Edvard Munch
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. 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.
If you own a work by Edvard Munch
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
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.