The Conclusion

Self Portrait: Between Clock and Bed (1940-42)

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Munch was a fascinating artist. A brave one-setting new directions, making a breaktrough. The more I'm getting to know about him and his art, the closer he becomes. His art was his life, his pictures were his true emotions. He wrote once:

"They will not get it into their heads that these paintings were created in all seriousness and in suffering, that they are the products of sleepless nights, that they have cost me blood and weakened my nerves."

And though his pictures may seem sometimes exaggerated to an average person, they convey what everyone of us felt, feels or will have to deal with someday. In the "Frieze of Life" Munch perfectly summed up people's nature- love, anxiety and death- the truths that can never change and are so perfectly fitted into human's fate. He also saw that people are full of emotions- that they make us, what we are and create our existance. And that we only see the part of the truth. The multitude of human emotions is an endless inspiration. As Munch said:

"At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting."

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After childhood trauma and tormented adult life, in his last years Munch felt a strange peace. "...now all the old phantoms have crept down in their mouseholes for this one enormous phantom," he is said to have said to Pola Gauguin, the artist's daughter. In the winter of 1943/44 Munch contracted pneumonia and he died peacefully at Ekely on 23 January 1944.

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”