Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a Norwegian painter whose raw studies of anxiety, love, and death made him a founder of Expressionism. He grew up surrounded by illness, losing his mother and his older sister Sophie to tuberculosis while he was still a child. That early grief runs through almost everything he painted, and he returned to it for the rest of his life. His aim was never to copy what the eye sees but to put raw feeling straight onto the canvas.

His best-known work, The Scream (1893), turned a moment of pure panic under a blood-red sky into one of the most recognized images in all of art. It belongs to a larger cycle he called the Frieze of Life, a sequence about love, jealousy, fear, and mortality that also includes Madonna and Anxiety. Working in Kristiania, Berlin, and Paris, Munch used swirling lines, sour colors, and stripped-down shapes to make emotion impossible to miss, an approach that shaped German Expressionism a generation later.

Earlier paintings like The Sick Child show him reworking the same painful memory over and over, scraping the surface and repainting it until it felt true rather than polished. After a breakdown in 1908 his palette brightened and he turned more to landscapes, workers, and self-portraits. You can see his work today at the Munch Museum in Oslo and the National Gallery, both of which hold large parts of his life's output.