The Evolution of Expressionism: Landscape, Light and Norwegian Painting

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 and died in 1944, and in the eight decades between those dates he produced a body of work that fundamentally altered the course of Western painting. The image most associated with him — The Scream, painted in 1893 — is one of the most reproduced and recognised images in the history of art. But Munch was not a creator of isolated iconic images. He was a systematic explorer of psychological states — anxiety, desire, jealousy, loneliness, the fear of death — expressed through the radical distortion of landscape, colour and line. His work predates and anticipates the German Expressionist movement by more than a decade, and it grew directly from the Norwegian landscape and from the specific quality of Norwegian light.

The Landscape as Psychological Space

The setting of The Scream is the Oslofjord, viewed from the Ekeberg ridge above the city. Munch described the circumstances of the image in his diary: he was walking with friends at sunset when the sky suddenly turned blood-red, and he felt an infinite scream passing through nature. The image he painted is not a realistic representation of the fjord at sunset. It is a representation of what the sunset felt like to a man whose nervous system experienced the world with unusual intensity — the landscape warped and pulsing around a solitary figure, the sky flowing like liquid over the dark silhouette of the fjord.

This approach — using landscape not as a subject to be accurately rendered but as a medium for expressing psychological states — is the essential contribution of Munch's work to the development of Expressionism. The Norwegian landscape, with its extreme contrasts of light and dark, its dramatic fjord topography, its long winter darkness and its explosive summer, provided Munch with a visual vocabulary of inherent intensity. The deep blue of the fjord at twilight, the blood orange of the summer sky at ten in the evening, the dead grey of the landscape under heavy winter cloud — these are the colours of Munch's world, and they are the colours of Norway in ways that are difficult to separate.

The Generation Before Munch

Munch did not emerge from nowhere. He was formed by and in reaction to a generation of Norwegian painters who had themselves been working out how to paint a distinctly Norwegian reality. Johan Christian Dahl, born in 1788, is generally considered the founding figure of Norwegian landscape painting. Dahl trained in Copenhagen and Dresden — where he was a colleague and friend of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich — and brought back to Norway a painterly ambition to engage seriously with the specific character of the Norwegian landscape: its mountains, its waterfalls, its light. His large-scale landscape paintings established the Norwegian wilderness as a serious subject for fine art.

The generation that followed Dahl moved toward social realism and the depiction of Norwegian everyday life. Christian Krohg, whose paintings of Oslo's poor — fishermen, seamstresses, workers in the city's developing industrial districts — combined precise observation with a social conscience that made them controversial when exhibited in the 1880s. Harriet Backer, working in the same period, painted Norwegian interiors with an extraordinary sensitivity to interior light — the way lamplight and window light fell in a wooden room, the quality of illumination in a church during an evening service. Her work is less dramatically expressive than Munch's but no less specifically Norwegian in its attention to light.

Legacy and the Munch Museum

Munch's direct influence on subsequent Norwegian painting is significant but not straightforward. No Norwegian painter after him could ignore his work, but the intensity of his example was difficult to follow directly, and most of the painters who came after him found their own paths — some toward further abstraction, others toward a realist reaction against expressionist distortion. What Munch established permanently was the legitimacy of Norwegian painting as a subject of international significance rather than a provincial variant of German or French models.

The Munch Museum, which holds the largest collection of his work in the world — including thousands of paintings, prints and drawings that Munch bequeathed to the city of Oslo on his death — moved to a dramatic new building at Bjørvika on the Oslo waterfront in 2021. The building, designed by the Spanish practice Estudio Herreros, is a tall, asymmetric tower clad in perforated aluminium, its upper section cantilevering out over the waterfront in a form that has been both celebrated and criticised since its opening. The move brought Munch's work into direct proximity with the Opera House and the new Deichman library, creating a cultural cluster at Oslo's southern waterfront that did not exist a decade ago and that has substantially altered the city's cultural geography.