LONDON.- The National Portrait Gallery opened its spring exhibition Edvard Munch Portraits. Curated by Alison Smith, previously Chief Curator of the National Portrait Gallery and now Director of Collections and Research at the Wallace Collection, the exhibition will show how Munch (1863-1944) painted portraits as commissions and for personal reasons, with many pictures doubling up as icons or archetypes of the human condition despite being based on the direct observation of named individuals. Contrary to the typical portrayal of Munch as an artist isolated from the mainstream, he will be presented as a social being, exploring his wide network of creative contacts across Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
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Including more than 40 works, the exhibition is arranged thematically and chronologically, taking visitors on a four-part journey through Munch’s immediate family, his interactions with bohemian radicals, his patrons and collectors and finally his closest confidants, the so-called ‘Guardians’.
This exhibition is made possible with key loans from major museums and private collections internationally including Munchmuseet (Oslo), Kode Bergen Art Museum (Bergen), Gothenburg Museum of Art (Gothenberg), Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Nasjonalmuseet: The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Oslo), Oslo Museum (Oslo), Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen), Thielska Galleriet (Stockholm), The British Museum (London), and The Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam).
Visitors will first encounter Munch’s early family portraits, created during the 1880s and 90s. These intimate pictures, often painted on small pieces of card in a naturalistic manner, introduce key concepts found throughout the artist’s body of work. Evening (1888) serves as a prototype for the Symbolist works Munch created during the 1890s. It shows Munch’s sister, Laura, on a family holiday, just a year before she was permanently hospitalized with schizophrenia, capturing her sense of alienation from her surroundings. Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy (1886) is an early expression of the artist’s lifelong fascination with medicine and physicians and the idea of mortality that was to haunt Munch’s oeuvre as a whole.
After leaving his family home to study art formally in the mid-1880s, Munch became part of the bohemian scene in Kristiania (as Oslo was then known) – a network of internationally-connected artists and writers, chief of whom was the anarchist Hans Jæger whose portrait dominates this section. Munch’s interaction with bohemian circles in Kristiania, Paris and Berlin was vital for his development as an artist, leading him towards a more expressive style he termed ‘soul art’. In Berlin, Munch encountered the Polish writer and dramatist Stanisław Przybyszewski whose 1894 monograph Das Werk des Edvard Munch was the first publication to promote Munch internationally and to suggest the idea of the ‘Naked Soul’ as being fundamental to his work. A particularly fascinating painting in this section is the portrait of lawyer Thor Lütken. Never before displayed in the UK, on close examination, Lutken’s sleeve along the bottom edge doubles up as a moonlit landscape inhabited by two mysterious figures suggestive of love and death.
The third section of the exhibition examines Munch’s relationship with his patrons and collectors. By the early 20th century, Munch was one of the most exhibited artists in Europe. Returning to Berlin in 1902, he won the support of a group of wealthy and influential collectors, whose patronage further elevated his profile. At this time Munch began to take commissions, marking a turning point in his portrait style, painting in bright and bold colours to reflect the dynamism of his sitters. Such portraits include Munch’s vibrant portrait of German physicist Felix Auerbach, commissioned in 1906, who engages with the viewer as if in conversation. A similar sense of warmth is conveyed in The Brooch (1902), Munch’s lithograph of the Brixton-born violinist Eva Mudocci, who appears both sensual and mysterious. While Munch’s Symbolist ‘floating head’ portraits tend to focus on male-creative figures, this portrait of Mudocci is a rare example of a woman depicted in this manner.
After collapsing from stress in 1908, Munch was admitted to a private nerve clinic in Copenhagen, run by Dr. Daniel Jacobson. When Jacobson requested a portrait, Munch chose to pose him in a powerful stance echoing Holbein’s iconic portraits of Henry VIII, painted in bright swirling colours as if engulfed by flames.
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