Today we’re going to walk around Norway to find out one of his most international artists, 2013 is the 150 celebration of his birth. We’re talking about Edvard Munch.
Munch was born in Loten, Norway, in 1873. His childhood was hard enough, when he was hardly 14 he lost his mother and sister, being alone with his father, a man under obsesive religious beliefs, in a puritan, lutheran and strict society. All of these circumstances arose into a conflictive and unbalanced personality, illness, madness, death, black angels… that he himself considered the basis of his geniality.
Why people likes the manifesatation of a nightmare? The scream made Munch famous worldwide, but why? Is the scream the best of his works? Is it the most beautiful? After the serenity and beauty in the realism period without emotional expressions, the scream, is a lovely artistic display? No it is not, it’s the morbidness, the human attraction to unpleasant occurences what made known worldwide this Edvard Munch painting.
A painting in his definition must be silently but this conceptual scream has reached our time because since the very moment of his creation, his view impacts directly into the feelings of the spectator. Munch transmits the anguish and fear feeling that he himself felt when he was there, up in the bridge, trembling with fear and he heard that scream rupturing the nature.
The scream survives all over the times involved in a mistery provoked by the uncertainty of his meaning, by the dreadful life of the author, the disturbing anonimous grafito, the illness, the multitude copies of the same canvas, the theft, the fame after the theft…
It’s a very simple painting apparently but at the same time very complex in its interpretation, we can never achieve a conclusión. In any case, it’s the most representative work of Munch the one which leave in the shadow the rest of his production which is, if permitted, much better and almost the same intriguing.
If you’re around Oslo before october the 13th, the exhibition Munch 150 is the most complete presentation of the art of Munch, more than 200 pieces about all his basis themes. The exhibition is the result of the collaboration between National Art, Arquitecture and Design Museum and Munch Museum.
Some odd and intriguing details…
Do you know that Munch never waste canvasses? On the back of the original painting, the one stolen from Oslo Museum, there’s a failing attempt of the scream, we don’t know why the artist turned the canvas and started again on the other side.
Do you know that there’s a graffiti on the painting? In the painting you can observe a grafito over the strong brush-strokes of the sky, the inscription says: “Could only have been painted by a madman”. We actually don’t know if it was written by himself or not.
Do you know that the author tried to destroy the canvas? In the right side of the painting where there’s a dark vertical line there’s a cut from top to bottom. Just over the same line that must be an attempt of a frame finally not done. Furthermore there are wax spots, it is said that Munch liked to give their paintings an old appearance leaving them in the open and mistreating them.
Do you know that the scream is the most expensive work of art in the history? The second versión was sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 2012 reaching the amount of 119,9 million dollars, the most expensive work ever sold at an auction.
Do you know that the model is a peruvian mummy? The painter didn’t reach what he wanted to express until he got the first versión of the scream basing on the image of a peruvian mummy he saw at Paris Universal Expo.
All images via http://www.munch150.no/en/Munch-s-life