The great Norwegian painter who announced expressionism was a puny boy, surrounded by mourning. The death of her older sister, Sophie, gave birth to her flagship painting, The sick childthat he never stopped reshuffling.
Munch or the Cri From anxiety, this face reduced to a grin that has become its icon, its signature, its destiny. Munch, forever, in the room of The sick child. That of her dear older sister, Sophie, who read her tales and who dies at 15 years of galloping phthisia, red with a diaphanous face, almost pearly in the low light of winter, sitting in her chair, on November 9, 1877. She will be her great pictorial theme, the origin of a multitude of variations in suave colors and symbolic contrasts thanks to engravings, but first 1885-1886, today a treasure of the Nasjonalgalleriet of Oslo.
It was on December 12, 1863 in a cold Norway marked by pedestism, this strict Lutheran movement which links the believer directly to God and imposed on him prayers, reading the Bible and lifestyle without drift towards earthly pleasures, that Edvard Munch is born, this painter of pink beaches and purple rocks that will announce expressionism. He’s …