began to keep a diary, writing down his thoughts, his fears, and his dreams, and those writings help us understand his pictures today. He was not a man who painted without thinking. He thought a great deal, and he wrote it down.
In the late 1880s he travelled to Paris, where he saw the work of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and where he learned about colour and about painting outdoors. He was impressed by the work of Paul Gauguin, who used flat areas of colour and strong outlines, and by the work of Vincent van Gogh, whose brushwork was rough and emotional. Munch took what he needed from those artists, but he did not copy them. He used their lessons to paint his own world, the world of Norway, of fjords, of winter light, and of people who felt too much.
He also began to drink heavily in these years, and his health suffered. He had a difficult relationship with his father, who died in 1889, and he felt guilty about leaving engineering, about his father’s disappointment, and about his own way of life. The guilt and the drinking would stay with him for many years, and they would cause him a great deal of trouble. But they did not stop him from painting. If anything, they made his painting more urgent, as if he knew that he had to get the pictures out before his health failed him completely.
Berlin, Scandal, and The Frieze of Life
In 1892 Munch was invited to show his work in Berlin, and the exhibition became a scandal. The Berlin artists’ association had invited him because they thought his work was modern and interesting, but when they saw the pictures, many members were shocked by the rough style and the dark subjects. The exhibition was closed after only a week, and the scandal made Munch famous across Europe. He was no longer a young painter from Norway. He was the man whose pictures had been too much for Berlin, and that reputation, bad as it seemed, opened doors for him.
He stayed in Berlin for several years, living in a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers who met in a tavern called the Black Piglet. Among them was the Swedish writer August Strindberg, the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, and other figures who were interested in modern art, in psychology, and in the darker sides of human life. Munch painted portraits of them, and he argued with them late into the night. Berlin was a hard city, and he drank too much, and he had affairs that ended badly, but it was also a city where he could be himself, and where his work was taken seriously by people who mattered.
It was in Berlin that he began to work on The Frieze of Life, a series of paintings about love, life, and death that he showed together as a group. The Frieze included pictures of lovers on a beach, of jealousy, of separation, of a woman in three stages of life, and of death in a sickroom. The pictures were not meant to be looked at one by one. They were meant to be seen together, like chapters in a book, telling the story of a human life from youth to death. Munch worked on the Frieze for many years, adding pictures, changing the order, and painting new versions of the same subjects.
The most famous picture from this period is The Scream, painted in 1893. Munch later wrote that he had been walking with friends at sunset, when the sky turned blood red, and he felt a great scream passing through nature. He painted a figure on a bridge, with two friends walking away in the background, and the sky swirling above. There are several versions of The Scream, in paint and in print, and each one is slightly different. The picture has become one of the most famous images in the world, and it has been copied, parodied, and stolen, but the original feeling, the feeling of a person alone with fear, has never been lost.
Love, Jealousy, and a Life in Turmoil
Munch’s personal life in the 1890s and 1900s was troubled, and he did not hide it. He had a long and painful relationship with a married woman named Tulla Larsen, and the relationship ended in 1902 in a quarrel in which a gun went off and Munch was shot in the hand, losing part of a finger. The details of that night have been told in many ways, and Munch himself gave different accounts, but the injury was real, and the end of the relationship was real. He painted pictures about jealousy and about the pain of love, and those pictures are among his most powerful work, because they come from experience, not from imagination alone.
He also drank heavily, and his drinking caused him to behave badly in public, to quarrel with friends, and to suffer from hallucinations. In 1908, after a period of heavy drinking and anxiety, he checked himself into a clinic in Copenhagen, where he was treated for alcoholism and for his mental health. The treatment helped him, and he stopped drinking for a time, and his work changed. The pictures became calmer, with brighter colours, and he began to paint landscapes, portraits of friends, and scenes of working people. He did not stop painting about love and death, but he painted them with more distance, as if he had learned to live with them.
After the clinic, Munch returned to Norway, and he bought a house at Ekely, on the edge of Oslo, where he lived for the rest of his life. He painted the garden, the house, and the fields around it, and he painted portraits of people who came to visit him. He was no longer the young man who had shocked Berlin, and he was no longer drinking as heavily as he once had. He was a famous artist, and he was respected in Norway, even though his work was still considered strange by many people. He worked every day, and he kept his pictures, thousands of them, in his house and in his studio, refusing to sell many of them.
The First World War passed without much effect on his daily life, but the Second World War brought a new danger. Norway was occupied by Germany in 1940, and the Nazis called modern art degenerate, and they removed Munch’s pictures from German museums. Munch was old, and he was ill, and he worried about his work. He kept painting, and he kept his pictures at Ekely, and he refused to leave Norway, even though he could have gone to a safer place. He died on 23 January 1944, at the age of eighty, in his house at Ekely, leaving behind a huge body of work that he had kept almost entirely for himself.
The Many Versions of One Feeling
One thing that surprises people about Munch is that he painted the same subject many times. There are four versions of The Scream, several versions of The Sick Child, and many versions of The Sun, of Madonna, and of other pictures. He did not do this because he was lazy, or because he could not think of a new idea. He did it because he believed that a feeling could not be captured in one try, and that each version taught him something new about the subject. He painted like a writer who rewrites a sentence again and again, trying to get it right, and each version is a little different, a little closer to the feeling he wanted.
He also worked in printmaking, making woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings of his most important subjects. Printmaking allowed him to make many copies of a picture, and to change it each time by using different colours or by cutting the wood in a new way. The prints spread his work across Europe, because they were cheaper than paintings and easier to carry, and they made his name known to people who had never seen a painting of his. The Scream is famous in part because it exists as a print as well as a painting, and the print version has been seen by millions of people.
Munch’s method of working was slow and careful, even though his pictures look rough. He would start with a memory, he would draw it, he would paint it, and then he would leave it for months or years, and come back to it with fresh eyes. He kept his pictures in his studio, and he looked at them every day, and he changed them when he felt they were wrong. He was not a painter who finished a picture and forgot about it. He lived with his pictures, and they lived with him, and that is why they feel so personal. They were not made for a gallery. They were made for a man who needed to understand his own life.
Why The Scream Still Speaks
The Scream has become a symbol of modern anxiety, and it is used in cartoons, in advertisements, and in protests, often by people who know nothing about Munch. That use can feel strange, as if a serious picture has been turned into a joke, but it also shows how powerful the picture is. A picture that can be understood by a child, by a person who has never been to a museum, and by a person who has studied art for years, is a rare thing. Munch painted a feeling that everyone has felt, the feeling of being alone and afraid, and he painted it so clearly that the whole world recognised it.
The picture is also a record of a real place. The bridge in The Scream is a real bridge in Oslo, and the sky that Munch painted was a real sky, coloured by a sunset that he saw on a walk with friends. The red sky has been linked by scientists to a volcanic eruption that coloured sunsets around the world, but Munch did not paint a scientific fact. He painted what he felt when he saw that sky, and what he felt was fear. That is the difference between a painter and a scientist, and it is why the picture still works. It does not tell us what the sky looked like. It tells us what the sky felt like.
Today Munch’s work is kept in the Munch Museum in Oslo, which holds thousands of his paintings, drawings, and prints, and in the National Gallery of Norway, where one version of The Scream hangs. His house at Ekely is gone, but his studio and his garden are remembered, and his pictures are shown around the world. He is now seen as one of the fathers of modern art, a painter who showed that art could be about feeling, not only about beauty, and that a picture could be rough and still be true. The boy who grew up with death in his house became a man who painted death, love, and fear, and who left those pictures for the rest of us.
Ekely, the Garden, and the Quiet Last Years
After his treatment in Copenhagen, Munch bought a house at Ekely, on the edge of Oslo, and he lived there for the rest of his life, from 1916 until his death in 1944. Ekely was not a grand house. It was a simple place with a garden, with fields around it, and with a studio where he could paint in peace. He painted the garden in every season, he painted the house, he painted the workers who came to help him, and he painted portraits of friends who visited. The pictures from Ekely are calmer than his earlier work, with brighter colours, with more light, and with a sense of a man who has learned to live with his fears, rather than being ruled by them. He was still painting about love and death, but he was painting them from a distance, as if he had finally found a place where he could look at them without being overwhelmed.
He kept his pictures at Ekely, thousands of them, in his house, in his studio, and in outbuildings, and he refused to sell many of them, even when collectors offered him large sums. He wanted to keep his work together, and he wanted it to go to the city of Oslo after his death, which is what happened. In his will, he left his paintings, drawings, and prints to the city, and they became the foundation of the Munch Museum, which opened in Oslo in 1963, and which now holds one of the largest collections of a single artist’s work in the world. That gift, of a lifetime of work, kept together, is one of the most generous acts by any artist, and it shows that Munch, who had been so troubled in his youth, ended his life with a clear purpose: to leave his pictures for the people of Norway, and for the world. He also painted in the open air, on the coast near Oslo, where he set up his easel on a beach, and painted the sea, the sky, and the people who walked there, in the summer light. Those outdoor pictures, with their bright colours, and their sense of a man enjoying the sun, after years of dark interiors, show a different Munch, a man who could be happy, even for a short time, in the light.
My Take:
I find Munch hard to read about, and I think that is the point. His life was not a happy story with a happy ending, and his pictures are not easy to look at. The Scream is famous, but it is also a picture of a person in pain, and I do not think we should look at it as if it were only a clever image. I think we should look at it as a picture of a man who felt fear very deeply, and who had the courage to paint it instead of hiding it. That courage is what I admire most about him, even more than his skill.
What strikes me first is how early the losses came. He was five when his mother died, and thirteen when his sister died, and those are ages when a child should be safe. He was not safe, and he never forgot it. I think about my own family, and about how lucky I am to have grown up without that kind of loss, and I feel a kind of respect for a child who kept going after losing the two people he loved most. He did not become a painter in spite of those losses. He became a painter because of them, because painting was the only way he knew to keep his mother and his sister alive in his mind.
I also think about his father, and about how religion can help a family and hurt it at the same time. His father was a good man, by all accounts, and he loved his children, but his talk of hell and sin made the house feel dark. I have known families where religion brings comfort, and families where it brings fear, and Munch’s family was the second kind. I do not blame his father, because he was grieving too, and he was trying to make sense of death in the only way he knew. But I do think that Munch’s art came from that fear, and that he spent his whole life trying to paint his way out of it. He never fully succeeded, and that is sad, but the trying produced great pictures.
The Sick Child is the picture I keep returning to, because it is the most honest picture I know about grief. It is not pretty, it is not finished in the usual sense, and it does not try to make death look noble. It shows a sick girl in a bed, and a woman sitting beside her who can do nothing. That is what grief looks like in real life: a room, a bed, and a person who cannot help. I have sat in rooms like that, and I know how true that picture is. Munch painted it again and again, not because he was obsessed, but because he was trying to understand what had happened to his sister, and to himself. I respect that kind of repetition, because it is not laziness. It is love.
I have mixed feelings about his drinking and his behaviour in Berlin, and I want to be honest about that. He drank too much, he quarrelled with friends, and he hurt people, including himself. I do not think we should excuse that behaviour because he was a great artist. Great art does not give a person permission to hurt others, and Munch’s drinking caused real harm, to himself and to the people around him. At the same time, I think it is important to understand why he drank. He was afraid, he was lonely, and he was carrying a grief that he had never been allowed to talk about. The drinking was a way of coping, and it was a bad way, but it was a human way, and I think we should see it as a warning, not as a part of his genius.
The clinic in Copenhagen is the part of his story that gives me hope, because it shows that he could change. He was forty-five, he had been drinking for years, and he checked himself in for treatment. That takes courage, and it is a different kind of courage from painting a shocking picture. It is the courage to admit that you need help, and to accept it. After the clinic his work became calmer, and his life became steadier, and he lived for another thirty-six years. I think that is a lesson worth remembering: it is never too late to get help, and getting help does not end your work. It can save it.
I think about The Scream a lot, and about how it has been used and misused. I have seen it on coffee mugs, on Halloween costumes, and in cartoons, and I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it is good that so many people know the picture, and that a child can recognise it. On the other hand, it is sad that a picture about real fear has become a joke, because the fear it shows is real, and it is still felt by millions of people. I hope that when people see The Scream, they stop for a moment and think about what it means, not only about how funny it looks. Munch was not joking. He was telling the truth about a feeling, and the truth deserves respect.
His method of painting the same subject many times is something I have learned from, in my own way. I used to think that if I got something wrong the first time, I had failed, and I should move on to something else. Munch taught me that getting it wrong the first time is normal, and that the second, third, and fourth tries are where the real work happens. He painted The Sick Child many times, and each version is a little closer to the truth. That is a patient way of working, and it is the opposite of the world we live in now, where everything has to be fast and perfect the first time. I think we need more of Munch’s patience, not less.
I also admire his decision to keep his pictures, to live with them at Ekely, and to refuse to sell many of them. In a world where artists are told to sell, to promote themselves, to be brands, Munch kept his work for himself. He painted for himself, and he kept the pictures in his house, and he looked at them every day. That is a radical act, and it is one I respect. He did not paint to please a buyer, or to fit a trend. He painted to understand his own life, and the pictures were his diary. When he died, he left thousands of them, and they are now in a museum, where everyone can see them. That is a generous ending, even if he did not plan it that way.
There is a sadness in his story that I cannot ignore, and it is the sadness of a man who lived to eighty but never really escaped his childhood. He painted love, but his own love affairs ended badly. He painted the sun, but he was often afraid of the dark. He painted life, but death was always in the room. I think that is true for many people, not only for artists. We carry our childhood with us, and we spend our lives trying to make peace with it. Munch did not make full peace, but he made great art from the trying, and that is more than most of us manage.
If I could say one thing to Munch, I would say thank you for painting fear. Fear is a feeling that most of us hide, because we are ashamed of it, or because we think it makes us weak. Munch painted it, and he showed us that fear is not weakness. It is a part of being human, and it is a part that deserves to be seen. I think that is why The Scream still matters, and why it will still matter in a hundred years. As long as people feel afraid, and alone, and overwhelmed by the world, they will need a picture that says: I felt that too, and I painted it, and you are not alone.
I also want to say something about Norway, and about how Munch’s work belongs to a place. He painted fjords, winter light, and the long evenings of the north, and those pictures feel like Norway, not like Paris or Berlin. He travelled, he lived in Berlin, he saw French art, but he always came back to Norway, and to Ekely, and to the garden he painted again and again. That loyalty to a place is something I admire, because it is easy to leave, and hard to stay, and Munch stayed. He stayed with his grief, he stayed with his country, and he stayed with his pictures, and that staying is the reason we have them today.
In the end, I think Munch’s life teaches me that art does not have to be beautiful to be true, and that a rough picture can be more honest than a pretty one. He painted with scratchy brushwork, with colours that do not look like real life, and with figures that have no real faces, and yet his pictures feel more real than many careful, realistic paintings. That is because he painted feeling, and feeling is real, even when it does not look like a photograph. I hope the reader remembers that the next time they see The Scream, and that they look past the famous image to the man who painted it, a boy from Norway who lost his mother and his sister, and who spent eighty years trying to paint what that loss felt like.
I also think about the house at Ekely, and about how Munch chose to live there, quietly, for nearly thirty years, keeping his pictures, painting his garden, and refusing to sell. That choice tells me something important about what an artist’s work means to the artist. He did not paint to sell, or to be famous, or to please a collector. He painted to understand his own life, and he kept the pictures because they were his diary, and because he wanted them to stay together, as a record of one life. I respect that, because in a world where everything is for sale, keeping something for yourself, and then giving it to a city, is a generous act, and a brave one.
There is a lesson in his drinking, and in his decision to get help, that I want to say plainly, because it matters for anyone who struggles. He drank too much, for many years, and it hurt him, and it hurt the people around him, and then, at forty-five, he checked himself into a clinic, and he got help, and he lived for another thirty-six years, and he painted some of his calmest, brightest work after that. I think that is a hopeful story, and it is one that should be told more often, because it says that it is never too late to change, and that getting help is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of strength, and it can save a life, and it can save a career, as it saved Munch’s.
I think about his brother Andreas, and his sister Inger, and the rest of his family, who lived with the same losses, and who dealt with them in their own ways. Munch was not the only child who lost a mother and a sister, and his art, which seems so personal, is also a family story, about a house where death visited often, and where the children had to learn to live with it. I wonder how his siblings felt, watching him paint their dead sister again and again, and whether it helped them, or hurt them. I do not know, and I do not think anyone knows, but I think it is worth remembering that a famous artist’s family also lives with the art, and with the grief that made it, and that their story matters too.
Finally, I want to say something about the sky in The Scream, and about how a real sky, coloured by a volcano, became a picture about fear. Munch saw a red sky, and he felt fear, and he painted what he felt, not what he saw. That is the difference between a photograph and a painting, and it is why The Scream still works, even though we now know the science of that red sky. Science can tell us why the sky was red, but it cannot tell us what it felt like to stand on a bridge, with friends walking away, and to feel a scream passing through nature. Only art can tell us that, and Munch told us, in a small picture, with a pale figure, and a swirling sky, that has become one of the most famous images in the world. I am grateful to him for that, and I hope the reader, the next time they feel afraid, remembers that a man from Norway felt it too, and painted it, and left it for us.
He also painted self-portraits, in which he showed himself as a man, not as a hero, with a tired face, and with eyes that look directly at the viewer, as if to say: this is who I am, a man who has suffered, and who has painted, and who is still here. Those self-portraits are among his most honest works, and they show a man who was not afraid to look at himself, even when the looking was painful. I think about those portraits, and about how hard it is to paint yourself honestly, and I respect Munch for doing it, again and again, throughout his life.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Edvard Munch born and where did he grow up?
Edvard Munch was born on 12 December 1863 in Løten, Norway, and he grew up in Christiania, now called Oslo. His mother died when he was five, and his sister Sophie died when he was thirteen.
What is The Scream actually showing?
The Scream, painted in 1893, shows a pale figure on a bridge holding its head, with a red and orange sky behind it. Munch said he felt a great scream passing through nature during a sunset walk, and the picture is about fear and being alone.
Why did Munch paint The Sick Child so many times?
The Sick Child shows his sister Sophie dying of tuberculosis in 1877, with her aunt sitting beside her. Munch painted several versions because he was trying to capture the feeling of that room and that loss, not just the scene.
What was The Frieze of Life?
The Frieze of Life was a group of paintings Munch showed together, about love, life, and death, including lovers on a beach, jealousy, separation, and death in a sickroom. He worked on the series for many years in Berlin and elsewhere.
Did Edvard Munch live in Berlin?
Yes, Munch lived in Berlin in the 1890s, where an exhibition of his work was closed after a week because of scandal. He joined a circle of writers and artists there and began work on The Frieze of Life.
Where can I see Munch’s paintings today?
Most of Munch’s work is in the Munch Museum in Oslo, which holds thousands of his paintings, drawings, and prints. One version of The Scream is in the National Gallery of Norway, also in Oslo.
