Göteborgs konstmuseum | Edvard Munch’s Graphic Art

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Here we present web exhibitions, some of which are, or have been, displayed at the museum, and some that are exclusively created for the web. A web exhibition comprises a text plus a list of works. From the list of works, you can click to the searchable database. This page will be updated continuously as new, differently themed web exhibitions become available.

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Edvard Munch’s Graphic Art

Early on, the Gothenburg Museum of Art acquired works by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944), partly through the museum curator Axel L. Romdahl’s connection with the artist. Romdahl had a great interest in graphic art. Therefore, it is not surprising that the museum’s Munch collection, in addition to four paintings, consists of as many as 45 prints.

Munch’s graphic production spans over 50 years, from 1894 until his death. Possibly, Munch saw the graphic techniques as a way of disseminating his art to a wider audience. As a printmaker Munch was self-taught, although he was influenced by skilful printmakers in Berlin and in Paris. Munch based his first etchings and woodcuts on earlier famous works in oil, which he modified using graphic techniques. As Munch mastered the graphic techniques he began to create new motifs. Self-Portrait (1895) with its inserted skeleton arm is an example. This lithograph is one of the most famous images of Munch, touching on his relationship with death.

Portraits of friends, colleagues and lovers reoccur throughout his career. During Munch’s time in Kristiania (present-day Oslo) he was a member of the so-called Kristiania Bohemians, an intellectual community of writers and artists that included Hans Jæger, Christian and Oda Krohg. Later he was inspired by another group of bohemians in Berlin, especially August Strindberg whom he portrayed in a lithograph.

The violinist Eva Mudocci – Munch’s lover for two years – was one of the women Munch depicted several times. In Violin Concert, Eva Mudocci is portrayed in her professional role, while in The Brooch she appears as an inaccessible Madonna.

Love, anxiety and death were the themes of Munch’s composition “Frieze of Life” produced from the 1890s and onwards. Munch viewed the frieze as a poem of life in its various phases. The works are deeply personal. For example, the frieze depicts his mother’s and sister’s illnesses and their deaths from tuberculosis, in 1868 and 1877. Munch’s different titles of the same motif, Love and Pain, Vampire and A Woman Kissing the Back of a Man's Neck expose the artist’s ambivalent relationship with love and women. The works in this presentation that may be regarded as forming part of the “Frieze of Life” are Moonlight I, Melancholy III, The Kiss, Vampire II, Madonna, The Sick Child I and Death in the Sickroom.

Works