Munch at the British Museum 2019
Six years ago the British Museum held a big exhibition of Edvard Munch’s prints, including the famous Scream. In my review of the exhibition I summarised the exhibition’s narrative of how Munch (1863 to 1944), when a youngish man, in the 1890s, was part of a hard-drinking, permissive Bohemian set in the capital of his native Norway, Oslo (then called Kristiana), and how the hedonistic free-love and hard drinking ethos of this world clashed with his strict Protestant rural upbringing to produce an often unbearable tension and angst in the young man. Not just unhappiness – intense mental distress. The British Museum show had numerous quotes from Munch’s journals and diary up on the walls all making the same point:
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)
All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)
You get the picture, and a feel for the troubled mentality which produced not only The Scream but a host of other deeply haunting woodcuts – of vampire-like young women, of traumatised couples standing in front of lakes of bottomless meaning and forests of endless threat.
However, alongside the woodcuts and paintings with titles like Despair, Anxiety, Death, and so on, Munch throughout his life was an accomplished painter of portraits, of his family, his Bohemian friends, of society patrons, and of himself. In fact he produced hundreds of them.
Munch at the National Portrait Gallery 2025
This fine exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery brings together 40 of Munch’s portraits, ranging across 40 years of his long career, from the 1880s to the 1920s, for us to enjoy, savour, compare and contrast. It is the first such exhibition to focus on Munch’s portraits ever held in the UK and includes foreign loans never before seen in the UK.
A mixed bag
The main point to make at the start is the great variety of size and treatment over these 40 or so years – and the very variable quality. Munch’s star is obviously in the ascendant and the curators, and many of the media reviewers, make a big case for him being one of the twentieth century’s great portraitists. I just don’t think that’s true. It’s nearly true, there are a lot of good portraits here, including some portraits of writers which have long been classic – but there are a lot of poor paintings here as well; ones I thought were poorly executed, showed bad draughtsmanship, sketchy painting technique.
There are quite a few powerful, notable works, but just as many that I’d cross the road to avoid or wouldn’t look twice at in a general exhibition.
Stories
One other point. The gallery labels accompanying the portraits are excellent and full of interest. Very often exhibition labels fall back on woke clichés or very general descriptions of what you can already see for yourself, and can be exasperating or futile, accordingly.
However the picture captions here are uniformly excellent. Almost all of them move beyond a brief background of the image to give fascinating potted biographies of the subjects, and seeing as these come from a surprisingly broad range of figures, in Norway but also Germany where Munch spent a lot of time, all these potted biographies build up into a fascinating mosaic of the times. They range all the way from the biography of Munch’s father and sisters, via the various writers, artists and poets he knew in his merry Bohemian times, through to fascinating accounts of the physicians, industrialists and patrons he painted, and their lives and fates after he painted them.
Putting to one side the questionable merit of some of the paintings, these potted biographies bring to life a whole world of culture and patronage in north-central Europe which we in Britain, in thrall to a very Paris-based view of modern art, are almost completely ignorant of.
Layout
The exhibition is arranged thematically and chronologically, taking visitors on a four-part journey through Munch’s immediate family, bohemian artists and writers, his patrons and collectors, and finally his closest confidants, the so-called ‘Guardians’ who supported him in his later years. I’ll pick a key work from each section.
1. Family
The earliest paintings, from his early 20s, are small oil paintings of himself, his father and the aunt (Karen Bjølstad) who moved in after his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five (in 1868). I really liked the small portrait of his bearded father – Dr Christian Munch, a military doctor – lighting his pipe. They’re small, dark and inside and hark back to naturalist painting of the 1860s and 70s which he would swiftly work through and move beyond.
Quite quickly we move outside, though, to a much larger work like ‘Evening’ (1888). This, the caption tells us, depicts Munch’s sister, Laura, on a family holiday, just a year before she was permanently hospitalized with schizophrenia. The curators claim it captures her sense of alienation from her surroundings. Do you agree? Apparently in the centre of the painting was a standing figure but Munch painted over it in order to emphasise and increase the sense of distance between the soulful woman and the figures by the lake.
Evening by Edvard Munch (1888) © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
2. Bohemian friends
Munch left his family home to study art formally in the mid-1880s, becoming part of the bohemian scene in Kristiania. This was a network of internationally-connected artists and writers whose their ideals ran contrary to the strict religious principles of Munch’s upbringing. They advocated free love, atheism and women’s emancipation.
It was here that he developed a free-er more expressive way with paint which he called ‘soul art’, and which relied on the intensity of the relationship with the sitter as much as technical proficiency. In other words, his brushwork became looser. Leader of this set of freethinkers was the anarchist Hans Jæger whose portrait dominates this section and was chosen by the curators to promote the entire show. They comment on the cynical, confident pose of a man who knows he bosses his social group, comfortably slouched on a sofa in the Grand Café, Kristiana.
Hans Jaeger by Edvard Munch (1889) © Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, The Fine Art Collections. Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Børre Høstland
Munch didn’t stay in Kristiana but travelled to Berlin where he had been invited to show. Here he met 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. Przybyszewski believed that society placed such a constraint on basic human instincts that it was the artist’s duty to compensate by giving free rein to unconscious impulses and desires – what he termed ‘the naked soul’.
The other strong work in this section is the portrait of lawyer Thor Lütken. Do you notice anything odd about this picture?
Thor Lütken by Edvard Munch (1892) Private Collection. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong
The oddity is that, on close inspection, the lawyer’s left sleeve, along the bottom of the picture, contains a moonlit landscape inhabited by two mysterious figures, a man in black and a woman in white.
Detail of Thor Lütken by Edvard Munch (1892) Private Collection. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong
Are they lovers or a symbolic portrayal of life and death, Death and The Maiden? Whatever the intention, it’s a pretty unconventional thing to do in a professional portrait but indicates the tremendous influence the 1890s movement of Symbolism had on Munch’s thinking.
Talking of Symbolism, the section includes a series of works which aren’t paintings but black-and-white lithographs. These depict some super-famous figures from the time, notably the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé, and the composer Frederick Delius who Munch met at the health resort of Wiesbaden, alongside group sketches of north European Bohemians in a number of cafes and bars.
The point is that for some of these portraits – notable Ibsen, Mallarmé and a striking portrait of himself – created a novel approach, presenting the sitters as disembodied heads floating in space. The detached floating head was a familiar motif in Symbolist art, signifying a split between the physical and spiritual self but hadn’t been used in such intimate and realistic portraits before.
The novel format does several things. In the portrait of Ibsen it emphasises the distance between the floating head and the busy life going on outside the window; in the wonderful portrait of Mallarmé, probably the most successful likeness in the show, it focuses you on the face and eyes so you feel you are just about to hear a pearl of wisdom from the witty old gent. According to the ever-interesting picture caption, Mallarmé was fascinated by the occult, which may explain the ghost-like feel of the portrait. And he said that the image reminded him of one of the images of Jesus on a holy shroud…
And in the self portrait with skeleton, the jet black background makes Munch’s head seem as if guillotined and floating in space, as in a bizarre dream.
3. Patrons and collectors
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. It’s fascinating to learn that, in the curators’ words, ‘Many had Jewish heritage and held key professional and institutional positions in German society. They all shared an enthusiasm for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and his belief in the creative power of the individual’ – indeed the influence of Nietzsche’s insistence on the Superman overthrowing all society’s traditional values and creating his own, is mentioned in the commentary of quite a few works from this period. Also, disapproving moralists nowadays frequently associate Nietzsche with the strains of thought which led to the Nazis, so it’s striking to learn that quite so many Jewish figure were attracted by his ideas.
From 1902 to his breakdown in 1908, Munch began to take commissions from the rich and successful and this marked a turning point in his portrait style. Increasingly he painted in bright and bold colours to reflect the dynamism of his sitters. The outstanding work in this section is the super-striking portrait of German physicist Felix Auerbach, commissioned in 1906.
by Edvard Munch (1906) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
In my opinion, you can see at least three things going on in this portrait. 1) The face and in particular the eyes address you really directly, with startling immediacy. Their clarity and figurative accuracy are comparable to the Mallarmé image’s eyes.
2) This immediacy distracts you from the fact that a lot of the secondary detail is no precise, is done using Munch’s trademark curves. Look at the hand holding the cigar: the fingers, the hand, the sleeve do not stand out with photographic realism from the background coat but instead are moulded with his trademark blurred curves. Instead of focusing on light and shadow to make the detail crisp, he prefers to go over the rounded outline of the hand again and again, in different colours, to give it an almost cartoon simplicity.
Lastly, of course 3) the bright red background. Maybe it’s an attempt at the actual wallpaper behind this rich patron when he painted him, but it feels more like an aesthetic statement. At first glance it made me think of the Fauves and Matisse who were just starting to do the same kind of thing in France but the wall caption tells me it’s a homage to Van Gogh’s use of bright and non-naturalistic colours. (n fact this painting now resides in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.) It certainly feels like Munch felt free to create any kind of background he wants, and to use very strong vibrant colour in order to create an effect, in this case an extremely powerful and stirring effect.
The redness of the image reminded me of John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece, Dr Pozzi at Home (1881). Look at Sargent’s treatment of the hands, and indeed of the face. Pretty much none of the works in this exhibition demonstrate the draughtsmanship, the accuracy, or the painterly precision of Sargent.
In a very different mode, and much more reminiscent of his famous woodcut prints in its appreciation of feminine sensuality and its air of mystery, is The Brooch (1902), Munch’s lithograph of the Brixton-born violinist Eva Mudocci. As we’ve seen, Munch created a series of Symbolist ‘floating head’ portraits but almost all of them are of men. This portrait of Mudocci is a rare example of a woman depicted in this manner.
The Brooch (Eva Mudocci) by Edvard Munch (1902) © Private collection, courtesy Peder Lund
As usual the picture caption gives us a fascinating potted biography of the sitter and I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I read that ‘Eva Mudocci’ was actually born Evangeline Hope Muddock in Brixton.
These are the outstanding good works in this section, but there began to be ones I didn’t like or felt fell far short of a professional standard. There are three prints from a set of 16 commissioned by a Dr Linde of his wife and young children. These ought to be good and they’re nearly good, but when you look closely, you see that they’re not good. Look at this drawing of his four sons – all the faces are bodged and wonky. Sorry to be so literal minded, but compared to the draughtsmanship of Holbein or Sargent or Lawrence or numerous other painters, ancient and modern, Munch’s technique feels good, but not wow.
Breakdown
Ten years of heavy drinking, of numerous affairs and moving constantly from place to place took their toll and in 1908 Munch had a breakdown. He was admitted to a private nerve clinic in Copenhagen, run by Dr Daniel Jacobson and slowly, steadily made a full recovery, going on to become a virtual teetotaller.
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. The wall caption amusingly tells us that Jacobson hated the portrait.
Dr Daniel Jacobson by Edvard Munch (1908) © SMK, National Gallery of Denmark. SMK Photo/Jakob Skou-Hansen
This reproduction makes it look quite dark and more coherent than it is in the flesh. In the flesh it is enormous, larger than life size, and scrappy. You can clearly see the untouched canvas through the scrappy hurried brushstrokes. Now ordinarily I really like this kind of thing when it conveys a sense of dynamism, as in Degas, or experimentalism, as in Cézanne. But, sorry everyone, in Munch, for me, it just felt scrappy and half-hearted.
My opinion was exacerbated by the presence in this room of quite a few other middling to poor paintings, which had the effect of dragging the whole thing down. Take Olga and Rosa Meissner from 1908. I can see that Munch is moving into the new world of German Expressionism, in the breakthroughs of post-impressionism, anticipating the scrappy portraits of English artists like Dora Carrington or Vanessa Bell a decade later. But I don’t like it. The faces are poor and the painting style is scrappy and half-hearted.
There were quite a few paintings with this half-finished scrappy vibe in this section and even more in the fourth and final room.
4. The Guardians
Following his recovery at Dr Jacobson’s clinic, in 1909 Munch moved back home and settled permanently in Norway. In that year (1909) Norway had gained independence from its union with Sweden and Munch was hailed a national hero, having been knighted the previous year.
Munch’s recovery of his health and turning away from the ruinous ways of his Bohemian lifestyle were supported by a small group of new friends who he came to call his ‘Lifeguards’ or ‘Guardians’ – friends and supporters he found among writers, artists and patrons. These Lifeguards were so important to Munch that he refused to be parted from their portraits, which acted as talismanic substitutes for them when they weren’t around. So this last section of the exhibition brings together ten or so portraits of these people which, I’m afraid to say, I found almost uniformly ‘bad’.
In its press images the NPG supplies the two strongest pictures in the room, which are the full-length portrait of Jappe Nilssen and the one of Birgit Prestøe in ‘Seated Model on the Couch’ (1924). They do not supply any of the weaker ones, such as the double portrait of Käte and Hugo Perls, of painter Ludvig Karsten or writer Christian Gierløff.
Here’s the best image in the room, the portrait of Jappe Nilssen.
Jappe Nilssen by Edvard Munch (1909) © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Juri Kobayashi
As you can see, it’s a powerful work, employing van Gogh-style slabs of primary colours to create a dynamic image – although the real source of its power is in the man’s four-square, virile pose. But it’s arguably the best image in the room, and not typical of almost all the others, which feel far weaker and less finished, in at least one case, literally so.
The only other work in the this section that I liked is a portrait of a regular sitter for Munch, Birgit Prestøe. He painted her many times between their meeting in 1924 and 1931.
Seated Model on the Couch (Birgit Prestøe) by Edvard Munch (1924) © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong
I liked this image because, from a distance, it reminded me of the kind of mathematical modernism I really like – the post-cubist angularity of Futurism and Vorticism. But of course, it’s more by accident than design. When you go closer you see that not many of the lines are straight, most are in fact bent or curved or swirly, although I still like the random pools of colour, such as the dark orange on her shoulders and hip and knee.
And here are links to some of the much more characteristic, much less finished, much scrappier, and less pleasing works:
- Christian Gierløff (1909)
- Käte and Hugo Perls (1913)
- Henriette Olsen (1932)
The Olsen, in my view, showcases all Munch’s weaknesses. The draughtsmanship of the face is poor, the arms are worse (at first glance, she looks like a thalydomide victim), the shadow looks like a pool of spilled dirty water.
The Christian Gierløff demonstrates the hold of what I early on came to think of as The Swirl on Munch’s technique, the way 1) the outlines of a figure’s body are echoed and repeated in multiple lines to create a kind of shadowy, faltering effect, and 2) the way the figure doesn’t stand out distinctly from the background, as people do in real life, but what background he can be bothered to paint in shapes itself around the foreground figure. This is most obvious in the rock of whatever it is behind Gierløff and on his right, whose contours entirely shape themselves around his figure, and the yellow line outlining the black which is presumably his shadow, and which curves round to a kind of golden loop on the ground at his feet, which to the schoolboy mind, suggests a puddle of urine.
Clearly Munch considers the backgrounds to his later portraits to be very secondary, to have a mostly decorative effect. Now whereas this works excellently in the striking and very finished portrait of Felix Auerbach, which is indoors, and whose backdrop hovers with pleasing ambiguity between a real wallpaper and pure abstraction – in my opinion this approach does not work when the figure is out of doors and so the background becomes more important, is necessarily more varied, we as animals want to understand the context and precise positioning of a fellow human, so I found Munch’s collapse into semi-abstract swirls and half-arsed shadows, frustrating and incomplete. They’re neither the realism of a Singer Sargent nor the purely decorative abstraction of a Matisse, but a muddy no-man’s-land in between.
Conclusion
The curators, and a surprising number of critics in the papers and magazines, try to persuade us that Munch was one of the great portrait artists of the 20th century. This excellent exhibition makes the strongest possible case for its cause, and is certainly very enjoyable for the biographical and historical facts to be found in all the picture captions – but, in my opinion, ultimately fails. Some of his paintings are excellent, the famous writer lithographs are classic – but, in my opinion, quite a few, especially of the later portraits, are badly drawn, scrappily painted, and the deployment of the swirly outlines which made his 1890s trauma works and the Symbolist portraits so powerful, has degenerated into a messy, irritating mannerism.
Here’s another work which features in the fourth room, a portrait of himself with friend, Torvald Strang.
It’s mildly interesting to learn from the wall caption that 1) the lawyer and barrister Torvald Stang had been a friend of Munch’s since the 1880s, often supporting him during difficult times. He was said to be an elegant man about town. And also to learn that 2) Munch had a strong liking for yellow and often used it as a background for his portraits.
But is this painting any good? Not really, no.
The promotional video
Related links
- Edvard Munch portraits continues at the National Portrait Gallery until 15 June 2025
- Edvard Munch Wikipedia article
- Who was Edvard Munch? (British Museum blog, 2019)
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