Munch is a very interesting character psychologically. He had all of that anguished artwork when he was young. Then, in middle-age, he went through an intense and apparently successful psychotherapy. Much of his later work is gloriously optimistic and joyful, including a wonderful mural-sized expressionist sunrise in the university hall where they announce the Nobel Peace Prize every year.
During my slacker years I spent some time in the little village on the Oslo fjord where Munch kept his summer cottage before he died in the 1940s. In the afternoons, the caretaker of Munch's cottage would give me strong coffee and tell me stories about the artist. The elderly and only recently optimistic Munch was one of Norway's last victims of WWII. Toward the end of the German occupation, a Norwegian resistance team blew up a German freighter that was anchored out in the fjord. Munch's housekeeper thought that it was the start of the allied invasion, so she put Munch into the root cellar where he would be safe. Once in the cellar he caught pneumonia and he died a few days later.