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.
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