Edvard Munch Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

Edvard Munch
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.

Edvard Munch
A strong naked arm – a tanned powerful neck a young woman rests her head on the arching chest.
She closes her eyes and listens with open and quivering lips to the words he whispers into her long flowing hair.
I should paint that image just as I saw it – but in the blue haze.
Those two at that moment, no longer merely themselves, but simply a link in the chain binding generation to generation.
People should understand the significance, the power of it.

Edvard Munch
Your face encompasses the beauty of the whole earth. Your lips, as red as ripening fruit, gently part as if in pain. It is the smile of a corpse. Now the hand of death touches life. The chain is forged that links the thousand families that are dead to the thousand generations to come.

Edvard Munch
Without this anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.

Edvard Munch
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

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

Edvard Munch
There must be no more pictures covered in brown sauce

Edvard Munch
Grey dawn was seeping into the sick room [around Christmas 1867, Munch was almost dying then and spitting blood when he was 13; but he recovered]. I lay in the middle of the bed with my hands outside the bedclothes, looking straight ahead. Now I was in a pact with God. I had promised to serve him if I survived, if he allowed me to escape the tuberculosis. Now I could never be as before.

Edvard Munch
No one in art has yet penetrated as far [as Dostoyevsky] into the mystical realms of the soul, towards the metaphysical, the subconsciousness, viewing the external reality of the world as merely a sign, a symbol of the spiritual and metaphysical.

Edvard Munch
Nature is not only what is visible to the eye—it also shows the inner images of the soul—the images on the reverse side of the eyes.

Edvard Munch
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.

Edvard Munch
What is art really? The outcome of dissatisfaction with life, the point of impact for the creative force, the continual movement of life.... in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.

Edvard Munch
Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.

Edvard Munch
I have been given a unique role to play on this earth: given to me by a life filled with sickness, ill-starred circumstances and my profession as an artist. It is a life that contains nothing that resembles happiness, and moreover does not even desire happiness.

Edvard Munch
My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.

Edvard Munch
My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50...I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.

Edvard Munch
I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red... I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

Edvard Munch
Was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Edvard Munch
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.

Edvard Munch
Life here [in Paris, 1885] is quite different. You hardly ever see a dog on a lead; you come across little wagons being pulled by dogs that are often so small that you can't imagine how on earth they manage to shift such enormous weights. You see shepherdesses in the middle of the street herding goats and sometimes playing on their flutes. I think I'll go to the Louvre and the Salon today.

Edvard Munch
My afflictions belong to me and my art - they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship... My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life - it is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity.

Edvard Munch
You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

Edvard Munch
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.

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

Edvard Munch
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 Leonarda 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.

Edvard Munch
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.

Edvard Munch
I thought I should make something – I felt it would be so easy – it would take form under my hands like magic. Then people would see!

Edvard Munch
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.

Edvard Munch
When seen as a whole, art derives from a person's desire to communicate himself to another. I do not believe in an art which is not forced into existence by a human being's desire to open his heart. All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart's blood. Art is your heart's blood.

Edvard Munch