Edvard Munch and His Family

 by  Trine Munch Snyder Presentation to Vikings of the Smokies 2/14/10

When I was born on the outskirts of Oslo in 1937 Edvard Munch was still alive and living with his paintings in his house, Ekely, in the center of Oslo. He died in his bed the winter of 1944 during an American air raid; he was 80 years old. The winter before an American bomb had landed too close to residential Oslo instead of the targeted German shipping in the harbor and had blown out the windows at Ekely. Perhaps Edvard was frightened to death? Such an end might seem fitting for someone who had spent his life painting his emotions, keeping them close and real, no matter how long ago they had been engendered.

In Munch’s art, we can always see his feelings; his reaction to events in his life. The Girls on the Bridge shows three 13-year old girls who had just raided Munch’s currant bushes and trespassed in his barn, making fun of the paintings stored there while the painter himself rested in a haystack.  A friend of Munch’s later told them they had been overheard. The next day they walked along the bridge, heading for the beach, when they saw the painter further out on the quay. Embarrassed, they stopped and pretended to be inspecting crabs in the shallow water. Munch, of course, recognized them, and understood the reason for their sudden interest in crabs.  I think the painting shows his bemusement, his attraction to children and young people, and his love of painting the Åsgårdstrand shoreline.

The Scream shows very different emotions, probably Munch’s reaction to the scary sunsets seen in Northern Europe ten years earlier after the eruption of Krakatoa, as well as the painter’s reaction to more personal events in his life.

The etching of the Sick Child, rendered in a beautiful profile with hair spreading over the pillow, has been interpreted as the look of a young girl who feels life ebbing away from her before she has even had a chance to start to live. A more accurate interpretation may be that the etching depicts how Munch himself felt about a 15-year old girl, his sister Sophie, dying before her time. This etching was made decades after Sophie’s death, which occurred when Edvard himself was not yet 14.

My only Munch is also a print; a lithograph. It is a portrait of the architect Henrik Bull, my grandmother’s brother. I remember Henrik as a “morsk”-looking fellow who looked at you from beneath bushy eyebrows, but as a nice relation. Under the lithograph I own, Munch has written in pencil:

“Let tilbakelenete i sin chaise lounge så han på sin motstander med et venlig men noe listig blik. Han hevde så revolveren, tok et sikkert sikte, og skjøt ham ned.”[1]

And in English:

“Leaning back a little in his chaise lounge, he looked at his adversary with a friendly but somewhat sly look. Raising his revolver, he took careful aim and shot him down.”

So this is how Munch felt when the eyes under those bushy brows gazed at him! He and Henrik knew each other, and by this year, 1928, both were accepted as major Norwegian artists; Henrik as designer of the National Theater in Oslo, and Edvard as the successful bidder on the competition to decorate the nearby University auditorium, the Aula. They were also aware that they were related by marriage: the sister of one was the wife of the second cousin of the other.

The table below shows my direct relationship to the painter. Our common ancestor was a minister, Peder, born in 1740. He and his wife Christine Storm Munch managed the wealthy parson’s farm in Vågå at the top of Gudbrandsdalen. They had many children, and two of them became ministers. These young men were prepared by their father, and then took turns studying in Copenhagen, because the income from the farm was not enough to keep two sons in a university at the same time. Of the two brothers, Johan Storm was my ancestor and became a bishop, while Edvard was the painter’s namesake and a pastor.

Johan Storm, the bishop, had son who was named after his father and was also a minister. The younger Johan Storm was my grandfather’s father, and a strictly religious but adventuresome man. He traveled to the opening of the Suez Canal, taking the opportunity to visit the Holy Land on the same trip. Later, he was a missionary pastor to the Lutheran church in America in Wiota, Wisconsin. My parents translated his wife’s letters home and published them as a book The Strange American Way. Ever since, he has been known in the family by how she referred to him in the letters: Min Kjære Munch (My Dear Munch)

Edvard, the pastor, had a son named Christian who became a physician.  Christian, like his cousin Min Kjære Munch, was a deeply religious man. He was an army surgeon and later a general practitioner in Oslo, then called Christiania. Edvard Munch the painter was Christian’s second child, after a sister Sophie. This was the era of tuberculosis, the “queen of diseases”, and Edvard’s mother died of it soon after giving birth to Edvard’s youngest sister, Inger, the summer before Edvard was five years old. It was not unusual that pregnancy, labor, and birth, were too much for a woman’s body that was weakened by tuberculosis. Nine year’s later, Sophie succumbed to the disease at 15. Edvard also had tuberculosis and nearly died at least once. Today we are no longer familiar with the queen of diseases, but in its pulmonary form, it was gruesome and bloody and no doubt had a lasting effect on Edvard’s life view, although physically he apparently recovered completely.

Min Kjære Munch’s son Peter Andreas, my grandfather, was another minister in the family ranks. Andreas, as he was called, was an exceedingly sweet person, whom I remember best for the care, love, and devotion he lavished on his arthritically crippled wife, Cathrine, or Trine, Henrik Bull’s sister. My father was their youngest son, named after his father and called “Pam” throughout his life. Pam was a sociologist who emigrated with his family to the United States in 1948 to pursue a University career. I was then 11. I have been here ever since, but keep in contact with my Munch relations in Norway, with whom I share an interest in the origins and accomplishments of Edvard Munch and of the whole Munch family.