Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a Norwegian Symbolist and Expressionist painter-
printmaker who, unlike the Impressionists in their focus on the natural world, looked
inward to portray basic human conditions—including love, jealousy, anxiety,
loneliness, sickness and death. According to Munch, “Art is this antithesis of nature,”
and he used his seemingly unending struggles, tumultuous and unsatisfying
relationships with women and the premature loss of his mother and sister, as fodder
for his emotionally charged works, intended to distill the most basic of human
emotional needs and fears. In 1879, Munch began training as an engineer in Oslo but
quickly changed direction to focus on painting, adopting a bohemian lifestyle heavily
influenced by local anarchist and nihilist Hans Jaeger, who guided Munch to look
inside himself to find inspiration for his artwork. He studied in Paris and worked in
Berlin for a time, frequently suffering bouts of depression and heavy drinking, often
pushing himself into poor health and forcing his relocation to more temperate
climates for recovery.
Early reactions to Munch’s work were unfavorable and he often received extremely
negative reviews. When he moved to Berlin to work in 1892, his paintings were hung
in a solo exhibition that closed after only a week because of the overwhelmingly
hostile reactions to his work. He did not receive any positive attention from the critics
and art public until the late 1890s. By 1900, Munch found critical acceptance and
acclaim in Germany and France, but was still not wholly excepted in Norway. He was
included in the Secessionist exhibition in Berlin in 1902, where the rising young
painters of the emerging German Expressionist movement saw his works. In 1897, he
was included in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, and would continue to exhibit
there, influencing the Fauves, who invited him to exhibit with them in 1906.
Munch began making prints in 1894, while living in Berlin, and became a prolific
creator of etchings, woodcuts and lithographs. He would often return to motifs and
subjects he addressed in his paintings and would alternate between the different
media with great fluidity and skill. He created his own vocabulary of personal
symbols that he would repeat and reform throughout his career. Munch produced
around 750 prints altogether; amounting to a staggering total of some 30,000
different impressions.
The Kiss
, 1895 (lot 83), is an etched variant of a painting from
1897, created during the artist’s Christmas sojourn in Nice, in the south of France,
and was part of his series of
Freize of Life
paintings. To describe the painting, Munch
wrote, “She was warm and I felt her body close to mine. We kissed long—it was
absolutely still in the lofty studio.” The etched variant of
The Kiss
is elegantly
simplified from the painted original. It is pared down to the absolute essential
elements in order to convey the universal concept of such an embrace.
