THE FRIEZE OF LIFE - from painting to graphic works

"These [pictures] which were rather hard to understand, will, I believe, be more readily understood when all of them are placed together. Love and death are their intended themes"

The Frieze of Life is an umbrella term denoting Edvard Munch's major works on the theme of young love before the turn of the century. In his exhibitions from 1893 onwards, he arranged the pictures in various series portraying love's gradual flowering and subsequent disintegration into jealousy, despair and angst. The works are linked to literary fragments and sketches depicting his experiences with a married woman in summer and autumn 1885. In all probability these were originally intended for publication as Munch's contribution to Bohemian literature, akin to Hans Jæger's novel cycle Sick Love.

Munch linked the love motifs to his personal experiences of angst surrounding death in general and to highly emotive memories of the deaths of his mother and sister. But instead of writing a self-revelatory autobiographical novel, he crystallises the motifs in drawings, paintings and graphic works.

Around the turn of the century Munch broadened the scope of the Frieze of Life to take in paintings associated with later experiences and ideas, his intention being to assemble them to form a single interconnected frieze. He also further broadened the perspective in graphic works to include more abstract, philosophical motifs.

The exhibition at the Munch Museum focuses on the themes represented in the original literary fragments - in other words, the themes which Munch said existed in literary form many years before they were painted, and in which he is patently both writing and painting "his own life".

Munch considered that by concentrating on his own experience, he would have something fundamental to say about the overall spiritual climate of the age. It is the aim of this exhibition to show the public the actual process whereby the pictures were created, so that we can see how the most central themes from Munch's own personal experience achieve a universal quality in pictures relating to human life at all stages.

Read the introductions to LOVE, ANGST and DEATH.