Edvard Munch valuation
Painted The Scream four times, and printed the rest of his life's anxieties in editions.
Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863 and lost his mother and his elder sister to tuberculosis in childhood, which he said sat behind everything he painted.
What a work by Edvard Munch is worth
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Bio
Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863 and lost his mother and his elder sister to tuberculosis in childhood, which he said sat behind everything he painted. The Frieze of Life, the cycle he worked at through the 1890s, contains The Scream, Madonna, Vampire, The Sick Child and Jealousy. He suffered a breakdown in 1908, spent months in a Copenhagen clinic, and afterwards worked in comparative seclusion outside Oslo, leaving his entire remaining estate to the city. He died in 1944, and The Scream exists in two painted versions, two pastels and a lithograph.
Munch is one of the greatest printmakers in the history of the medium and the prints are the substance of this market — woodcuts, lithographs and drypoints, catalogued by Schiefler and by Woll, frequently hand-coloured and often printed in small numbers with significant variation between impressions, so no two are quite the same and each requires individual assessment. Lifetime impressions are what matter. Paintings are scarce outside Norway. The high-profile thefts of Munch paintings mean provenance is examined closely as a matter of course.
At a glance
- Born
- 12 December 1863, Ådalsbruk
- Died
- 23 January 1944, Ekely
- Movements
- Symbolism, Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
The Scream as a print, and everything after it
Munch made The Scream as a lithograph in 1895, printed in black, in small numbers; a few impressions were later coloured by hand. Lifetime impressions are rare and well recorded, and almost every Scream that turns up in a private home is a later reproduction, often in the colours of the painted version, which the original print does not have.
His estate, left to Oslo, included his printing plates and lithographic stones, which are now held by the MUNCH museum with thousands of his prints. That collection is the natural reference for comparing an impression's paper, colour and state. Reproductions of the other famous images, the Madonna, The Kiss and Vampire among them, are common and are sometimes framed as prints; under magnification the dot pattern of mechanical printing gives most of them away.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
