Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter who put raw human emotion at the center of his art. Born in 1863, he grew up surrounded by illness and death, losing his mother and sister early, and that grief runs all through his work. He is famous the world over for The Scream, an image of a figure clutching its face under a blood-red sky that has become shorthand for modern anxiety itself.

Munch painted love, jealousy, sickness, and dread with swirling lines and intense color, helping lay the groundwork for Expressionism. He worked on a series he called the Frieze of Life, exploring the big emotional stages of human existence. After a breakdown and treatment in his later years, his work grew calmer, and he left a huge body of paintings and prints to the city of Oslo.