Text by
Gerd Woll

Self-portrait, 1895, litograph

Edvard Munch`s graphic work holds a unique position, in terms of both quality and quantity. It spans a period of 50 years (1894-1944) and covers a total of approximately 850 catalogue numbers divided between the three traditional graphic techniques of etching, lithography and woodcut as well as hundreds of what are known as hectographs. On his death, Munch bequeathed all his works of art to the City of Oslo and, besides paintings and drawings, the Munch Museum currently holds a collection of over 17,000 prints all created by this one artist. Furthermore, there are also a large number of graphic works spread through museums and private collections worldwide.

As a graphic artist, Munch was innovative in several fields and experimented with and simplified the various techniques in a way which places him in a class of his own even in an international context. Munch developed his capabilities with roughly the same amount of enthusiasm and skill in all the most important graphic techniques. In the main he worked with professional printers and did not produce large editions alone. However, at his death he also left a number of more experimental prints which clearly show that he was also in command of the technical aspect of the process.

A typical feature of Munch's graphic work is that he normally did not number his prints or state the size of the edition. Nor did he have the plates destroyed once printing was complete but, on the contrary, took great pains, at great expense, to preserve his stones and plates so that he could take further impressions at a later date. Consequently, in many cases many years may have passed between the date when Munch worked the plate and the time the last print was pulled from it. It is evident that this led to great variation in the quality of prints from the same plate but the reprints were done in Munch's own lifetime and largely under his control. We are aware of only very few examples of posthumous reprints of Munch's graphic work.

In addition to his works of art, Munch also bequeathed all his printing plates to the City of Oslo, and the Munch Museum therefore holds a large collection of lithographic stones, woodblocks and metal plates as well as three presses and some tools and printing equipment. While this is very important and interesting material for the researcher, it was also a way for the artist to ensure that no prints were pulled from his stones and plates after his death.

Intaglio, relief and surface printing

Munch used the term 'radering' for all forms of intaglio prints and did not specify the technique or type of tool used to prepare the plates. The term 'radering' has been retained in the Munch Museum's catalogues, although this is often supplemented by a more detailed description of the technique used.

Relief prints, as its name suggests, is based on the opposite principle, where it is the raised parts of the plate which take the ink and produce the impression. This method is almost solely associated with woodcuts, or the closely related lino-cuts, where the surplus, light areas are cut away. During the nineteenth century, woodcuts were normally carved in the end-grain of the woodblock, enabling large editions to be printed without wearing down the block excessively. The technique was frequently used for illustrations in books and papers, carved by skilled craftsmen copying photographs or works of art. Munch was one of the first modern artists to carve along the grain instead of across the grain, something which also made it possible to produce large format woodcuts. He used almost all types of wood and his surviving blocks include rough planks in spruce or pine, primed blocks in oak, mahogany and other hardwoods, hardboard and wood veneers. His tools included gouges of various thicknesses, pointed and rounded as well as broader chisels for removing large areas. He also often used a fretsaw to cut blocks into sections for colour printing.

Surface printing is normally associated with lithography, printing from stone. Lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder at the end of the eighteenth century and quickly gained in importance as a commercial printing method. It was used by several artists in the first half of the nineteenth century but really took off towards the end of the century. Here the printing block is a thick, porous limestone, which is ground to provide a smooth and even surface on which the artist can draw directly using lithographic crayon or tusche. Then the stone is prepared by a fairly complicated chemical process which fixes the drawing to the surface of the stone.

Before inking, the stone is wetted thoroughly so that water is absorbed into the porous stone, with the exception of the part of the surface where the drawing makes it water-resistant.Then the stone is rolled with a greasy ink, which does not adhere to the places where the stone has absorbed the water. One problem with lithographic stones is that they are expensive, besides being heavy and unwieldy. They are also fragile and can easily be chipped or smashed. Consequently, there was great interest in discovering new materials to replace the expensive stone and good results were obtained using specially prepared zinc plates. In commercial printing these soon became more common than the traditional stones. Prints from zinc plates are often called zincographs. Munch also used lithographic zinc plates on a few occasions.

Another method which allowed artists to avoid working with the unwieldy stones altogether was to draw on paper and have the printer transfer the drawing onto a lithographic stone. Such transfer techniques were developed at an early stage and a number of special types of paper were produced to ensure the best possible result. A skilled printer, however, could obtain perfect transfers from normal paper and Munch preferred to place a relatively thin sheet of paper on a textured base before drawing on particularly grainy transfer paper. Many of his drawings for such transfer lithographs have also been preserved.

Munch's first graphic works

The earliest intaglio prints were carried out using drypoint on copper, where lines are incised directly into the copper plate with a drypoint needle. The metal is forced up beside the line in what is known as a burr, a characteristic feature of drypoint prints. The ink is not only held in the line but also in the burr, so that the prints gain a slightly fuzzy line, which merges into a dense and soft black surface. This typical burr wears down very quickly during printing and the quality of the prints is noticeably reduced after very few runs through the press. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, it was discovered that the copper plate could be steel-faced by placing it in an electrolytic bath so that the entire plate became covered by a hard, steel film. This made it possible to print large editions and led to an increase in the use of drypoint as a technique. Munch also made use of this technique, and all the copper plates for his early drypoints have been steel-faced.

Soon afterwards, he also began to use different forms of etching and often combined several techniques. He practically never used traditional aquatint, instead obtaining similar effects using other processes. Open-bite is used in very many of his etchings, often in combination with stopping out. Corrections and additions were often made in drypoint, but etching in acid could also be repeated several times to attain greater variation in surface treatment.

The majority of his earliest intaglio prints can be found in a number of states. After the first drawing of the motif he took one or more proofs, continued to work on the plate and then took new proofs until he was satisfied and printed an edition. He worked in the same way with some of the lithographs and woodcuts. Changes might often be added at a later stage and each such change to the plate gives us a new state of the print. Placing a series of such state prints side by side enables us to reconstruct practically the entire production process. When we look at colour prints from several plates, the picture becomes more complicated, as the technique allows the plates to be combined in various ways, making it harder to talk about states in the normal sense of the word.

As a graphic artist Munch must have been mainIy self-taught and what he needed in terms of technical skill he probably learned from the printers. Naturally, he would have been aware of the graphic work of leading French and German artists and several of them have justifiably been suggested as sources for the development of both motifs and style in Munch's art. These include, for example, artists such as Max Klinger, Félicien Rops, Odilon Redon, Alfred Besnard, Eugene Carrière, Paul Gauguin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as old masters such as Rembrandt, Goya and Daumier. They were all part of the general cultural climate in which Munch lived and he naturally took advantage of what he could of this material.

Bearing in mind Munch's drawing skills and steady hand, it is hardly surprising that he was highly successful in using graphic techniques as a means of artistic expression. When he took up graphic work in 1894, he was far from a novice as an artist. One of Munch's most famous motifs of all, also among his graphic work, is The Sick Child. The drypoint from 1894 is a fairly accurate but mirror image version of the painting completed almost ten years earlier, carried out using drypoint and roulette in a full six states. In the first, the design still appears to be somewhat grey and tentative. In the first examples we know of this state he has drawn in a landscape in pencil under the picture itself. In later states this landscape has also been incised into the plate, only to be removed once more in the final state of the print. However, there are also a number of other changes which make it interesting to see how Munch worked through this motif, layer by layer, almost as intensely as he worked on the first version in oils.The figures are worked out with thicker and thicker lines and appear in increasingly greater contrast to the white bedclothes and the pale face of the sick child herself, which is almost indistinguishable from the white pillow.

It is assumed that Munch also created his first lithograph, Puberty, in Berlin in the late autumn of 1894, and we know that the portraits of Harry Graf Kessler were created in April - May 1895. In an unpublished diary, Graf Kessler describes an episode in Munch's room when he was working on the lithograph.The hotel manageress came in and confiscated the easel on which the stone was placed, presumably to cover an unpaid bill, and Munch, apparently unmoved, then attempted to continue work with the stone leaning against a chair. Graf Kessler continues that in order to make things easier for Munch he wanted to ask Joseph Sattler to teach him to create transfer lithographs, so that he could draw on paper instead of on stone.

This gives an interesting insight into Munch's method of working in these first lithographs. How and where he did learn of the opportunities offered by transfer lithography, however, remains unclear. While he did not create pure transfer lithographs until the following year in Paris, some of the lithographs from 1895 also show signs that the rough outline of the drawing itself may have been transferred. In The Scream, for example, the motif is printed the same way round as in the painting, which in itself indicates that the image on stone was preceded by a drawing. If we look at the print in more detail, we can also see that under the strong tusche lines lies a thinner outline in crayon, in which the motif ends several centimetres above the final design. In all likelihood Munch first drew the motif on paper with lithographic crayon, transferred this to stone, and then continued with tusche directly on the stone. A similar procedure may have been used for Madonna, which is also not a mirror image of the painting. In this work, besides lithographic crayon and tusche, Munch also makes great use of a pointed scraping tool to scratch fine lines into the stone.

Colour printing

The problems which Munch focused on in depth in Paris included various methods of making colour prints and in this field Paris had considerably more to offer than Berlin.Thanks to the increase in the popularity of lithography around 1890, soon a number of painters tried their hand at this technique, and, despite the fact that colour lithography was long seen by many artists and collectors as being an inferior technique, such prints soon won great popularity in other circles. In 1893-1894, Roger Marx put together two graphic portfolios which became highly significant for the further development of graphic art. The selection was daring and it came to be seen as representative of modern printmaking. These portfolios were published by Ambroise Vollard, who published two further portfolios in 1896 and 1897.

Munch arrived in Paris in February 1896 and his natural place at the forefront of modern art was assured when he also contributed a print to Vollard's portfolio, namely the lithograph Anxiety, printed in red and black by the famous lithographer Auguste Clot. The normal principle for colour prints is to use a separate plate for each colour, but in his print for the portfolio Munch simplified this process. Anxiety was printed in two colours from one stone which was rolled with black ink on the lower part and red in the upper part. Whether this was the invention of Munch himself or the printer we do not know, but the process displays an audacity and daring which is entirely typical of Munch.

Munch's masterwork in the colour lithograph The Sick Child, was also printed by Clot in 1896. Munch's good friend from that time, the German painter and printmaker Paul Herrmann, gave an often-quoted description of how that lithograph was printed: 'The lithographic stones with the large head were already lying side by side in rows ready to be printed. Munch arrived, stood in front of the row, closed his eyes, and waved his fingers in the air without looking, ordering 'Print grey, green, blue, brown'. Then he opened his eyes and said to me, 'Let's go and have a schnapps'. And the printer printed until Munch returned and once more without looking ordered 'Yellow, pink, red' and so it went on a couple more times.'

Although the story was told many, many years later and possibly bears the signs of having improved in the telling, in the main it appears credible. Herrmann was not one of the most sensational artists of the period, but some technical finesses in his graphic art show an astounding similarity with Munch, and it is by no means certain that Munch himself was the pioneer in the field. We know, for example, that Herrmann combined lithography and woodcuts in colour printing as early as 1896, while we are not aware of such combination prints on Munch's part until several years later.

Munch produced a couple of pure transfer lithographs with Clot in 1896, Attraction II and Separation II, which are both drawn using lithographic crayon on paper. To obtain texture in the drawing, he used an artist's portfolio as a base, where the rough canvas-like surface has been transferred to the drawing. Both the lithographs are also printed in a few multi-colour examples, but these are fairly discreet and subdued in their use of colour.

The use of metal plates also offered several opportunities for colour printing and during his time in Paris, between 1896 and 1897, Munch completed a number of very fine prints in burnished aquatint, a technique similar to mezzotint.

On a ready-prepared mezzotint plate ink is held densely and evenly over the entire plate producing a completely black print. The motif is then scraped or burnished out. Unlike drypoint, line etchings and most forms of normal drawing, the artist works from dark to light, and forms the motif out of the light parts instead of using lines and contours. The technique is ideally suited to fine, nuanced transitions and soft surface effects, and throughout the nineteenth century was very popular in reproductive work. The technique become incredibly popular in the USA and Britain in particular, and was also used by some artists.

Munch - like Paul Herrmann - used a somewhat simpler method than the original mezzotint technique. Instead of preparing the copper plates with a rocker, he bought zinc plates which were already prepared with an aquatint ground. The motif was burnished out in the same way as in a mezzotint and the plate was then printed either in block or as a colour print. For inking the colours he used dollies, which were dipped in ink and then dabbed in the desired location on the plate (à poupée). Because the plates had to be re-inked for each print, it was hardly possible to obtain two identical impressions. Nor are zinc plates able to withstand very many printings before they wear down, and the maximum number of colour prints is around ten to twelve, as a rule fewer.

It was in Paris that Munch also began to carve woodcuts, and his work in this field came to have great significance for the further development of this type of graphic art.

The artists most often cited as possible precursors of Munch's in this field are Paul Gauguin and Felix Vallotton, but although it is easy enough to find similarities between their art and that of Munch, it is difficult to demonstrate any direct influence in the use of woodcut as a printing method. Munch's earliest woodcuts can rather be seen as logical extensions of his work on lithographs created at the same time. The strong, block lines in lithographs such as The Scream and Anxiety, have led to many misunderstandings as to the technique, and it is common for them to be taken for woodcuts. The large, dark areas in lithographs such as Death in the Sickroom, Jealousy, etc. have the silky, velvet-block appearance of lithographs but clearly show that Munch developed his graphic images by using simple surfaces and lines in a way which was closer to woodcut.

Although he had also obtained many unique effects with his black and white graphics, it is likely that the painter in Munch missed the opportunity of using colour as an element in his art. Possibly the process of colour lithography and burnished aquatint, in the long run, was too time-consuming and complicated for his nature. Woodcut, on the other hand, presented new and almost undreamt-of possibilities. The plates could be inked with different colours in the same way as with burnished aquatint, and they could be divided into separate sections, which could be inked individually. He used a fretsaw for this, and cut out the individual parts with great skill. As far as we know, Munch was the first artist to use such a method. Each separate part was inked with the desired colour and the entire block was reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle and printed in a single operation instead of printing many plates one on top of the other. Dividing up the motif in this way also strengthened the composition, which Munch often exploited as an extra feature.

For such colour printing Munch tended to use a key block where he carved the actual motif itself and a divided plate for printing the other colours. However, Munch could make colour woodcuts even more complicated by inking the plate with several colours at the same time, also in combination with divided woodblocks. A good example of this is Towards the Forest where the entire key block is usually inked with three colours, and the colour block is divided into many sections, which are printed in different colours.

Experimental lithographs and woodcuts 1898-1899

During 1898 he completed four very special lithographs: Woman with Urn, Burlesque Couple, Desperate Woman and Desire, which all have in common the fact that they use stones prepared and printed by Munch himself. These lithographs exist in a number of states - in fact each impression is unique. Coincidence appears to have played a major role in the execution, calling to mind August Strindberg's ideas on coincidence as a creative factor. Several of Munch's woodcuts at this time also bear the unmistakable signs of having been printed by the artist himself, and on these we find the same fondness for rough brownish paper, torn or cut in an almost random manner which emphasises the character of packaging paper.

At this time Munch also developed another technique for taking imprints from woodblocks, what in modern art literature is referred to as frottage and is considered to have originated with the Surrealists. Instead of inking the woodblock and printing it in a press, he laid a sheet of paper over the block and rubbed it with a piece of coloured crayon. Unlike ordinary printing, such rubbings do not appear as a mirror image, that is to say they render the woodblock the same way round as it was carved. The first time Munch used such a technique was probably in 1897, when he created the poster for an exhibition in Kristiania. Then he first made a frottage from the woodblock of Man's Head in Woman´s Hair, which was then transferred to a stone or plate and printed lithographically. Later he also created several pure frottages, sometimes reinforced by drawing or further work. In addition, we can see that in some later transfer lithographs he also used woodblocks as a base for the drawings, so that the grain of the wood produced an effect in the finished lithographs.

Breakthrough as a graphic artist 1902-1903

The increased interest from 1902 onwards also led to an increased need for prints. Munch was not particularely productive in terms of new prints from 1902 onwards, but he did reprint many of his previous motifs - generally in large editions. After this point the intaglio prints were almost solely printed by Felsing, who was expensive but had become considered the leading workshop for intaglio prints. Felsing's print shop had a passion for ink with a warm brown tone and often printed on paper which also had a distinct yellow tone. This contrasts with Munch's previous intaglio prints which tended to be printed in clearer black and white or off-white paper. The lithographs and woodcuts were almost without exception printed by Lassally in Berlin, and in 1904 Munch had all his lithographic stones sent from Paris to Lassally. Greater popularity and an improved financial situation meant that he could order frequent editions of his most popular prints and print them on large sheets of high-quality paper.

Transfer lithographs and duplicate stones

In 1909 Munch returned to Norway, and in the next few years he lived in various places on both sides of the Kristiania Fjord until, in 1916, he settled down at Ekely on the outskirts of Kristiania. In around 1910 he came into contact with a lithographer, Anton Peder Nielsen, who later took the name Kildeborg. Nielsen worked for various lithographic printers in Kristiania until he established his own print shop in the 1920s, and became an invaluable assistant to Munch when it came to printing lithographs and woodcuts. In 1912 Munch installed a lithographic press at Hvitsten and in 1916 he set up a graphic workshop in the cellar at Ekely. Nielsen often visited him there and printed on Munch's press.

While transfer lithographs still prevailed, it can also be seen that both in 1912 and in 1916 Munch was working directly on stone, as he also did occasionally around 1930.

By the outbreak of the First World War, most of Munch's stones were at Lassally´s in Berlin, and this caused him a great deal of worry. This was partly because, naturally enough, he was uncertain about what might happen to them and also because it became impossible for him to order new reprints from Germany after the outbreak of war.

During the first months of the war he succeeded in having all his woodblocks and metal plates sent home from Germany and probably all the stones that he had transferred from Paris. In 1917 he received five stones from Lasally while the others were destroyed by having a cross scratched into them once Munch had ensured that he had prints for transferring to duplicate stones at home in Norway. Many of his lithographs may therefore have been printed by Clot, Lassally and Nielsen - either from the original stone, or from the duplicate stone - over a period of 20 years.

Intaglio prints and woodcuts after 1910

Woodcut was the graphic method which came to occupy Munch the longest. Even in the earliest woodcuts he used the actual texture of the wood itself, for example as in Kiss III and IV, where one of the plates is actually quite untouched by the gouge or other sharp tools. The entire decoration is made up of the fine lines, growth rings and knotholes in the wood, creating a background which gives the picture life and atmosphere. It is quite certain that Munch must have worked on the woodblocks to strengthen these lines. It is likely that he used sandpaper to remove some of the soft wood, so that the hard edges appear more clearly. In some of the woodcuts from 1917 which used motifs from Henrik Ibsen's play The Pretenders and particularly the one of Skule and Bishop Nicholas in the Forest, this special effect has been taken to the extreme. Here the lines of the wood give a feeling of nebulous unreality where the two heads appear like ghostly spirits. Munch goes furthest along these lines in one of his last woodcuts; according to documentation witnessed by his sister Inger, it was printed on his 80th birthday on 13 December 1943. The motif itself, Kiss in the Fields, is only carved in thin contour lines. The swirling, restless patterns of the cherrywood are what actually create the main emphasis in this woodcut.

In 1915-1917 Munch also printed several more colourful, almost gaudy, woodcuts, where he combined fretsaw technique and direct painting to great effect. This concerned both new blocks, and reprints from old blocks with or without reworking. In order to further increase the opportunities for special colour effects, he also used varying types of stencil cut in linoleum or card. He used these to mask part of the plate or inked them in line with the various sections of the block, laying them over the woodblock before it was printed. Use of such stencils can be found in several examples of woodcuts printed in this period, such as Sunbathing, the new version of Towards the Forest and reprints of older blocks such as Man Bathing, The Lonely Ones and Two Women on the Shore. The moon and the moonlight in the two latter prints come from stencils and in some impressions we can clearly see that he has used the same stencils for both.

Munch's last graphic work, however, was not a woodcut, but a new lithographic version of the portrait of Hans Jæger, originally completed in 1896. The new version is verly similar to the old one, which was only printed in a very limited edition. Munch was working quite intensively on this lithograph only a few weeks before he died in 1944 and the printer brought the finished print out to him after he had fallen ill in January 1944. Although the motif was designed earlier and the new version is a mere repetition, it still has an astonishing freshness and strength in the execution, which clearly shows that the ageing master was in command of both his vision and his craftsmanship until the very end.

That it should be precisely the portrait of Hans Jæger, bohemian and anarchist, abused and driven out by the bourgeoisie and police in Kristiania, which was his final work closes the circle in a thought-provoking way. Hans Jæger was a determined naturalist, wrote his books with an orthography which, incredibly radical, was based on the Norwegian manner of speaking at a time when the written language was still Danish, and he challenged modern artists to write their lives - nothing else. He himself achieved this to the extent that almost all of his books were banned due to their ruthless honesty - particularly in their many erotic descriptions. Of the painters, it was really only Munch who took Hans Jæger seriously, and honestly and ruthlessly looked into his own experience and his own soul for motifs and inspiration.