Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Scream Within. Introducing the Edvard Munch Collection at Elliott Best
Most painters ask you to look. Edvard Munch asks you to feel. A woman leaning on a doorframe, a couple dissolving into one shape by a window, a lone figure on a bridge with the sky tearing open behind him. None of it is polite. All of it is true. More than eighty years after his death, Munch still has a way of walking straight past the eye and knocking on something deeper.
This month we're opening a new collection dedicated to him, nine works brought back to life through careful digital restoration and remastering. Before you meet them, we want you to meet the man.
A Childhood Kept Watch by Black Angels
Edvard Munch was born in December 1863 in Løten, Norway, and grew up in Kristiania, the city we now call Oslo. His father, Christian, was an army doctor, devout to the point of darkness. His mother, Laura, died of tuberculosis when Edvard was five. Nine years later the same disease took his beloved older sister Sophie, just fifteen. A younger sister, Laura, would spend much of her life in psychiatric care, and his brother Andreas died only months after his wedding.
Munch himself was a sickly child, often kept home from school, drawing to pass the hours. Later he would write that illness, madness and death were the black angels that stood watch over his cradle. He never stopped painting them.
In his early twenties he returned to Sophie's death in The Sick Child, scraping and repainting the canvas for a year until it looked as raw as the memory. Critics hated it. Munch considered it a breakthrough. It was the moment he stopped painting the world as it looked and started painting it as it felt.
Bohemians, Scandal, and Berlin
In Kristiania, the young painter fell in with the city's bohemians, a circle of writers and artists led by the anarchist Hans Jæger, who preached free love and the duty to write (and paint) your own life. It was here Munch began his first serious romance, a secret, agonizing affair with a married woman, Milly Thaulow. It left him jealous, obsessed and, as he put it later, unable to believe in love the same way again. The wound became a lifelong subject.
A state scholarship took him to Paris in 1889, where he absorbed Impressionism, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and resolved to paint living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love. Then, in 1892, Berlin invited him to exhibit. The show caused such an uproar among the city's conservative artists that it was shut down within a week. It was the best thing that could have happened to him. Overnight, Munch was the most talked-about painter in Germany.
Berlin became his second home through the 1890s. At a little tavern nicknamed Zum schwarzen Ferkel (The Black Piglet), he drank and argued with the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, and the brilliant Norwegian writer Dagny Juel, the circle's magnetic centre. Several of the men were in love with her. She married Przybyszewski. The tangle of desire and rivalry around that table fed directly into Munch's greatest series.
Tulla, a Gunshot, and a Breakdown
In 1898 Munch met Tulla Larsen, the wealthy daughter of a Kristiania wine merchant. She wanted marriage. He wanted his work, and was convinced marriage would destroy it. Their four-year relationship ended in 1902 in a quarrel at his summer house, where a revolver went off and shattered part of a finger on his left hand. Who held the gun is still debated. The bitterness never left him, and Tulla turns up, barely disguised, in paintings for years afterward.
Drink, overwork and paranoia followed. In 1908 Munch collapsed and checked himself into Dr. Daniel Jacobson's clinic in Copenhagen for eight months. He came out sober, steadier, and painting in a noticeably brighter key. Some say his most anguished art ended there. Others say he simply learned to live alongside his ghosts.
Light, Land, and Solitude
Back in Norway, Munch won the commission for the great murals of the University of Oslo's Aula, centred on an enormous, blazing sun. In 1916 he bought Ekely, a small estate on the edge of Oslo, where he spent the rest of his life painting gardens, workers, animals, and the light on the fields. He never married. His paintings, he said, were his children.
The 1930s brought fresh darkness. In 1937 the Nazi regime branded his work "degenerate" and stripped it from German museums, the very country that had made him famous. When Germany occupied Norway, Munch refused to have anything to do with the occupiers. He died at Ekely in January 1944, aged eighty, and left the thousands of works in his studio to the city of Oslo. They became the heart of today's Munch Museum.
Introducing the Edvard Munch Collection
Our new collection follows Munch across his whole life, from the quiet naturalism of his early twenties to the bright, late canvases of Ekely, with two original works from our own atelier in his tradition. Each one has been digitally restored and remastered by hand, piece by piece, to recover the colour, texture and detail that time and old reproductions have dulled, and is printed on premium archival museum quality stock.
• Morning (1884). Painted at just twenty, a young woman on the edge of a bed in soft window light. Before the anguish, there was this calm.
• Kiss by the Window (1892). Two lovers merging into one dark shape against the night, an early seed of The Kiss.
• Self-Portrait with Cigarette (1895). Painted at the height of his Berlin fame, Munch emerges out of smoke and shadow. Unforgettable.
• Vampire II (1895 to 1902). Love and Pain, by another name. Tender or terrifying, depending on where you stand.
• Four Girls in Åsgårdstrand (1902). Summer in the seaside village Munch loved, the year everything with Tulla came apart.
• Man in the Cabbage Field (1916). From his first year at Ekely: earth, labour, and colour that practically hums.
• Young Woman on the Veranda (1924). The late Munch, loose, luminous and at peace with the light.
• Male Bathers, school of Edvard Munch. An Elliott Best original, in conversation with Munch's sun-drenched bathing scenes.
• The Scream 2025. Our modern interpretation, in the school of Munch, of the cry that never stopped echoing.
Munch once said he didn't paint what he saw, but what he had seen. Grief, desire, jealousy, loneliness, the sudden beauty of a summer evening: none of it has gone out of style. A Munch on the wall isn't decoration. It's a conversation, and it's one worth having every day.
Explore the Edvard Munch Collection →
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Art restored. Art created. Art that lasts.
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