Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced German Expressionism in the early 20th century. One of his most well-known works is The Scream of 1893...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth12 December 1863
CityAdalsbruk, Norway
CountryNorway
In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color
Your face encompasses the beauty of the whole earth. Your lips, as red as ripening fruit, gently part as if in pain. It is the smile of a corpse. 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.
The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.
I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.
And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?
Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.
But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never.
Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It's simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.
Without fear and disease, my life would be like a boat without oars.
Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being... You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.
It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity.
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.
Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.