Edvard Munch

Munch lost his mother and his elder sister to tuberculosis in childhood, and the illness and death of people close to him is the subject he returned to for fifty years. He grouped much of the work into a sequence he called the Frieze of Life.

He was as significant a printmaker as a painter, and the prints are where the method is clearest: he would cut a woodblock into pieces, ink them separately and reassemble them, so the grain of the wood stays visible in the finished image and no two impressions are quite the same.

His work was declared degenerate by the Nazi regime and removed from German museums in 1937. He died in occupied Norway in 1944 and left everything he still owned to the city of Oslo.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗