The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (328 page)

Müller , Otto
.

See
BRÜCKE
.

 
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(1786–1863).
Irish-born painter, active in England, the pupil and brother-in-law of John
Varley
. After undistinguished beginnings with historical
genre
and landscape he turned with great success to scenes of contemporary life in the vein made popular by
Wilkie
.
The Fight Interrupted
(V&A, London, 1816), which shows a vicar intervening between two boys who have come to blows, made his reputation and set the course for his career. Although at first his meticulous brushwork showed the influence of 17th-cent. Dutch painting, in the 1820s he began to develop a more distinctive technique, using light clear colours over a white ground. This, together with his clear draughtsmanship and the poetic quality of some of his later paintings (
The Sonnet
, V&A, 1839), has led him to be seen as a precursor of the
Pre-Raphaelites
, although they themselves rejected his work as trivial. Mulready also designed the first penny postage envelope (1840).

 
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multiples
.

Term used from about the middle of the 20th cent. to designate works other than
graphic art
or cast sculpture which are planned to be produced by a variety of industrial processes in unlimited numbers. In principle they are not industrially produced copies of an original work hand-made by the artist himself. Indeed, in some cases the artist produces only a blueprint or instructions for the industrial process. The concept of the multiple represents a revolution of aesthetic attitude according to which craftsmanship is disparaged and works of art are no longer regarded as items for connoisseurs but as consumer goods for the masses like any other industrial product.

 
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(documented 1427–d. before 1467).
German sculptor, active in Ulm. The solid
naturalism
of his style, reminiscent of
Sluter
, suggests that he trained in the Netherlands or northern France. He ran a large workshop, which was influential in spreading this manner in Swabia. Paintings were often integral to his altarpieces, but it is a matter for debate whether he practised painting himself. Among his most important works was the high altar for the church at Sterzing in the Tyrol (1456–8), parts of which are now in the Multscher museum there.

 
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(1863–1944).
Norwegian painter, lithographer, etcher, and wood-engraver, his country's greatest artist. He began painting in a conventional manner, but by 1884 was part of the world of bohemian artists in Christiania (now Oslo) who had advanced ideas on ethics and sexual morality, Christian
Krøhg
being his early mentor. In 1885 he made the first of several visits to Paris, where he was influenced by the
Impressionists
and
Symbolists
and, above all, by
Gauguin's
use of simplified forms and non-naturalistic colours. Munch had endured a traumatic childhood (his father was almost dementedly pious and his mother and eldest sister died of consumption when he was young): ‘Illness, madness and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle’, he wrote, and in his paintings he gave expression to the neuroses that haunted him. Certain themes—jealousy, sickness, the awakening of sexual desire—occur again and again, and he painted extreme psychological states with an unprecedented conviction and an intensity that sometimes bordered on the frenzied.
In 1892 he was invited to exhibit at the Kunstlerverein (Artists' Union) in Berlin and his work caused such an uproar in the press that the exhibition was closed. The scandal made him famous overnight in Germany, so Munch moved there and from 1892 to 1908 lived mainly in Berlin with frequent stays in Norway and visits also to France and Italy. In the 1890s much of his effort went into an ambitious series of pictures that never had a definitive form and which he called the ‘Frieze of Life’—‘a poem of life, love and death’. The most famous of the paintings from the series,
The Shriek
(NG, Oslo, 1893), and several others were translated by Munch into etching, lithography, or woodcut. The woodcuts (often in colour) are particularly impressive, exploiting the grain of the wood to contribute to their rough, intense vigour. With those of Gauguin they played a major part in the 20th-cent. revival of the technique. In 1908 Munch suffered what he called ‘a complete mental collapse’, the legacy of heavy drinking, overwork, and a wretched love-affair, and after recuperating he returned permanently to Norway. He realized that his mental instability was part of his genius (‘I would not cast off my illness, for there is much in my art that I owe to it’), but he made a conscious decision to devote himself to recovery and abandoned his familiar imagery. The anguished intensity of his art disappeared and his work became much more extroverted. In landscapes, portraits, and pictures of workmen in the snow his technique grew more and more sketchy and energetic, his palette bright and vigorous. The great achievement of this period is a series of large oil paintings for the University Hall of Oslo (1910–15) exalting the positive forces of nature, science, and history. In 1916 he settled at Ekely, Oslo, thenceforth living a solitary life. In some of his later work, however, he rekindled the passion and profundity of his early years, as in the last of his numerous self-portraits,
Between the Clock and the Bed
(Munch Mus., 1940–2), in which he shows himself old and frail, hovering on the edge of eternity. At his death he left the large body of his work still in his possession to the City of Oslo to found the Munch Museum.
Munch ranks as one of the most powerful and influential of modern artists. His influence was particularly strong in Scandinavia and Germany, where he and van
Gogh
are regarded as the two main sources of
Expressionist
art. The intensity with which he symbolized and communicated mental anguish through an unrestrained and violent distortion of colours and forms opened up new paths for art. ‘Just as
Leonardo da Vinci
studied human anatomy and dissected corpses’, he said, ‘so I try to dissect souls.’