In his death motifs Munch primarily bases himself on scenes which go back to the deaths of his mother and sister when he was five and fifteen years old respectively. Death is sometimes portrayed classically as a farewell; the dying person's farewell to the living or vice versa, and sometimes as an absence which either paralyses and stultifies the living or triggers off a heart-rending "primal scream".

The latter is characterised by the fact that the motifs are presented from what might be termed a memory perspective; scenes from childhood are seen as though from above, which implicitly includes the artist himself as an observer of the events in which he also sometimes participated. The interiors are often highly simplified, almost stylised, and may be characterised by evocative changes in the proportions. Munch asserted that the portrayal of memories from childhood had called for its own aesthetic:

I then painted only what I remembered without adding anything
- without individual things I no longer saw.
- Hence the simplicity of the pictures
- a seeming emptiness -
I painted impressions from my childhood
- the faded colours of that time -
By painting the colours and lines and forms I had seen when deeply moved
- I wanted the feeling I had had when deeply moved to vibrate again as in a phonograph. -

At that time, representations of deathbed scenes in painting virtually served as devotional pictures. Countless painters tried their hand at this genre, which was one of the most popular of the age. But to set out so consistently to make personal experiences from childhood into a separate group of motifs of its own was something quite new in art; bitter childhood memories became the motif for a series of family scenes portrayed with the sort of gravity associated with the passion of Christ. Such a subjective laying bare of private life, and especially of a child's deeply personal experiences, was something quite new.

Read the introductions to LOVE and ANGST.