Edvard Munch: love and angst (British Museum)

Munch’s early life in the industrial town of Kristiania (renamed Oslo in 1925) was marked by sickness and poverty. His first works centred on the expression of deep emotional experiences, specifically the deaths of his mother and teenage sister, as well as passionate yet unhappy love affairs of which his deeply religious father disapproved. Encouraged by his encounters with a Bohemian society of artists, writers and poets, he developed a visual landscape that was a radical deviation from the slick society portraits and grand Scandinavian landscapes then so much in vogue. His efforts attracted considerable attention and much criticism, and he practised with little financial success as a painter for ten years before he started to gain his reputation as a profoundly innovative printmaker.

Written by a team of experts, and with an interview by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, this book will shed new light on the production of some of Munch’s most remarkable works.