“I had to try to translate what moved my soul”: the life of Edvard Munch, the tormented painter of The Scream

Edvard Munch He was walking along a trail with friends when a sudden change in the sky distracted his attention. “Suddenly, the sky turned blood red,” he later described in one of the pages of his diary, dated 1892. “Blood and tongues of fire hid against the dark blue of the fjord and the city. . My friends continued and I stood still, shaking with anxiety. I felt an infinite cry that ran through nature “.

With this note, the Norwegian painter left the testimony of the germ of a work which would elevate his name to the laurels of immortality. As the Mona Lisa of Da Vinci either The starry Night of Van Gogh , The Scream by Munch continues to be one of the most famous and popular paintings in world history. AND Although it is not his only masterpiece, it firmly represents those agonizing sensations that marked his career.

Clear and impactful, such was his leitmotif: “Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy by dissecting corpses, I want to dissect souls, penetrating the mystical territory of the unconscious. “, he declared in another passage from his diary. “I had to try to translate what stirred my soul. »

This interest in expressing the interiority of our species was not fanciful. Censored and admired, obsessed with death and sins and tormented by alcoholism and depression, his life was not entirely simple. . A few days before his death – on January 23, 1944, exactly 80 years ago – the painter revealed the mark that haunted him. “I have already experienced death at birth. For me, true birth is dying,” he said in a sentence that makes much more sense when you delve into certain passages of his biography.

His fixation on death began when he was just a child. . She was only five years old when her mother died of tuberculosis, and 14 when Johanne Sophie, the eldest and most beloved of her four siblings, died of the same disease.

Until then, the children’s relationship with their father, a military doctor named Christian Munch , was relatively good. Edvard’s best memories of his childhood were precisely those of those first five years, when his father read them stories about Edgar Allan Poe before to sleep.

But it didn’t take long for things to get tense. In addition to being a fan of horror literature, the man was also a Christian with a practically obsessive faith . With the death of his wife, his religious devotion becomes increasingly dogmatic and aggressive. Poe’s stories were supplemented by apocalyptic stories about the devil and his enormous thirst for revenge, as well as constant sermons about the terrible fate that awaited sinners. A series of elements that only fueled his nightmares.

“My father was of a nervous and obsessively religious temperament, to the point of becoming psychoneurotic. », described the artist in a passage from his diary. “From him, I inherited the seeds of madness. “The angels of fear, pain and death have been by my side since the day I was born. »

“I came into the world afraid and lived in perpetual fear of life and people. » Thus, Munch and his brothers spent much of their childhood confined to their homes, tormented by their father’s prophecies and the latency of such an unfortunate disease as tuberculosis.

During those winters at home, he started drawing to relieve all that anxiety he had built up since he was little. And although he enrolled in a technical school to study engineering, he eventually abandoned it to devote himself fully to painting.

The decision once again affected their fatherly relationship. For Munch Sr., art was nothing more than a pagan profession far from the hand of God. When he announced that he would enroll in Kristiania Royal School of Art and Design his family began receiving a series of anonymous letters containing biblical passages attributing terrible sins to the young man.

But his father was far from sitting idly by. On several occasions, he even threw his paintings in the trash, especially those depicting female nudes, and he refused to be part of his son’s new life.

Whether there was rebellion or not, it was not long before Munch began hanging out with Oslo’s more bohemian artist circle. From this time, the painter opened up to two worlds that would mark him throughout his life: alcohol and women.

His entry into the world of artists was not without difficulties. To his father, he was a libertine, while to his colleagues, he was too traditional a man, an imbalance which only increased his feeling of loneliness.

One of the biggest shocks was sexual freedom, already common in bohemian circles. . I did not conceive of situations like that of the painter Christian Krög whose wife had a romantic relationship with two of his best friends with his consent.

The terrible consequences of sin continued to torment him and made his first sexual encounter a real ordeal. At the age of 22, he met Millie Thaulow the wife of a friend of his brother, during a family dinner organized during the holidays. After eating, the young woman invited him for a walk in the garden. Shy, he accepted.

What Munch didn’t imagine was that this innocent walk would eventually take a detour through the forest. And worse, they would make him the protagonist of a sinful adulterer. . He would later describe the situation in his diary, stating that it was as if the girl had drained him of all his energy. From this anecdote would be born the brother-in-law Love and pain, where we can see a woman who, like a vampire, places her mouth on a man’s neck.

In general, his relationship with the female sex has always been quite tense. He had several lovers, although he was hesitant to commit: “I decided very young that I would never marry. I have always placed my painting before anything else and women have often stood in the way of my art. », he wrote in his diary.

But there was one woman he was about to marry. Tulla Larsen She was a wealthy heiress who became obsessed with the painter. When they met, Munch already had problems with alcoholism and quite advanced depression, although none of this mattered to him.

Larsen wanted to marry him at all costs, even if it meant supporting him financially. They began a romantic relationship, but the artist would soon begin planning his escape. He was even able to check himself into a psychiatric sanatorium to lose sight of her.

This is when The woman conceived a plan with which she was about to secure her future . After the escape, Larsen wrote a letter inventing a false terminal illness. The situation made Munch so guilty that, in his response, he ended up asking her in writing to marry him.

When he wanted to retract, it was already too late. Under the law of the time, men were required to keep their marriage promises. And although he was eventually able to free himself from his commitment, he had to mortgage his house and auction off several of his paintings to pay the costs of the litigation.

After several comings and goings, the relationship between the two ended when, after a heated argument, Munch was shot in the right hand, destroying one of his fingers. . It was never known exactly who shot, although it is very likely that the painting named The death of Morat represented part of the feelings that the woman aroused in the painter.

“I have inherited two of humanity’s most formidable enemies: the legacy of tuberculosis and insanity. “. This is how Munch defines the legacy of his family, which was not only affected by the illness that claimed the lives of his mother and sister.

Mental health also played an important role in his life and that of those close to him. Laura, one of her younger sisters, was diagnosed with mental illness as a child. ; while depression and episodes of anxiety were still commonplace in the painter’s life.

However, from the start, he was not really convinced of the need to treat his instabilities. “I don’t want to get rid of my illness. My suffering is part of me and destroying it would destroy my art », he wrote during these years.

The alcohol only made things worse. . At a time when he started drinking even before breakfast, his mental problems worsened to the point that he developed paralytic dementia which led him to spend a stay in a psychiatric clinic.

In the fall of 1908, his problems worsened. “My state was on the verge of madness,” he later described. Seized with hallucinations and feelings of persecution, he was hospitalized for eight months to receive specialized treatment and electrification therapy.

His recovery coincided with the emergence of expressionism in Germany, a territory where he cultivated a good number of followers at least until the second World War .

Munch’s final years were relatively quiet. He continues to paint at his estate in Oslo, even though a series of visible problems are affecting his quality of life. One of its last tragedies was the arrival of Hitler on German territory, since Nazism was categorical in including his work on the list of banned arts.

Many of his paintings kept in the European country were destroyed, although a considerable part was able to be saved by friends and people linked to his art. Eighty years after his death, his works on solitude and human anguish seem more contingent than ever.