The German-Polish writer and anarchist Stanislaw Przybyszewski, one of the circle of mainly German and Scandinavian artists, writers and intellectuals that gathered in the Berlin tavern nicknamed Zum schwarzen Ferkel (the Black Piglet), described his friend, the artist Edvard Munch, as ‘a painter of the soul’ [who] ‘attempts to depict phenomena of the soul spontaneously through colour. He paints in a manner that only a naked individuality can do, and sees with eyes that have turned away from the world of reality towards an inner world’.
Born in 1863, Munch was one of the first truly modern painters. One who didn’t simply portray the physical world from a different perspective – as did the Impressionists – but who plunged deep beneath the social and psychological veneer of the everyday. Many of his paintings don’t describe the world but convey in brush marks and paint, the inner darkness of the soul. The maelstrom of the psyche. His most famous painting The Scream – a common sight on the walls of undergraduate bedrooms in the ‘60s and ‘70s ¬ became a symbol for the underlying anxiety of the modern world. Like his near contemporary, Van Gogh – who was exactly a decade older – his paintings get beneath the skin of human existence. Growing up in a family repeatedly struck by trauma, somewhat mirroring Van Gogh’s attempted suicide, Munch severely injured his hand in an accidental shooting during a lover’s quarrel. In 1908, he suffered a profound psychological collapse and sought treatment from Dr. Jacobsen and was prescribed electric shock therapy.
Within the intellectual circles of fin-de-siècle Europe, philosophies were changing. Nietzsche had declared God dead, and individuality, along with our deepest fears and anxieties, was thought to be what defined us. The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud were exploring new maps of the human mind. Freud’s psychoanalytic method posited that human behaviour is influenced by unconscious thoughts, desires and memories and that the psyche is composed of the id, the ego and the superego, with defence mechanisms acting to protect the vulnerable ego. The psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung was delving into the collective unconscious, whilst spiritualists and occultists such as the Swedish artists Ernest Josephson and Hilma Klint attempted to get in touch with spirits beyond the rational self. Outside Berlin, the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Malarmé, were exploring Symbolism and the use of images to express emotions and states of mind. As the poet W B Yeats suggested, things were falling apart within European society. Old shibboleths no longer held, and seismic political changes were brewing. A growing interest in ‘primitive’ cultures and the dark side of the soul was seen as a route back to the authentic. Such art would soon be denounced as decadent by the Nazis.
The exhibition at the NPG begins with a fairly conventional self-portrait painted when Munch was studying at the Royal School of Art and Design under the tutelage of the ‘naturalist’ painter, Christian Krohg, who was a major influence on the young bohemians of Kristiania (Oslo). The Munch we see here is confident. His eyes meet ours, though the mouth is soft and vulnerable. There is a superficial swagger, even a degree of haughtiness, nevertheless, this young man seems uncertain of his place in the world. There’s the suggestion of a struggle between inner and outer, no doubt influenced by the existential novels of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, in which he explored faith and doubt, suffering and redemption, loneliness and alienation. Munch is dressed as a bourgeois, in a brown jacket and white shirt under (perhaps) a dark sweater. Yet, despite the slightly experimental short, textured brush marks that depart from a more hard-edged academic style and the soft-muted palette, this is still basically a conventional self-portrait.
His family appears a good deal in his early work, not just because they were a source of cheap models but because Munch seems to be trying to articulate his place within it. His somewhat Freudian portrait of his father, Dr. Christian Munch, a military doctor given to bouts of melancholia and nervousness, shows him smoking a pipe, refusing to meet his son’s gaze. There is little connection between Munch senior and Munch junior. Mental ill health dogged Munch’s family. During her adolescence, his sister, Laura, developed what was likely to have been some sort of schizophrenia. In Evening, we see her gazing wistfully into the middle distance near a lake, brooding, isolated and alone. Soon after this was painted, she would be hospitalised for the rest of her life. Munch’s family portraits hint at something dark and chthonic just below the surface. In the next century, R.D. Laing and other psychiatrists would argue that familial dysfunction brought about internal tensions and unresolved conflicts.
Portraits of Jewish friends, such as Felix Auerbach, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Jena, show a confident, sophisticated man, highly groomed and smoking a cigar. Yet it’s apparent that what’s being presented to the world is an acceptable public mask, the mask of attainment, that he is hiding in plain sight, covering his unacceptable sense of ‘otherness’. He and his wife would take their own lives shortly after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
When the German troops invaded Norway in 1940, Munch refused all contact with the occupiers, retreating to his main residence at Ekely, where he lived to his death from pneumonia in 1944, becoming known as the ‘hermit of Ekley’. In the self-portrait painted there in 1942, he appears featureless and alone, walking in the arbour beyond his studio. Beside him, an empty garden seat and bench, the yellow shrubs and vista of a far fjord all emphasise his solitude. Compared to the early self-portrait, the paint is loose, put down, it seems, in a hurry. This is not a painting for the world. He is not transcribing what he sees, rather using paint as a language of psychological exploration. It’s as if he’s stripping himself back to explore the unconscious depths of a more unregulated self ¬ the id. Unlike the portrait that opens the exhibition, this is not a statement, but a process of discovery.
It is perhaps significant that Munch never married and found intimate relationships difficult. It is as if in the 1944 self-portrait, he is remembering, repeating and working though (as Freud described psychoanalysis) his complex emotional past with his family and lovers. Through the medium of paint, he appears to be trying to make the unconscious conscious and reorganise his very being. The mask, that camouflaging behaviour presented to the world, has been removed. Rather than painting to keep past traumas at bay, the very movement and texture of paint, is being used to explore his deepest vulnerabilities and heal them.
Edvard Munch Portraits, 13 March – 15 June 2025, National Portrait Gallery
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Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, award-winning poet and novelist. She has published five collections of poetry, four novels and a collection of short stories. Her latest Flatlands, from Pushkin Press and Mercure de France as just been translated into Italian.
Photos © Artlyst 2025