After an unfinished university course in engineering, the Norwegian painter and graphic artist Edvard Munch began to study graphic design in Oslo in 1881. Until 1884 Munch studied under the sculptor Julius Middelthun, the painter Christian Krogh and others. Soon the artist worked as a self-employed painter, who continuously managed to evoke the interest of the broad public with his own style. In 1892 Munch's Berlin exhibition, which took place upon invitation of the 'Verein Berliner Künstler', caused a scandal and lead to the foundation of the Berlin 'Sezession'. Munch's early paintings were realistic pictures with strong emotional content - a basic mood in the works of the young artist, which intensified when Munch came across the works of Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, Gaugin and the Symbolists during his first sojourn in Paris around 1890. These artists' works inspired Munch not only to simplify his formal language, but also to increase his expression through new pictoral means. This resulted in Munch's lasting subject range, which surrounded his personal and at the same time the general experience in the field of psychological processes and the existential threat to man. Munch used dark, melancholic colors and large combined arabesque shapes to give his pictures their significant dramatic expressiveness. Thanks to a careful use of means, these motifs also manage to convey their particularly forceful message in etchings, lithographs and wood cuts. The artist, who lived primarily in Paris and Germany until 1908, returned to Norway after a severe nervous crisis. In 1937 the Nazis declared 82 of Munch's works in German meuseums to be 'degenerate' and sold them. An eye disease made it more and more difficult for the painter to work. In 1944 Edvard Munch died on Ekely. Munch left his estate to the city of Oslo. In 1963 the city opened the Munch Museum, which was paid for by his inheritance.