Edvard Munch on display at the Palazzo Reale in Milan

40 years after his last exhibition in Milan, Edvard Munch (Norway, 1863 -1944) is celebrated with a major retrospective, promoted by the Municipality of Milan - Culture, under the patronage of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Rome, and produced by Palazzo Reale and Arthemisia, in collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo.

 

Munch is one of the artists who has best been able to interpret the feelings, passions and anxieties of his soul, communicating them in a powerful and tragic way. Initially shaped by the Norwegian naturalist Per Lasseu Krohg, with whom he began his painting career in 1880, he moved to Paris for the first time in 1885 and here he was influenced by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist who suggested a more intimate, dramatic use of color but above all a psychological approach.

 

Munch was conditioned throughout his life by the suffering and lack that he already knew as a child, when he suffered the shocking loss of his mother and sister, suffering from tuberculosis.
In Berlin he contributed to the formation of the Berlin Secession and in 1892 his first solo exhibition was held, which was not only not appreciated, but was also considered scandalous: from that moment Munch embodied the figure of the subversive and cursed artist. A precarious life lived "on the edge of a precipice" that led him to alcoholism and a psychological crisis, until he was admitted to some nursing homes between 1908 and 1909. Choosing seclusion, he then moved to his Ekely property in Oslo until his death in 1944, a month shy of his eightieth birthday.

 

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