“Nature is the vast eternal kingdom which nourishes art,” Munch observed, and this vast source was not a choice but a reality. Self Portrait by the Arbor (1942), a seldom exhibited late work of Munch’s, is on view and has the same austere self-examination of an elderly man to it as the artist’s renowned Self Portrait Between Clock and Bed (1940-43). Unfortunately, a lot of the expressionist masterpieces are simply not in this show, but the prints and some exquisite portraits compensate to a degree. Insurance issues?
Edvard Munch – Portraits – is the first-ever show of Munch’s portraiture in the UK. It presents an overview of Munch’s era, including family, fellow bohemians, patrons and friends. Let’s be clear: although Munch is portrayed as the poor outsider or loner, he was as connected to collectors and artists in his era as Andy Warhol. The portraits of Gustav Schiefler, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jappe Nilssen, Henrik Ibsen, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Frederick Delius, August Strindberg or Friedrich Nietzsche, like New Yorker Arnold Newman’s photo portraits, incorporate the environment as an expression of the person.
Evening Laura Munch (1888) shows Munch’s sister Laura, who went mad, staring off into her inner space with a straw hat. Another sister, Inger, is outdoors in the sun, while a brother, Andreas, studies anatomy with a human skull on his desk. How unfortunate that Munch’s Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette (1895) with a naked boho Munch standing amid a fiery backdrop of flames (painted a year after breaking up with the heiress Tulla Larsen, who, in a spat, shot off one of Munch’s fingers) didn’t make it into the show. Now, that was an expressive statement!
Munch brought inner and outer worlds together, and he kept the rough, sketchy texture of life in the art. His best paintings breathe life and nature. The Beat writers did the same in the 1960s. Munch never overpolished, never erased the inner life of the soul, whatever the subject. A portrait of his psychiatrist, Dr Daniel Jacobson (1908), who looked after Munch after his breakdown, sings with an expressive realisation.
Likewise, Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski (1905), who in Das Werk des Edvard Munch on Munch, elucidated on the “naked soul’ as Munch’s way of seeing, is an intense lithographic portrait. The same goes for his portrait of the English violinist Eva Mudocci (1902) and Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (1895). On view, these are a must-see – superb examples of Munch’s master prints. The Anatomist Schreiner (1928-29) presents Munch himself as the corpse under study. Death is always there. His mother and sister Sophie, captured in The Sick Child (1907), died of tuberculosis. Like so many of Munch’s paintings, The Sick Child was immensely unpopular when first exhibited. Munch himself had tuberculosis at age 13. A friend died; he did not. He recovered, almost expecting himself to be in the realm of the dead. He never accepted it was he, and not his friend, who died. This set him on a course for life. Paintings reaffirmed he was “healthy”.
One of the most successful portraits in the show is Hans Jaeger (1889), the anarchist bohemian from Kristiania, slouched in an armchair after getting out of prison. Another is a bright full-length of fellow painter Ludvig Karsten painted the same year Norway achieved independence from Sweden. Often, portrait figures, while realist, exist in a kind of protoplasmic non-space, as in the highly successful portrait of Walter Rathenau (1907) with its vivid red background. Karl Jensen-Hjell (1885) has flash to it and embodies love among the artists in the pro-biotic bohemian non-space of a background. There is a touch of Matisse’s colour patch style to Sultan Abdul Karem (1916), but it works.
Those inner and outer worlds – the psyche and nature are less apparent in the early family portraits. There is less of that sense of the psyche in the post-breakdown portraits, but with Henriette Olsen (1932) of the Olsen family of shipping fame, figure and surrounds dissolve into each other.
Like Warhol, Munch’s iconic portraits stand the test of any time, for he’s true to himself. The various nihilistic or philosophical worldviews in the air among the Berlin thinkers’ café society and collectors of the Secession propelled ideas of the inner and outer worlds Munch revelled in. Brush stroke by brush stroke, Munch left the raw stakes of emotion in his process. His paintings of collectors, artists and personal friends carry a memory of this even now, a kind of signal note or cue to Munch’s journey through life.
Identity is always shifting, never static like his sensitive soul; the embryonic soup of self and other is a world with no inner or outer boundaries. The Scream (1893), an icon that supersedes the real can now be seen on socks, cheque-book covers, and T-shirts as well as blow up dolls, stripped away the veneer to reveal a Freudian world newly discovered by Kristiania’s devoutly Christian society. Munch’s portrait subjects are personas with a body. Edvard Munch – Portraits – is a fine survey of the portrait as subject in Munch’s art. But where are the artworks impassioned by love and booze, every adolescent’s lived dream? That’s the Munch we know and love… a forever angst-ridden kunstler for whom inner and outer worlds are enmeshed in a tangle of torment. Not to be seen at the National Portrait Gallery!
Words: John K. Grande Photos © Artlyst
Edvard Munch Portraits, 13 March – 15 June 2025, National Portrait Gallery, £21/23.50 with donation
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