Edvard Munch Quotes

When I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look on these notes as confessions. I have chosen – in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard – to split the work into two parts; the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is the universal in the soul [written after 1908]

The only influences in [the painting 'The sick Child', Munch painted in his elderly home, remembering very accurate the last days of his dying little sister Sophie] 'The sick Child'.. ..were the ones that come from my home.. ..my childhood and my home. Only someone who knew the conditions at home could possibly understand why there can be no conceivable chance of any other place having played a part – my home is to my art as a midwife is to her children.. ..few painters have ever experienced the full grief of their subject as I did in 'The sick child'. It was not just I who was suffering; it was all my nearest and dearest as well.

There must be no more pictures covered in brown sauce [c. 1880, when Munch started to paint series of landscapes in fresh colors]

My ideas developed under the influence of the bohemians or rather under Hans Jager [leader of the 'Kristiania Bohemia' since 1883]. Many people have mistakenly claimed that my ideas were formed under the influence of Strindberg and the Germans.. ..but that is wrong. They had already been formed by then.

My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? ..my art gives meaning to my life.

I am at work on a girl. It is quite simple a girl getting up on the edge of her bed and pulling on her stockings. The bed is whitish, and in addition there are white sheets, a white nightdress, a bedside table with a white cover, white curtains and a blue wall. [as model for his painting 'Morning', 1884]

Could only have been painted by a madman.

One evening I came to have a discussion with my father on the subject how long unbelievers are tormented in Hell. I maintained that no sinner could be so guilty that God would let him suffer longer than a thousand years. Father said that they would suffer for a thousand times a thousand years. We would not give up the argument. I became so irritated.. .I returned home to make my piece with him. He had gone to bed so I quietly opened his bedroom door. He was on his knees in front of the bed, praying.. .I closed the door and went to my own room but I could not get to sleep.. ..eventually I took out my drawing block and started to draw. I drew my father kneeling by his bed, with the light from the bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over his nightshirt. I fetched my paintbox and colored it in. Finally I achieved the right pictorial effect, and I was able to go to bed happy and slept soundly.

By painting colours and lines and forms seen in a quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does.

One sunny spring day I heard the music coming down Karl Johan [street] and it filled me with joy. The spring, the sun, the music, all blended together to make me shiver with pleasure. The music added colour to the colours. I painted the picture [his painting 'Music on Karl Johan'] allowing the colours to reverberate with the rhythm of the music. I painted the colours as I saw them at that moment.

The strange light illuminated all those night-time meetings that took place in every imaginable sort of café; the lips mouthing defiant words, heedless of restraint or consequence, often overbearing and brutal as only Norwegians can be, vast shadows of impotence misery and shabbiness – spirits training for fulfillment, striving in vain to be great, complete, unique. [Munch describes the environment and atmosphere of the Norwegian bohemia in Kristiana, where he himself lived and worked when he was about 23] And at the center of all the faces there would be Jaeger, whose logic was as sharp as a scythe and as cold as an icy blast..

I thought I should make something – I felt it would be so easy – it would take form under my hands like magic.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

And I live with the dead – my mother, my sister [Sophie], my grandfather, my father [who died in 1889, when Munch was in France].. .Every day is the same – my friends have stopped coming – their laughter disturbs me, tortures me.. ..my daily walk round the old castle becomes shorter and shorter, it tires me more and more to take walks. The fire in the fireplace is my only friend – the time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace gets longer and longer.. ..at its worst I lean my head against the fireplace overwhelmed by the sudden urge – Kill yourself and then it’s all over. Why live? I light the candle – my huge shadow springs across half the wall, clear up to the ceiling and in the mirror over the fireplace I see the face of my own ghost.

Realism's 'truth' as embodied in painting and literature now solely consists of things capable of being seen by the eye or heard by the ear. Realism is concerned only with the external shell of nature. People content with the discoveries they have made ignore the fact that there are other things to be discovered, even broader avenues to be explored. They have found bacteria, but not what they consist of. [quote of 1892)