Edvard Munch: Painting the Soul’s Landscape

Edvard Munch, like Gauguin and Van Gogh, rejected the conventions of his time—grand landscapes, genteel interiors, and the polished realism favored by the cultural elite. From the beginning, Munch sought something deeper: a visual language that could express the raw, often painful truths of human emotion. “We want more than a mere photograph of nature,” he wrote in 1888. “We want to create… an art that arrests and engages. An art created of one’s innermost heart.”

This conviction led to the creation of his Frieze of Life, a cycle of paintings that trace the arc of human experience—love, desire, jealousy, anxiety, and death. Inspired by personal trauma and philosophical reflection, Munch’s imagery was not conceived as a single series but gradually evolved into one. Each painting was revisited, reworked, and reimagined, revealing more of what Munch called its “soul.”

Symbolism and the Shoreline

Munch’s poetic sensibility and love of contemplative figures on shorelines align him more closely with German Romanticism than with his contemporaries. He admired the moonlit reveries of Caspar David Friedrich and the spiritual landscapes of Philipp Otto Runge. Like Wagner’s Ring cycle, Munch’s Frieze was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total artwork that fused emotion, symbolism, and atmosphere.

In a 1918 article, Munch described the Frieze as “a number of decorative pictures… an image of life.” A sinuous shoreline threads through the panels, beyond which lies the restless ocean—symbol of the unconscious, of eternity. Beneath the trees, life unfolds in all its joy and sorrow.

The Soul in Paint

Munch’s belief in the soul as a metaphysical presence within each painting was shaped by his admiration for Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Nietzsche’s idea that behind every material phenomenon lies an eternal prototype resonated with Munch’s view of art as a spiritual act. Dostoevsky’s explorations of the human psyche—especially in The Idiot—deeply influenced Munch’s own efforts to portray the mystical and the subconscious. He saw each painting as a living entity: “I believe that each painting is an individual trying to achieve something of its own.” By reworking his images, he believed he could reveal more of their inner truth.

A Life Rooted in Loss and Legacy

Munch’s upbringing in Kristiania (now Oslo) was steeped in piety and intellectual tradition. His father, a military physician, died suddenly in 1889, triggering a profound emotional crisis. His extended family included scholars, artists, and churchmen—among them Peter Andreas Munch, a historian whose tomb Munch later memorialized in paint and print.

Introduced to art at age 13, Munch enrolled in the National School of Art and Design in 1880. By 18, he was exhibiting in the newly opened National Gallery. His early exposure to both classical and Romantic traditions laid the foundation for a career that would fuse personal anguish with universal themes.

Edvard Munch: A City of Shadows

Kristiania in the late 19th century was a city of rigid moral codes and quiet despair. Until 1912, it was legally required to be confirmed as Lutheran. There was no opera, no ballet—only beer halls and music venues. The city’s social ritual was the daily promenade down Karl Johan Street, where the bourgeoisie paraded in their finest attire. Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892) captures this scene with haunting clarity: pale, anxious figures stare directly at the viewer, a motif he would later intensify in Angst.

Industrialization brought rapid growth—and deep suffering. The population surged from 17,000 in 1801 to over 230,000 by 1900. Tuberculosis ravaged the city’s poor, and Munch was marked by its toll: his mother died when he was five, his beloved sister Sophie when he was thirteen. He believed he had inherited a curse—“Disease and Insanity and Death were the black Angels that stood by my Cradle”—and vowed never to marry or have children.

Sex, Disease, and Moral Hypocrisy

Munch’s neuroses were shaped not only by personal loss but by the city’s fraught relationship with sexuality. Though prostitution was banned nationally in 1842, Kristiania permitted it under strict regulation. Women were subjected to humiliating medical inspections and police oversight. The system was rife with corruption, and failure to comply could mean imprisonment. This hypocrisy—moral purity enforced alongside institutionalized exploitation—was central to the work of Henrik Ibsen, whose play Ghosts exposed the devastation wrought by adultery and hereditary syphilis. Munch later designed the stage set for a Berlin production in 1906, a testament to their shared critique of societal norms.

Art as Social Conscience

Munch’s first teacher, realist painter Christian Krohg, also challenged the status quo. His novel Albertine and its companion painting Albertine in the Waiting-Room of the Police Surgeon depicted the brutal treatment of women forced into prostitution. The painting, rendered with the grandeur of history painting, caused a sensation in 1887 and helped prompt legal reform.

Munch absorbed these influences deeply. His painting Inheritance (1898) and its associated print confront the legacy of syphilis with unflinching honesty: women infected by their partners, left to watch the disease destroy their children. It is a searing indictment of gendered injustice and a society that punished the vulnerable while shielding the powerful.

Edvard Munch: From Bohemia to Soul Painting

In the late 19th century, Edvard Munch moved between two worlds: the repressive moral climate of Kristiania and the more permissive, cosmopolitan atmosphere of Paris. While prostitution in Norway was tightly regulated and stigmatized, Paris offered a more fluid social structure. High-class escorts could reinvent themselves through marriage, and artists openly explored the lives of women on society’s margins. Writers like Zola and Flaubert, and painters like Manet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec, turned these women into icons of modernity—figures of desire, despair, and defiance.

Munch’s early artistic path was shaped by this contrast. Though briefly enrolled in engineering to satisfy his father’s expectations, he soon joined the National School of Art and Design in 1881. Encouraged by his cousin Frits Thaulow, a landscape painter who had faced his own battles with artistic conservatism, Munch received a travel grant in 1885 and began to absorb the radical currents of European art.

The Sick Child and the Birth of Expressionism

Munch’s first teacher, Christian Krohg, was a realist with a social conscience. His painting Albertine in the Waiting-Room of the Police Surgeon exposed the brutal treatment of women under Norway’s prostitution laws. But it was Krohg’s Sick Girl (1881)—a haunting image of a dying child—that left a lasting impression on Munch.

In The Sick Child (1885–86), Munch revisited the death of his sister Sophie with raw emotion. The painting’s rough surface, muted palette, and expressive brushwork marked a break from academic finish. Critics dismissed it as incomplete, but Munch defended its honesty: “We can’t all paint fingernails and twigs.” He later called it his first “soul painting”—a work that sought not to depict reality, but to embody feeling.

Life-Painting and the Bohemian Ideal

Munch’s ideas were shaped not by German Symbolists or Strindberg, as some claimed, but by the radical bohemian circle led by Hans Jaeger. Jaeger’s anarchist philosophy rejected religion, marriage, and bourgeois morality. His banned book From the Kristiania Bohemians argued that celibacy, poverty, and sexual repression were the true evils of society. The group’s manifesto included instructions to sever family ties and even commit suicide—a nihilist creed that resonated with Munch’s own sense of existential doom.

Years later, Munch described this period as “Russian” in spirit—a time of blazing new trails in a “Siberian town” still trapped in moral frost. “It was a testing time for many,” he wrote to Pola Gauguin. “To describe it would require a Dostoevsky, or a mixture of Krohg, Jaeger, and possibly myself.”

Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Making of a Modern Artist

In the late 1880s, Edvard Munch entered his first serious love affair with Milly Thaulow, a married woman from a prominent Norwegian family. Their summer rendezvous in Åsgårdstrand provided the emotional and atmospheric backdrop for works like Summer Night: The Voice. Torn between the piety of his upbringing and the bohemian ideals of free love and artistic liberation, Munch found in this tension the fuel for his creative fire.

Though he never fully embraced Hans Jaeger’s radical manifesto—rejecting suicide and severing family ties—Jaeger’s influence was profound. Munch began to express himself with greater emotional intensity, painting Hulda, an early version of his erotic Madonna, and gifting it to Jaeger for his prison cell.

The Frieze of Life: Art from Inner Turmoil

The themes that would define Munch’s Frieze of Life—attraction, jealousy, anxiety, and isolation—grew directly from the emotional chaos of the Kristiania bohemian circle. Oda Lasson, the only woman in Munch’s painting Kristiania Bohemians, embodied the era’s complex entanglements. Her relationships with Jaeger, Krohg, and later Jappe Nilssen—whose brooding presence anchors Melancholy III—reflected the group’s unraveling ideals. Nilssen’s later support as a critic helped legitimize Munch’s work in Norway.

Munch’s own romantic life remained turbulent. After Milly Thaulow left him, he retreated further into solitude. His most painful relationship was with Tulla Larsen, who pursued him across Europe. Their affair ended in a shooting incident in 1902, leaving Munch with a permanently damaged hand—an injury immortalized in one of the earliest surviving X-rays.

Berlin: Scandal and Stardom

In 1892, Munch was invited to exhibit in Berlin by Adelsteen Normann, a fellow Norwegian painter. But his emotionally charged style—especially works like The Sick Child—clashed with the conservative tastes of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s court. The show was shut down after just one week. The Frankfurter Zeitung mocked the reaction: “Art is endangered! An Impressionist, and a mad one at that, has broken into the herd of our fine solidly bourgeois artists.”

To Munch’s surprise, the scandal made him famous. His exhibition reopened in December, and his work began touring across Germany. In Berlin, he joined a vibrant circle of international bohemians who gathered at the Black Piglet tavern—among them August Strindberg, Stanisław Przybyszewski, Holger Drachmann, Jens Thiis, and Richard Dehmel. Their conversations ranged from science and sex to alchemy and Symbolist art.

Drachmann’s fascination with cabaret and the Parisian can-can inspired Munch’s print Tingletangle (1895), a nod to Berlin’s own version of the dance craze. Munch had arrived—not just as a painter of emotion, but as a cultural force.

Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life

The emotional chaos of the Kristiania Bohemians—marked by tangled relationships, idealism, and heartbreak—provided the raw material for Edvard Munch’s most enduring artistic achievement: the Frieze of Life. Among the muses who shaped its imagery was Dagny Juel, a free-spirited writer and pianist whose beauty and independence captivated many in Munch’s circle. She married the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, bore him two children, and was later murdered by a jealous lover in Tbilisi in 1901. Munch remained loyal to her memory, writing a heartfelt obituary while the press vilified her for her sexual freedom.

Dagny, along with Milly Thaulow and Tulla Larsen, inspired Munch’s symbolist depictions of women—figures fused from memory, emotion, and myth. In Jealousy II, Przybyszewski’s pale, tormented face appears beside a half-dressed Dagny, with Munch himself in the background. These images were not portraits, but emotional archetypes.

A Poem in Paint

In 1893, Munch began to think in terms of a visual cycle. His exhibition Study for a Series: Love at Unter den Linden in Berlin included six compositions set against the pinewoods and shoreline of Åsgårdstrand, where memories of Milly Thaulow lingered. The works—The Voice, Kiss, Vampire, Melancholy, Moonlight, The Scream, and Death in the Sick Room—traced the arc of love, loss, and existential dread.

By 1896, ten paintings from the series were shown at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris to considerable acclaim. Munch continued to expand the cycle, producing prints under the title The Mirror and exhibiting them in Kristiania in 1897.

From the Modern Life of a Soul

In 1902, Mx Liebermann invited Munch to present the full cycle at the Berlin Secession. Now titled From the Modern Life of a Soul, the works were arranged in four thematic sections:

• I. Seeds of Love – The Voice, Attraction, The Kiss, Madonna

• II. Flowering and Passing of Love – Vampire, Melancholy, Jealousy

• III. Life Anxiety – Evening on Karl Johan Street, The Scream

• IV. Death – Death in the Sick Room, Dead Mother and Child

To complete the circle, Munch added Metabolism, a haunting image of a naked couple beneath a tree rooted in human bones—symbolizing life emerging from death. “It may appear that the motif… stands somewhat apart,” he wrote, “yet it is as necessary for the entire Frieze as a buckle is for a belt.”

A Vision Without a Home

Munch hoped to sell the Frieze as a complete installation, ideally housed in a single room designed to showcase its emotional and architectural unity. “Each individual panel,” he wrote, “should be shown to its total advantage without the overall impression being compromised.” But no buyer came forward.

The cycle was exhibited in Leipzig (1903), Kristiania (1904), Prague (1905), and again in Kristiania in 1918, with new panels replacing those sold to collectors. Though it was never housed as a whole, the Frieze of Life remained central to Munch’s identity. In a photograph taken on his seventy-fifth birthday, he stands in his studio at Ekely, surrounded by fragments of the cycle—a visual testament to a lifetime spent painting the soul.