Edvard Munch: Escaping…

Edvard Munch - Spring Ploughing - 1918 - Oil on canvas - Munch Museum, Oslo (click photo for larger image)Norwegian Symbolist painter (1863-1944) Edvard Munch had a profound effect on subsequent painters in Europe and the United States, even as his particular style dated quickly after the First World War. 

Pioneering German Expressionist painters such as Kirchner, Kandinsky, Beckmann, and others concerned with expressing individual psychology through intense color and semi-abstraction found considerable inspiration in Munch's melancholy yet strident canvases.

Munch's somber, resonant color, as well as his rendering of the human figure in semi-abstract tonalities, would prove enduring expressive and stylistic hallmarks of Symbolism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and even Surrealism. 

On his death in 1944, it was learned that Munch had bequeathed his remaining work to the city of Oslo. Numbering about 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings, and 18,000 prints, the collection was provided its own museum in 1963, where it serves as a testament to Munch's lasting legacy. 

Munch was a troubled soul who spent time in the hospital for mental issues more than once. In the years following one of Munch's hospital stays, the artist removed himself from the lifestyle of carousing and heavy drinking and devoted his days to his art and to the countryside of his homeland. While at one time the artist referred to his paintings as "my children," he later began referring to them as "my children with nature." A new-found inspiration, in the form of farm hands, animals, and the Norwegian landscape, took Munch's art in an entirely new direction, one celebrating life and work, rather than anxiety and loss.

In Spring Ploughing, one can see the inspiration Munch took from the much younger Franz Marc, whose Expressionist paintings were originally inspired by Munch, and who had a penchant for painting animals in their natural surroundings. 

Munch's period of creating truly original Symbolist-cum-Expressionist works had since passed, indicated by similar works of this time and their innocent subject matter. Nevertheless, the maturity of this painting's brushwork and palette clearly demonstrate the hand of a master.