Edvard Munch – From disgrace to accolades

A pioneer of expressionism, Munch has never stopped influencing art and fascinating the public. Today, as a painter of the soul and of emotions, he continues to impose his revolution by shaking up the art market in 2012. Born in Oslo in 1863, Edvard MUNCH comes from a family of five children, supported by the modest income of his father, a military doctor. His family’s troubled history inevitably contributed to the feelings of sickness, death and sadness that emanate from his works. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was only five. Less than ten years after his mother’s death, his older sister Sophie died of consumption (a form of tuberculosis), and then a younger sister was diagnosed as suffering from melancholy (a term used at the time to refer to depression). A few years later, Edvard began to study engineering. A frequent victim of depression, he interrupted his studies and decided to become a painter. He then entered the Royal School of Art and Design. Four years later, in 1885, he began painting the first version of The Sick Child. Throughout his life, he would continue to work on this painting, whose subject matter echoes the death of his sister Sophie. The many tragic turns that framed his childhood would, unfortunately, be followed by new tragedies as an adult. To illustrate the torments of his personal background and the primitive forces of his inner visions, Edvard Munch opted for the strength of synthetic images over the verisimilitude of the subject represented. From his neuroses was born a new, efficient, pictorial approach which consisted of paring down what he had seen (and not what he was currently seeing) and reconstructing his memories in simplified forms.

This feeling of instantaneousness would earn his works the dubious privilege of being considered “unfinished” and “ugly”. His career was marked by many scandals and disdain from the press and the public. One of the first scandals hit during Kristiania’s Autumn Exhibition in Oslo, where he presented a version of The Sick Child for the first time. One of the six painted versions of this major work, which symbolises the artist’s definitive break with realism, rightly belongs to the collections of the Tate Gallery in London. To date, no painted version has gone up for sale. However, even the most minor lithograph from the period easily fetches $100,000, such as the one put up for sale recently, The Sick Child I, which reached a hammer price of more than $135,000 (Grev Wedels Plass, Oslo, 28 November 2011).

Prints for the high-end market
Painter, drawer, but also engraver… Edvard Munch’s works provided several key contributions to 20th century art. One of these is reproducibility. This reproducibility is intimately linked to his obsession with working and re-working the same themes: vampire woman, sick child, adolescence, and people on a bridge. He multiplied the number of copies as if hoping to exorcise the enemy within that would result in the famous Scream. For the same subject, he switched from one format to another, from one technique and one style to another. With time, his works moved in the direction of a pictorial depiction that was ever more colourful and gestural, with an increasingly spare style. Edvard Munch sought to continue the exploration of a theme and to repeat it in order to better experiment with it. Woodcutting, which he began practising in 1896, evolved into a relevant medium, especially as it allows for deep blacks, streaks, and abrupt boundaries between blacks and whites while still maintaining the perfection of a line. Many paintings are replicated in lithographic works, whose high-end market is a result of the customisation of each print, which he retouched with watercolours, ink, or even pencil. His market now includes 289 prints having already been sold for over $60,000. Two lithographic versions of Madonna and Vampire II were auctioned for more than $1.5 million ($1.65 million for Madonna and $2.16 million for Vampire II).

The price of a modern icon
Between 2011 and 2012, the travelling retrospective exhibition L’Oeil Moderne was certainly no stranger to the surge of interest among collectors, which was reflected by a 159% increase in its price index (between January 2011 and January 2012). Essentially, the works from between 1890 and 1900 are the most sought-after and represent the artist’s best auction results. For many years Edvard Munch was looked down upon as a painter; he was ignored as an engraver for even longer. And yet he produced thousands of prints. It is therefore no coincidence that of the 2,098 lots that have gone up for sale, 1,855 are lithographic works. While few paintings have been sold at auction (142 since 1986), this is partly explained by the fact that, upon his death, he left all of his works to the city of Oslo (resulting in the creation of the Munch Museum). Edvard Munch had a prolific career. Nonetheless, the scarcity of private acquisitions during his lifetime naturally magnified the shortage of works available on the secondary market. Between 2011 and 2012, before one could hope to buy an oil painting on canvas, a minimum investment of $1.5m was required for relatively strong works. The high estimates and unpredictable quality of the paintings contributed to the large number of works regularly passed in (in 2011 and 2012, five paintings out of twelve remained unsold). When a pastel version of the emblematic Scream dating from 1895 was put up for auction, it could only attract the world’s most powerful collectors. It is the only one of the four versions that is still in the hands of private collectors and was estimated at more than $75 million by the fortunate auction house Sotheby’s. The hammer finally fell at $107m on 2 May 2012! In addition to dethroning the $95m record for Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (a record held since 4 May 2010, Christie’s New York), this historic auction has shaken up the hierarchy of genres by awarding the coveted title of “world’s most expensive work of art” to a drawing.
After setting such a record in the first half of 2012, what other icon of art is likely to push auction prices to even higher levels?