Thread by @culturaltutor

Edvard Munch was born 160 years ago today.

You know he painted The Scream, but did you know he made five different versions of it?

This is the strange and tragic story of Edvard Munch, a man who created some of the most haunting art the world has ever seen...

The Scream has become one of the world's most iconic paintings, but why did Munch paint it?

He was taking a walk near Oslo in the winter of 1892 when the sky turned blood red and he heard "an infinite scream passing through nature":

His first attempt to capture this feeling was a painting called Despair — notice the same framing, composition, characters, and skyscape as The Scream.

It's powerful. But, more mellow than horrifying, it lacks the visceral, blistering, radioactive power of his masterpiece.

And it doesn't have the defining feature of his final vision — that famous and chilling face, barely human, contorted with anguish.

Over the next two decades he made four more versions of The Scream, two of them pastel drawings, one a painting, and the other a lithograph.

Back to the beginning: Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863.

His youth was disrupted by the death of his mother and sister, plus an oppressive father and a stifling upbringing.

At 17 he joined the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania, as Oslo was then known.

Munch was the archetypal modern artist: an outsider with challenging ideas and provocative art.

As a young man he fell in with Norway's most rebellious, anti-establishment group, led by the nihilist-anarchist Hans Jæger, a man who had been imprisoned for outraging public morals.

But Munch was something of an artistic chameleon.

Having first taken up painting during long bouts of illness as a child, he experimented with Impressionism during his twenties, like so many other young painters in Europe, but found it unsatisfying.

Impressionism, even though it had moved art away from strict "realism", was still about portraying the world as it truly looks.

It was about the ever-shifting light of the natural world. Hence Monet's waterlilies, different every time he painted them.

Munch sought a release for his intense & complicated emotions — an art style suited to the expression of inner psychology rather than outward appearances or the truths of the natural world.

He thought The Sick Child (1886) was his first successful attempt to find such a style.

And in 1889 Munch visited Paris — it was transformative.

His search for an artistic style to match his personal philosophy and troubled life experiences was over.

In Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh Munch found exactly what he needed.

From Gauguin he learned that the world could be depicted in vivid, unnatural colours, and that any attempt at depicting the world "as it truly appeared" could be cast off entirely.

And what Munch realised, above all, was that colour could *become* his emotion.

Munch's Golgotha, from 1900, seems like a clear reference to Gauguin's Yellow Christ.

Only, here, it has been transformed by Munch's hellish idiosyncracies — not least those faces, almost childlike in their simplicity but haunting in their strangeness.

And from van Gogh Munch learned that the appearance and form of the world could be moulded to his feelings.

Munch painted his own versions of The Starry Night, one in 1893 and another in 1924. They are more subdued than van Gogh's, revealing Munch's bleaker outlook on life.

Munch returned to Kristiania from Paris and created Melancholy in 1891.

Gaugin's vivid colours and van Gogh's swirling forms are present. But Munch did more than merely unite their styles; he introduced something new.

The world of his art was purely psychological.

He painted a few versions of Melancholy, each with slightly varying colours and forms.

Munch simplified things over time, focussing more and more on the power of colour — whether vivid or mellow — and letting his figures morph into half-human spectres, strange ghosts of emotion.

Munch had created a style which, more than ever before in art, expressed pure and inner *psychology*.

The Romantics, the Impressionists, the Realists — none had gone quite this far.

His liquid figures melt before our eyes, burning up with the intensity of their feelings.

The Scream represented for Munch the apotheosis of his search. A staunch anti-realist, what he painted was not the art of outward reality but of a state of mind.

Here are two paintings of Karl Johan Street, before and after Munch's artistic awakening; the change is clear.

Just one year after The Scream he created a painting called Anxiety, similar in composition and colour, only this time the viewer is stared down by a crowd of those of those gaunt faces — a motif that haunts so much of Munch's art.

There should be no surprise that he had a huge influence on Expressionism, which appeared in Germany in the early 20th century.

It was, above all, his total embrace of colour and its power over mood — supplanting with its fluidity the real world — which so inspired them.

Calling Munch Post-Impressionist, Symbolist or Proto-Expressionist might be accurate, and it might be useful in some ways.

But these "isms" can obscure how unique and deeply personal his art was.

Does his Self-Portrait In Hell need categorising? The painting speaks for itself.

He lived for another fifty years after painting The Scream. It was a complicated life, filled with personal, psychological, social, and financial trouble.

But, through it all, he never stopped painting.

The colours of his art represent Munch's autobiography.

Munch's art was classified as "degenerate" by the Nazis, who occupied Norway in 1940. In 1944 he died, aged eighty, a year before the occupation ended.

This is a self-portrait made in 1943, when he was living alone and his art was hidden from Nazis to save it from destruction.

But Munch's legacy has survived and The Scream might just be *the* definitive modern work of art, both in style and substance.

With its disinterest in outward reality and embrace of inner psychology, The Scream seems to capture the modern world in all its maddening complexity.

Munch's art was deeply personal and yet it has become universal — he was a prophet of the century that would follow.

Each era has its defining artworks. Despite all that has been created since, does The Scream remain the ultimate modern painting?

Gratulerer med dagen, Edvard!