Edvard Munch Portraits

Published 31/03/2025

Edvard Munch Portraits

The artist’s portraits have flown under the radar, but getting to know his sitters reveals a lot about Munch himself

Installation view, Edvard Munch Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2025. © David Parry.

National Portrait Gallery, London
13 March – 15 June 2025

by ANNA McNAY

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is indisputably well-known, but his fame comes primarily from just a few of his works – The Scream (1893), of course, and perhaps Madonna (1894) and Love and Pain (1895, also known as Vampire). His portraits – despite there being hundreds of them – have flown under the radar, even in his native Norway, and many of the 45 gathered here for this enlightening exhibition have never been seen before in the UK.

Since the exhibition is being shown at the National Portrait Gallery, the curator, Alison Smith, was clear in pointing out that, as per the venue’s remit, the sitters’ biographies should be seen as at least as important as the artist’s, but, inevitably, in learning about them, we learn about Munch himself. It nevertheless remains a challenge to discern which works are indeed to be classified as portraits from among Munch’s wider practice, since he was often vague and inconsistent with his titles, and he also frequently used features from his sitters in other non-portrait works. For example, as Smith writes in the exhibition catalogue: “The unhappy love life of Munch’s close friend, the writer Jappe Nilssen … helps explain why Munch adopted his hunched form to convey the feelings of loneliness and despair in Melancholy and why the eerie features of the Satanist poet Stanisław Przybyszewski haunt the different versions of Jealousy.”¹

Edvard Munch, Stanisław Przybyszewski, 1895. Lithograph. © Kode Bergen Art Museum. Photo: Fosse, Dag/KODE.

The exhibition, which spans six decades, is divided into four sections: Family, Bohemia, Patrons and Collectors, and Friends and Guardians. It begins with Munch’s early works from when he was still struggling to become an artist, living at home with his family. The palette is naturalistic, or plain – dare I say it, drab – but this is not surprising given the levels of death and misery he had to confront. Born in 1863 in Ådalsbruk, Munch grew up in Kristiania (now Oslo). His early years were plagued by illness (his own and that of others) and death, losing his mother and favourite sister to tuberculosis before the age of 15.

Edvard Munch, Evening,1888. Oil on canvas. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Another sister, Laura – who is seen here in the painting Evening (1888), with her hands clenched and eyes fixedly staring at nothing – was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Munch’s own mental health was never robust, with diagnoses, during his lifetime and posthumously, variously including depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder. These works are thus primarily painted in beiges and blues, embodying dogged dreariness and melancholy. The omnipresence of death is further reinforced in Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy (1886) by the direct gaze between his brother and a skull.

Edvard Munch, Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy, 1886. © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Juri Kobayashi.

Many of Munch’s early portraits of non-family members also depict men who were prone to ill health or were to die young. For example, the painter Jørgen Sørensen, who had long-term effects from a childhood leg injury and was to die at the age of 33, and the artist Karl Jensen-Hjell, who was ill with abdominal tuberculosis and died a couple of years later. His portraits of both men are in the same drab colour scheme as those of his sickly family. His full-length “swagger portrait” of the latter, however, was a deliberate act of provocation, condemned by the conservative press as “a travesty of art” and “a raw spluttering on canvas”. It was the first of the artist’s full-length portraits to be exhibited in public and, as such, it set a precedent for what was to come, both in terms of Munch’s painting style and the response of the critics.²

Edvard Munch, Hans Jaeger, 1889. Oil on canvas. © Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, The Fine Art Collections. Photo: Nasjonalmuseet / Børre Høstland.

Munch travelled a lot between Kristiania, Paris and Berlin, fraternising in Bohemian circles and learning about the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In these still-early years, he didn’t take commissions, preferring to maintain his freedom to experiment, without the pressure of having to make a likeness approved by its subject. He said: “When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness. He himself believes, however, that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.”³ In Oslo, Munch became part of a circle known as the Kristiania Bohème, a group of writers and artists united by their anti-bourgeois attitudes, unconventional way of life and rejection of Christianity. Through this group, he made friends with the likes of the fellow artist Christian Krohg and the anarchist political activist Hans Jaeger. His portrait of the latter shows the man slouched on a sofa in a drinking establishment, legs crossed, and staring directly at the sitter, through his glasses, from under the brim of his hat. In Berlin, Munch socialised with a similar group, which met in a tavern nicknamed Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (the Black Piglet). Here he got to know Przybyszewski and the Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg. It was Przybyszewski who first used the term “painter of the naked soul” to describe Munch in 1894.

Munch made his first print in Berlin, aged 30. At this time, graphic works were becoming increasingly popular – and increasingly collectible. While not an astute businessman, Munch was fully aware of the commercial potential of the medium and wanted his works to be disseminated, to be seen, and to become known. He thus exploited the medium to its full. In addition, printing offered him the opportunity to further explore some of his leitmotif themes using varying techniques to different – and often very striking – effect. He explored symbolism and, through the motif of the “tête coupée” (severed head), the idea that the spiritual and physical reside separately. An example of this is his Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (1895).

Edvard Munch, The Brooch. Eva Mudocci, 1902. Lithograph. © Private collection, courtesy Peder Lund.

Featuring in his portraits far less frequently than men, women, when they do appear, are often portrayed as archetypes, split between the quest for ideal beauty (for example, The Brooch, Eva Mudocci, 1903) and the femme fatale, as well-known from his Vampire series, seen here in the figure of Oda Krohg (wife of Christian) in the background of one of his first etchings, Kristiania Bohemians II (1895). This image, made from memory, shows Krohg with her hands planted firmly on her hips, smoke swirling all around. She was alleged to have had affairs with every man in the portrait except for Munch.⁴

Munch’s drypoint etching A Mother’s Joy (1902), however, which depicts the wife and youngest son of the Lübeck collector Dr Max Linde, exquisitely captures the adoration and tenderness of its subject’s gaze. Apparently, Munch felt at ease with the family, and the boys were very fond of him and called him Uncle Munch.⁵ While this intimacy is apparent in his drypoints of the mother and children, his full-length portrait of Linde is very formal, with hat and umbrella as props in his hands.

Edvard Munch, Felix Auerbach, 1906. © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

The section on patrons and collectors begins with a fabulous portrait of Felix Auerbach (1906), set against a blood-red background reminiscent of the terror-filled sky of The Scream, and, in places, dried as curdling drips (the result of Munch’s mixing turps with his oil paints). While he used colour to flatten the composition, it here also reinforces the sitters’ dynamism and generosity.⁶ The flat red is further broken up by detached strokes, creating a flow of energy, and random floating shapes, purely decorative in form. In direct contrast to this abundance of colour, a swathe of Auerbach’s forehead remains nearly as bare canvas, giving the work a sense of freshness and the vitality of not being overworked. Munch was clear that he did not want his portraits to appear either smooth or finished. Auerbach is shown holding a cigar, in a hand that Munch debated repainting, as he felt it disproportionately large in relation to the face. He ultimately decided the painting had an integrity that should be preserved.⁷ Moreover, this detail gives the sitter a sense of being viewed from low down, which, both in method and result inflates his presence and importance.

Next to Auerbach stands Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (1906), the philosopher’s sister, dressed in blue against a mustard yellow. Taken together with Auerbach, we thus have a complete primary-colour palette, as was preferred by Munch – vibrant, full of personality, and certain to draw attention. The artist was also commissioned by the Swedish banker and art collector Ernest Thiel to paint a portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche (not in the exhibition). There is, however, an unfinished study for a portrait of Thiel (1907), which gives us an interesting insight into Munch’s process, with the background still being worked out, while the head and face have been completed first.

Edvard Munch, Dr Daniel Jacobson, 1908. Oil on canvas © SMK, National Gallery of Denmark. SMK Photo / Jakob Skou-Hansen.

In 1908, Munch suffered an alcohol-induced, paranoid breakdown. He was treated under Dr Daniel Jacobson, in a nerve clinic in Copenhagen. The painting he made of the doctor has him in a stance straight out of a Holbein portrait, yet comprising such free and loose brushstrokes as to venture into the no man’s land between figuration and abstraction. This – and many of its companions – could easily be mistaken for works by the great “Farbenmensch” (colour man) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Munch later recalled his reasons for painting Jacobson’s portrait: “Jacobson was a fine physician. He walked around like a pope among white dressed nurses and us pale, sick patients … I wanted to say something, too, so I asked him to pose for me. I placed him in the picture, big and dominant in a fire with all the colours of hell. He behaved nicely and became as tame as a doe.”⁸ The picture really is quite extraordinary, with the subject and the background competing for primacy, and the sweeping brushstrokes energetically reaching in all directions at once.

Munch repeatedly shows us that he is aware of convention and art history, not only through nods, like this, to great artists, but in his use of traditional (albeit often tweaked) formats as well. We have, of course, the many full-length portraits, but there are also some double portraits, in the manner of traditional marriage portraits (for example, Aase and Harald Nørregaard in Tête-à-Tête, 1885, and the much more colourful Käte and Hugo Perls, 1913). Despite his dramatic shifts in manner and in palette, Munch’s formats and poses varied little throughout his career. He also frequently – and, in his later years, consistently – made two versions of the same portrait (not always identical by a long shot), one of which he would hold on to. He thought of his works as “his children” and found it difficult to part with them. A photograph included in the exhibition shows the artist standing “in conversation” with some of his full-length portraits.

As we move into the final section on friends and guardians, Munch continues to work with bold, complementary colours, using portraiture as a way of saying thank you to those who have stood by him throughout his crises. As well as his friends and doctors, these include “guardians”, who wrote about him, shaping and protecting his reputation, and servants, with his chauffeur, Sultan Abdul Karem, being his only Black sitter, yet someone he painted on numerous occasions. He also painted men and women, who came and knocked on his door, asking to sit for him, such as 16-year-old Birgit Prestøe, pictured here in Seated Model on the Couch (1924), blurry as a vision through drunken, swimming eyes. Long gone are the days of struggling along, making beige pictures of his siblings.

The exhibition closes as it opens with the artist turning his gaze on himself. Self-Portrait with Palette (1926) – later deemed degenerate and confiscated by the Nazis – depicts him, identifiable as an artist through the tools of his trade, in his garden at Ekely. Next to this, however, a striking lithograph shows the artist as the corpse being opened up on the dissection bench of his friend, the professor of anatomy Kristian Schreiner. While made two decades before Munch’s death, it nevertheless shows his heightened awareness of human mortality, and the shadow of doctors and death that was never to let up in his life.

References
1. The Portraits of Edvard Munch by Alison Smith, in Edvard Munch Portraits, exh cat, National Portrait Gallery, 2025, pages 9-18, page 10.
2. Bohemia by Alison Smith, exh cat, 2025, pages 54-75, page 56.
3. Edvard Munch by JP Hodin, Thames & Hudson, 1972, page 128.
4. Bohemia, op cit, page 64.
5. Patrons and Collectors by Alison Smith, exh cat, 2025, pages 78-100, page 85.
6. ibid, page 78.
7. Correspondence with Auerbach’s wife, Anna, cited in ibid, pages 92-93.
8. Cited in ibid, page 96.