Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a compulsive portraitist, and an odd one. Portraiture is the most transactional of genres; images produced, by and large, at the behest of and for the sitter. Munch produced hundreds of portraits over the course of his career but a great number of them were neither commissioned nor handed over: he painted people for himself and painted them how he wanted to.
Here was a man who claimed he could see “behind everyone’s mask” and it meant that not infrequently his sitters disliked what he had found there. As Munch himself noted drolly: “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.” Neither family, friends, models, nor patrons had leverage over what his brush produced.
Among the 45 Munch paintings on display in a revealing new exhibition of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery are, for example, a full-length of 1905 of his friend and follower Ludvig Karsten. Despite the pair’s closeness, Munch’s feelings were not entirely warm; he found the younger painter a “strange guy” with a mouth “always ready for some sarcasm”. The trait makes sense of the expression on Karsten’s face – that and the fact that Munch showed off his skill with a gun by shooting a cigarette out of his subject’s mouth during the course of the sitting. Later, during an altercation, Munch turned a rifle on him.
His feelings for the psychiatrist Daniel Jacobson, the man who treated him when he had an alcohol-induced breakdown in Copenhagen in 1908, are also clear in his portrait. Munch thought him controlling, “a pope among white-dressed nurses”, and took his revenge in a flame-coloured picture in which he depicted the physician chest out, hands on hips, legs akimbo – a cock-of-the-walk in the wards. Jacobson was mystified as to why Munch had shown him that way. “In all seriousness, I am really worried about him,” he confided. “Just look at the picture he has painted of me, it’s stark raving mad.”
He also used his sitters as models for his subject paintings, turning them into archetypes. He saw in his friend the art critic Jappe Nielsen a man suffering from love, pining for the painter Oda Krohg who spread her favours liberally, and used his portrait as a universal symbol in his several versions of Melancholy (1891-93). Meanwhile the features of the Satanist poet Stanisław Przybyszewski appear disconcertingly in Jealousy (1895). (Przybyszewski’s wife, the writer Dagny Juel, had various affairs and was later to die when one of her lovers shot her in the head.)
Munch’s feelings for his friends appeared in more positive ways too. In the first decade of the 20th century, by which time he was an established artist, he had accumulated a group of wealthy patrons. These men, such as the German ophthalmologist and collector Max Linde, the financier Ernest Thiel, the industrialist and politician Walther Rathenau, and the writer and journalist Christian Gierloff, were, said Munch: “My soldiers, my warriors, my battalions, the Guardians of my art.” He painted them in a series of vivid, skinny full-lengths in which the rapidity and variety of his brushwork act as a measure of feeling. The portrait of Gierloff, for example, has areas of bare canvas, rapid vertical strokes, paint as thin as watercolour so that it dribbles and other areas so thick that the pigment stands proud of the surface. Munch kept most of these portraits with him as a phalanx of “lifeguards” to protect him against the world outside – and himself.
In fact, the world outside recognised Munch’s work. When Norway ceded from Sweden in 1905 he became the newly independent nation’s artistic figurehead. Decades later, on his 70th birthday, he was awarded Norway’s highest civilian honour, the Grand Cross, and among the congratulations he received was a tribute from Joseph Goebbels – not that this was to stop the Nazis shortly designating his art “degenerate”.
What the many faces in this exhibition proclaim, including several self-portraits, is that Munch stood at the centre of a wide social circle. In his travels to assorted artistic and intellectual centres, from Berlin and Paris to Copenhagen as well as Kristiania (Oslo), he acquired numerous friends and supporters. Frederick Delius, August Strindberg, Stéphane Mallarmé were all intimates; he painted Henrik Ibsen, one of his heroes, and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the sister of another.
The impression given by his most famous subject paintings is of a man who knew all too well the bleak solitude of the human condition. Indeed, he was horribly familiar with both family tragedy – his mother died from tuberculosis when he was five and his sister lingeringly succumbed to the disease at 15 – and mental illness. But if he was alone, he was at least alone in a crowd.
Edvard Munch Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 15 June
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