Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a Norwegian painter best known for his anguish-ridden, iconic painting, The Scream, which (according to Munch) was inspired one evening when he was out walking at sunset and ‘heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature’. Munch traveled to Paris in 1889 where he grew inspired by the works of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, especially their use of color. His psychological themes and Symbolism would greatly influence German Expressionism in the early 20th century. 

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labeled Munch's work "degenerate art" (along with that of Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Gauguin, and many other modern artists) and removed his 82 works from German museums. Munch spent most of his last two decades in solitude at his nearly self-sufficient estate in Ekely, at Skøyen, Oslo. When Munch died, his remaining works were bequeathed to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen (it opened in 1963). The museum holds a collection of approximately 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings, and 18,000 prints, the broadest collection of his works in the world.

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