Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863 and, with the notable exception of the two decades from 1889 to 1909 spent traveling, studying, working and exhibiting in France and Germany, he lived there until his death in 1944. He was active as a painter from the 1880s until shortly before his death, though the greater part of his oeuvre, and certainly the better-known part, was produced before the early 1920s. During his lifetime of work, he made one of the most significant and enduring contributions to the development of Modernism in the twentieth century. In his themes and subject matter, in the manner in which he gave voice to these, and in his handling of paint and the graphic media (especially woodcut and lithography), Munch was profoundly original and radical. He is one of the handfuls of artists who have shaped our understanding of the human experience and transformed the ways in which it might be visually expressed.
Munch's nomadic and self-imposed exile's life in Europe, from his mid-twenties to mid-forties, especially in the cosmopolitan, creatively fertile centres of Paris and Berlin, was undoubtedly vital to the shape of his art. It established the necessary detachment from the 'untroubled communal myths' of his homeland and the troubled passage of his young manhood. On the one hand, he was freed from the constraints of his past, and the real and perceived limitations of provincial life. On the other hand, he was closely associated with the largely Nordic avant-garde writers and artists of his day who shared and promoted his belief in the necessity of using private, subjective experience to create 'universal' statements and imagery. this was the ambiance in which Munch's originality and personal convictions flourished. His was the beginning of an age that celebrated the life of the individual rather than of community or society.
Munch showed a flair for drawing at an early age but received little formal training. An important factor in his artistic development was the Kristiania Bohème, a circle of writers and artists in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. Its members believed in free love and generally opposed bourgeois narrow-mindedness. One of the older painters in the circle, Christian Krohg, gave Munch both instruction and encouragement.
Berlin was crucial to Munch's evolution. It was here in the early 1890s that his art found its first widespread reception and recognition; and here too, after 1900, that the level of public acknowledgment, the numerous commissions for both portraiture and mural decoration, and the emergence of patrons, such as Dr. Max Linde, and his wife Marie Linde, enabled him to earn his living as an artist. In Berlin in the early 1890s, amongst his peers, the cosmopolitan and largely Nordic circle of writers, critics and philosophers, Munch found also the intellectual stimulus and philosophical attitudes that validated the underpinnings of his art, whose beginnings were formulated in the fervent intellectual and sexual radicalism of the Kristiania-Boheme. Munch's works are now represented in numerous major museums and galleries in Norway and abroad. Munch Created 1789 paintings total. 1006 of which are at the Munch Museum. Many of the remaining are in Bergen and the National Museum.