Rare Drawings by Munch
If we count ourselves among those who know little of Munch's work, an important initiative of Munch Museum in Oslo aims to correct that by making over 7,600 of Munch's drawings available online. The online catalog, free to all, represents a tremendous feat of logistics, and features drawings that go back as far as the artist's childhood, sketchbooks, studies of tools, coins, and keys that demonstrate Munch's dedication as a disciplined draftsman.
"Rarely in the canon of Western art." writes Tom Rosenthal at The Independent, "has there been so much anxiety, fear and deep psychological pain in one artist.
That he lived to be 80 and spent only one period in an asylum is a tribute not only to Munch's physical stamina but to his iron will and his innate, robust psychological strength." Born in Norway in 1863, the sickly Edvard, whose mother died soon after his birth, was raised by a harsh disciplinarian father who read Poe and Dostoevsky to his children and, in addition to beating them "for minor infractions."
The trauma was compounded by the death of Munch's sister and, later, his brother, and by the institutionalization of another sister, Laura, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Munch's own childhood illness made his schooling erratic, though he did manage to receive some artistic training, briefly, at Oslo's Art Association, an artist's club where he "learnt by copying the works on display."
From there the young Munch launched himself into what was destined to become an extraordinarily productive artistic career.
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