Original subtitles

Edvard Munch is one of the few non-French artists who gets mentioned in the same breath

as the Post-Impressionists, and one of the few famous artists to come out of Norway.

But he's not always easy to classify.

On the one hand, he spent time in Paris and was strongly influenced by the techniques and

style of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.

On the other hand, he also spent significant time in Germany, and his powerful emotional

works can also be classified as part of the Expressionist movement that was arising there.

Munch is a fascinating artist who straddles several art worlds of this time.

Edvard Munch was born in a small village in Norway in 1863 to Christian Munch, a pious

man and military doctor, and Laura Catherine Bjolstad.

The family moved to Christiania, now Oslo, but Laura tragically died of tuberculosis when

Edvard was only five years old, leaving behind three girls and two boys.

Afterwards, Christian fell into a deep depression and became hyper-religious to the point of neurosis.

Tragedy continued to stalk the family.

Munch's closest sister died of tuberculosis, too, in 1877.

While another sister struggled with mental illness and would be in and out of mental hospitals

throughout her life.

So much illness and death at such a young age would haunt Edvard for the rest of his life.

Tuberculosis was a particularly graphic and upsetting illness for a child to see.

Coughing up blood would have been a regular sight in the household.

Feelings of fear, loss, and anxiety would become major themes in his life, and ones he'd revisit

again and again in his paintings.

Edvard would say that he inherited the seeds of madness from his father, and even once said,

illness, insanity, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied

me all my life.

That is a very heavy and dark thing to say, but I don't believe he was exaggerating.

This was the reality he experienced.

Edvard himself was often ill and laid up in bed for weeks at a time.

So like many other artists in this course, he spent a good deal of his time in bed, staring

out the window, drawing and painting.

Edvard leaves school at 16 and tells his dad he can't study engineering or any other

trait his father wanted him to learn, and instead he's going to become a painter.

Much to his father's disapproval, of course, Christian Monk called painting an unholy trade.

Any surprise there?

That should be the center square on the post-impressionist bingo card, Disappointed Dad.

Edvard begins his studies at the Norwegian Royal School of Art and Design.

He's a natural and starts getting attention right away.

You can see in this early self-portrait how skilled and confident he is with paint and a brush.

His understanding of light, shadow, form, and volume would have been miles ahead of his classmates.

While studying at the Royal School, Edvard meets a few people that would be very influential

on his career.

First, his painting professor, Christian Krogh, who was plugged into what was happening in France.

Krogh was publishing a journal of the developments of French Impressionism, and he encouraged Edvard

to give it a try.

His second important encounter was with Hans Jaeger, who was a prominent writer and anarchist.

He encouraged his followers to overthrow bourgeoisie society, including its moral code.

They referred to him and his group as the Christiania Bohemians.

Just like in France, these were mostly the kids of the bourgeois middle class, the only class

who has the time or the means to sit around and criticize itself.

They meet in coffee shops and bars and talk about culture, art, society, and philosophy.

Jaeger's big idea was to reorganize government and society around a decentralized structure,

based on humanity's natural inclination towards love.

On the other hand, when Monk tells Jaeger he's been arguing with his father, Jaeger tells

him to kill him with a pistol.

Thankfully, Jaeger's influence wasn't deep enough for Edvard to consider that.

But Monk falls in with the Bohemians of Oslo, anarchists, atheists, non-conformists.

Free love and polyamory, copious drinking and public brawling were all activities held in

high regard by this group of mostly jaded bourgeois kids.

Between Krogh and Jaeger, Monk had been set free.

Krogh had freed his painting style and gave him permission to be more creative and intuitive.

Jaeger freed his mind from the conventional norms and attitudes of society and gave him

the confidence to trust his own strange ideas, because Jaeger told him to write his life.

He felt free to express his pain, his grief, depression, and anxiety.

Monk is met with pretty quick success and even starts to sell a few paintings.

He gets accepted into some of the bigger exhibitions in Norway.

Things are starting to happen, but he's also pretty quick to attract controversy.

After his first exhibit, the conservative Christian press described one of his works as an almost

frighteningly ugly portrait.

This is a good example of the types of frighteningly ugly portraits Monk was making at the time.

While he hadn't been to France to see the impressionist paintings there, he was learning as much as he could

from the reproductions and publications he saw.

And you can see here, this is a highly skilled impressionist painting with Monk focusing on

the light and its glow.

Also influenced by realism, he's using real colors and showing details like dirty feet

and wrinkled sheets.

Norway was a long way from Paris, and this shows a much looser and softer style of painting

than the conservative critics there would have been used to.

But by the French standards, he's still quite conservative with his colors, using mostly neutral

tones.

Over the years, he gradually starts pushing things, gradually getting a little bit looser,

a little bit brighter.

He was still studying with Krogh, who appreciated Impressionism, but was no Impressionist himself.

In 1886, he has a breakthrough when he finishes his painting, The Sick Child, based on the terrible

memory of his sister dying from tuberculosis.

This is an idea and a composition he will revisit over and over throughout his career.

He takes his time painting this piece, adding and scraping away paint, layer by layer, as

if he's trying to uncover his own buried or forgotten memories.

This is an incredibly moody painting.

It was heavily criticized, of course.

The Norwegian critics said it looked unfinished, rough, dirty, no realistic light and shadow.

And they were right.

But that was the point.

In 1889, Edvard has his first solo exhibition in Oslo.

It's a big hit, and the local government even offers him a grant to go to study in Paris.

Obviously, in the late 19th century, this was really the place to go if you wanted to get

serious about painting.

And in Paris, he wastes no time.

As part of his scholarship, he's exhibiting paintings and enrolling in classes as soon as he arrives.

He's also going to museums, visiting studios, and soaking in as much as he can.

He falls in love with the work of Van Gogh, Pissarro, Seurat, and Gauguin.

The symbolism and reaction against realism was enlightening and incredibly inspiring to Monk.

However, not long after Monk arrives, he receives word that his father had passed away.

So he heads back to Norway to attend his father's funeral and be with his family.

This must have been a difficult and confusing time for Monk.

The father he fought with for so many years, but also loved, was now gone.

Edward gets very depressed and starts drinking a lot.

He becomes suicidal and hopeless after so much death in his family.

He isn't able to accomplish much for a while.

His father's death left the family destitute.

Edward feels the responsibility fall on his shoulders.

But fortunately, based on the quality and success of his paintings,

he's able to secure a loan from a wealthy art collector so he can start supporting his siblings.

Eventually, the depression and alcoholism begin to ease their grip on Edward, and he's able to start painting again.

He eventually returns to Paris to study more.

Seurat has been on his mind, and he wants to try out a bit of pointillism.

You can see him dipping his toes in here on this painting called Spring Day on Carl Johan Street.

He doesn't commit to pointillism, but he is beginning to push himself beyond his comfort zone and think about things in a different way.

Monk's popularity is rising, and in 1892, he's invited by the Association of Berlin Artists to have a big solo show in Berlin.

The directors apparently weren't completely aware of what they were going to get, and some were shocked at what they saw when his paintings came in.

So, they decided to shut down the show after only a week to spare anyone else from being exposed to this degenerate art.

Keep in mind, he hasn't even made anything really radical yet.

Yes, he'd been experimenting with simplifying forms and using looser and less polished marks, but it's nothing really crazy like the scream.

Even though Berlin has a burgeoning art scene, Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm was a pretty conservative place when it comes to official taste in art.

He's becoming increasingly focused on the emotional expression in his work, though.

Like the symbolists, he wants his paintings to have feeling and psychological depth, with dreamlike landscapes that help capture our inner lives.

He wasn't concerned with how his figures looked, but what emotions they experienced.

In 1891, he first paints a picture called Melancholy of an unhappy man on a beach, which he painted in reference to a friend who had a romantic affair that had ended badly.

He often felt his own emotions were so big and at times so unmanageable that you can see why he might become focused on learning about the emotional lives of others.

Melancholy is the perfect emotion to describe a lot of monks' work, and he'll do many versions of this painting over the years, coming back to it again and again.

But melancholy isn't exactly the inspirational, masculine sort of theme the Kaiser wanted to see in his art gallery.

Closing the show, though, had the opposite effect anticipated, and news of the censorship blows up. It goes viral.

Monk finds himself suddenly in high demand.

His closed show starts to tour around Germany, and the fallout leads to the formation of a new group called the Berlin Secession,

artists and writers who are ready to shake off the hold of the German art establishment.

They demanded freedom from censorship.

This was huge. It would kick off similar movements throughout Europe.

Meanwhile, Monk's sitting back here, watching with his popcorn, quite amused at the controversy his work has caused.

In a great Hollywood-style plot twist, by the time his show tours around the country and comes back to Berlin,

the Artists' Association has changed its tune and welcomes this new celebrity back for a full show.

Now, he's getting recognition, but in his words, it's more honor than gold.

He wasn't selling much work, and remember, there were several family members back in Norway depending on him,

and a big loan collecting interest as well.

He also found it difficult to part with many of his paintings, describing them as like his children.

Collectors would have their checkbook out, and Edward would say,

Hey, no, not that one. I can't part with it.

Monk will stay in Berlin for about four years, painting, sketching, and planning.

His work is becoming more abstract, more simplified, flattened forms, more interested in color,

unusual compositions, mood, and feeling, exaggerating to heighten the emotion.

Amidst all this, Monk starts seeing Billy Thoulo, the wife of a third cousin.

His whole social circle is encouraging free love, open relationships,

and rejecting all the institutions of the bourgeoisie middle-class society.

He becomes infatuated with her, but eventually she calls it off after a couple of years.

Of course, he's devastated, but he focuses his disappointment and disillusionment towards his work.

This beautiful work, entitled Starry Night, from 1893,

shows the view from the window of the hotel where he remembered falling in love for the first time.

Monk follows up this work with the painting for which he's known around the world, The Scream,

which was completed in 1893 when Monk was 30 years old.

In the simplest of terms, he's painting fear and loneliness of a person in a natural setting.

Edvard said of this painting,

Why he painted the sky red has long been debated.

Some believe that Monk is depicting the memory of the Norwegian skies about 10 years earlier

when Krakatoa had erupted in Indonesia and tinted the skies throughout the Western Hemisphere.

There are also variants of polar clouds that appear in Norway that can catch the sunset like you see here,

which could come on suddenly, as he described.

But other scholars are not convinced Monk was an expressionist and symbolist.

He was more interested in what he felt than what he saw.

The figure and the face in the painting looked very much like it was influenced by mummies he saw in Paris.

I always wondered about the odd, simplified features of The Scream,

but seeing mummies like this, with their eyes hollowed out and mouth agape,

the face in The Scream starts to make a lot more sense.

If you look really closely, written in tiny letters in the sky, Monk writes,

Can only have been painted by a madman.

I'm not sure why he wanted to tell us that.

He must have been channeling his most chaotic feelings of fear in this painting.

Was he being ironic?

It's far more abstract than anything he's painted up to this point.

This tells me he really went out on a limb and pushed himself in many new ways.

He may have felt anxious to paint such a bizarre painting.

Fundamentally, Monk wanted his paintings to answer big questions like,

How does it feel to exist?

What's going on behind our calm exteriors?

Judging by the popularity of this painting, one of the most famous ever painted,

I would say he nailed it.

Monk made many versions of The Scream,

and he also made other similar paintings with the same themes and composition.

This one is titled Anxiety, and is particularly haunting.

I love the reflection of the sky and the water,

and the absolute alien bug-looking face of the sky on the bottom left.

At this point, Monk has hit his stride,

and is making the most groundbreaking and recognizable work of his long and successful career.

These new highly emotional paintings are part of a long-running series he later calls

The Freeze of Life, and there are his most recognizable works exploring the full spectrum

of human feelings.

Here's another one from that series.

It's titled Love and Pain, though it was later dubbed Vampire.

Because of the way she kisses his neck, looks more like a bite.

Plus, her red hair draping over him looks a lot like blood.

As he often did with many of his favorite works,

Monk went on to make multiple versions of this piece decades later.

However, one critic said of Monk,

he sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints.

That's why his paintings look unfinished,

because he's trying to get at the core of his feeling and to express that.

Sometimes that requires painting a nose, and sometimes that means leaving it off.

In 1895, his only brother sadly dies of pneumonia,

another heavy, heavy weight on Edvard's heart.

He makes this haunting and beautiful painting in memory of his deceased brother entitled

At the Deathbed the following year.

But life is not all bad.

By 1897, he's doing relatively well and is regularly selling his paintings.

And after years living and traveling through Germany and France,

he returns to live in Christiania again.

The same old conservative art scene is there,

but Monk is a legit artist now, with Paris and Berlin under his belt.

Begrudgingly, the Norwegian establishment starts to accept him.

Monk's financial success is due in large part to printmaking.

This was a great way for artists to sell multiple copies of a single work.

Not knowing how to make prints himself,

he hired Auguste Klott, renowned printer in Paris,

who worked with Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh.

Soon, Monk gets really into printmaking,

and he's making tons of new work and reworking old work with new ideas for the new format.

He got more involved in the process,

and because he's brilliant,

he invented a way to make woodblock printing easier.

By using a jigsaw to saw out the colored bits,

so you could just switch those parts out instead of the whole plate,

like a child's puzzle.

As he would have done in this piece here in what appears to be Darth Vader and Princess Leia on the beach.

Anachronistically, though, I could be wrong.

Within a few years, he had made hundreds and hundreds of new prints,

and selling them is a much more reliable way to make a steady income from your art,

instead of holding out for big-ticket painting sales.

Continuing to experiment and push the boundaries with this medium,

he would embrace using the texture of the wood grain used to press the print,

as you can see in this print of a man bathing.

The wood grain is serving as the ripples in the water and reflection of the sky.

Unlike other artists, he usually kept the printing plates themselves, too.

They found 500 in his home when he died.

Now, we need to talk about a bizarre chapter in Monk's life.

In 1899, he meets a woman named Tula Larson, who falls madly in love with Monk, and she pursues him.

Except he has a love-hate relationship with Tula.

At first, they have a roaring affair and travel to Italy together.

But when she starts talking about marriage, Monk rejects her.

But then she pursues him across international borders.

He moves back to Berlin for a bit, and she follows him.

Then he goes to Paris, and she followed him there, too.

He would often refuse her advances and then give in to her,

which only prolonged this painful back and forth.

Monk even gets close to agreeing to getting married before fleeing to another city again.

Yes, they had a highly dysfunctional relationship.

And he said of her,

the touch of her lips was like the kiss of a corpse.

With Monk, it's hard to say whether that was a good or a bad thing.

Perhaps he had Tula on his mind, or one of his other love triangles,

or perhaps all of them together,

in this intense and uncomfortable painting of love and jealousy called The Dance of Life.

Certainly, jealousy was one of those big feelings, like melancholy and terror,

that Monk reveled in finding ways to paint.

Tula gets to the point where she tells Edvard he has made her depressed and suicidal,

which honestly sounds reasonable after years of chasing someone

who can't make up their mind about you.

So they have an argument.

There is a gun involved.

And somehow, Monk gets his fingertip shot off.

As we've seen with a lot of artists, their lives are like soap operas sometimes.

He's very self-conscious of his partially missing finger.

From then on, he would always hide his hand or wear gloves in public.

He commemorates this traumatic evening in a painting he coyly titles

The Death of Murat I, a personal retelling of the classic Jacques-Louis David painting.

Unsurprisingly, this fails to improve their relationship.

What's actually surprising, though, is that they do reconcile for a bit.

But Tula finally moves on to one of Monk's younger artist friends.

For the final pendulum swing, Monk, feeling betrayed by her leaving,

grabs a saw and literally cuts her out of a painting he had made of them together.

I remember my sister in high school doing that with photos of her and her ex.

Monk is obviously not in a good place after Tula.

And by 1908, his bohemian lifestyle is beginning to catch up with him.

All the traveling, smoking, drinking, love triangles, depression, and anxiety

is becoming too much.

Monk eventually collapses.

He's hearing voices.

Too much nicotine and alcohol are taking their toll on his body.

He attempts to self-medicate, but that only exacerbates the problem

and creates a downward spiral.

His physical and mental state were at an all-time low.

Thankfully, he's able to get the help he needs,

and he spends the next eight months in the hospital resting, recuperating,

and getting his drinking under control.

After hitting rock bottom, he decided to make some big changes to his lifestyle.

There were some friends who were bad influences that he'd have to cut off.

He preferred to keep to himself anyway.

His biggest goal was keeping the drama to a minimum.

No more tumultuous relationships and running from one city to the next.

He needed to relax and just focus on painting.

He returns to Norway once again, and by now, the public there has finally embraced him,

and he starts receiving lots of acclaim and honors as an artist.

Coming home and living a cleaner lifestyle seems to work well,

and there's a visible change in his work after this.

His colors become brighter, his marks even looser.

He has no fear or reservations.

Here he is painting perhaps a more hopeful work of his intellectual heroes,

Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright, and the philosophers Nietzsche and Socrates.

In 1916, he buys a former plant nursery on a large piece of land outside of Oslo called the Ekeli Estate.

With acres of trees and several large studio buildings on the property,

he commissions an architect to build yet another one.

Each one filled with paintings.

He's doing so well now, he's basically part of the landed gentry.

A few years later, he caught the flu in the great pandemic.

He not only survived, but made some fascinating paintings of himself while he had it.

Monk, like Cezanne, Bonnard, Valadon, and Radon,

tried to live out the last few decades, keeping mostly to himself,

with a large studio out in the country, away from the city,

taking inspiration from nature and painting.

It was not total isolation.

All these artists, Monk included, still had friends, family, and collectors occasionally visit them,

but they were highly selective about who could visit and for how long,

which most of the time turned out to be not very many and not very long.

During these years, he was also commissioned to paint some murals in the hallways of Oslo University,

in which he would finish in 1916.

These glorious, colorful, and hopeful sunsets

couldn't be further from the anxious loneliness in the scream.

A commission like this one would help cement his legacy.

Monk continued painting pretty much all day, every day at his estate,

with no wife or children for the last 28 years.

While his later works are not very well known,

and perhaps lack the emotional rawness that made him so famous,

he continued to make incredible and beautiful paintings until the end of his life.

During these later years, the admiration and praise keep coming.

He's awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olaf.

Ironic for the former bohemian who once talked about replacing the government with a free love collective.

As Monk's eyes began to fail him, he would record the process of degeneration, much like Cézanne did.

Although Monk painted far more abstract and inscrutable works.

In fact, his self-portrait during his eye disease is kind of terrifying.

As a painter myself, I can't imagine the anxiety of losing one's vision.

Unsurprisingly, his old companions' fear and anxiety return to the paintings.

Despite a lifetime of drama, emotional turmoil, and many years of self-abuse through drinking and violence,

Monk lives to a ripe old age.

He lives long enough to even see World War II, in which Norway was occupied by Germany.

The Nazis declare his work degenerate, and they get removed from the museums.

Monk spends most of the war trying to keep a low profile,

terrified the Gestapo would take his house and confiscate all the decades of art he had stored there.

Unfortunately, he doesn't live quite long enough to see Norway liberated,

and eventually dies in 1944 at the age of 80 from pneumonia.

He donated his entire estate, consisting of some 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, and watercolors,

to the city of Oslo, plus stacks and stacks of all his writings and notes.

There's a long list of contemporary painters today where Monk's influence is clear.

Peter Doig, Neo Rausch, Kim Dorland, and many more artists continue to look at Monk today.

His relevance and inspiration span the decades.

But Monk stands alone as one of the most powerful of the symbolist painters,

who fused the styles and techniques of the post-impressionists with bold, emotive, and expressive subjects.

The Scream today is one of the world's most iconic paintings,

as fascinating as the story of the man behind it.