- About Ateneum Munch (1863–1944) was one of the leading artists
in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. As a pioneer in
the development of modern art he sought painterly means to
express the distress and anguish suffered by individuals in a
fastmodernizing world. His works often deal with his personal
familiarity with sickness, loss and grief. Munch was born in the
village of Løten in south-east Norway, but the family soon moved
to Christiania (Oslo). His father, a doctor, brought up the
family after the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1868.
His sister also died from the disease and Munch himself suffered
from ill health as a child. Munch trained at the Royal School of
Art and Design in Christiania, winning a travel scholarship to
Paris in 1889. There he encountered the work of Vincent van
Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and was
especially influenced by Gauguin’s Synthetism and rejection of
realism. In 1892 he moved to Berlin, where he met August
Strindberg and other artists