Discover Munch's delightful portraits at the NPG, London

By Theresa Thompson, Timeless Travels' Art Correspondent

Self-Portrait, Edvard Munch, 1882–83. Oil on unprimed cardboard. Image: Fredrik Birkelund/Oslo Museum

Although almost everyone recognises The Scream by the Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, far fewer think of him as a portrait artist. But then again, few images sear themselves into our brains quite as much as The Scream’s wailing figure beneath a “red like blood” sky.

Edvard Munch Portraits, the latest exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, aims to take us beyond that fiery vision of anguish, to steer us towards his life-long interest in portraiture.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a prolific painter of portraits. Regarded as one of the great portraitists of the 19th and 20th centuries, he consistently produced intimate portraits of family, friends, lovers, writers, artists, patrons and collectors, along with an extraordinary range of self-portraits. He made portraits as commissions and for personal reasons, and his pictures often doubled up as icons or archetypes of the human condition, despite being of named individuals.

The show includes more than 40 portraits covering the period from the 1880s to the 1920s. It is the first exhibition in the UK to focus exclusively on this aspect of his oeuvre, and it includes several works that have not been seen before in the UK. Arranged chronologically in four sections - family, his circle of bohemian radicals, patrons and collectors, and finally his close confidants, whom he called his ‘guardians’ - the exhibition explores his wide network of creative contacts across Scandinavia and Northern Europe.

It starts with a self-portrait of the nineteen-year-old Munch. Is the haughty face we see a case of intense youthful self-scrutiny? Simply a guarded self-portrait made in the process of getting to know himself? Does it express a desire to see himself as an aesthete, even then?

His were never superficial portrayals. “Throughout his life, Munch sought to delve behind the masks of those he portrayed, using expressive paintwork to reveal inner feelings and motivations,” explains Alison Smith, exhibition curator. Contrary to the typical portrayal of Munch as an isolated artist, the exhibition presents him as a social being - to take us beyond The Scream, beyond Munch as the painter of existential isolation and loneliness.

Hans Jaeger, Edvard Munch, 1889. Oil on canvas. © The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Oslo), The Fine Art Collections. Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Børre Høstland

Leaving behind 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 central figure in this network of internationally-connected artists and writers, was the anarchist and social critic Hans Jæger whose portrait, aloof, slouched on a sofa, sizing us up from under his hat, dominates the second section. It’s a brilliant, penetrating depiction, painted with bold brushstrokes and strong colours, and it shows Munch’s direct engagement with the sitter (and consequently the portrait’s engagement with us viewers). Jæger, the label tells us, gave Munch the courage to ‘write his life’.

The connections made in Kristiania, like that with Jæger, and later in Paris and Berlin were vital for Munch’s development as an artist, leading him towards a more expressive style that he termed ‘soul art’. The idea of the ‘Naked Soul’, fundamental to his art, was born.

The apparently straightforward portrait of his lawyer friend Thor Lütken is particularly fascinating. At first sight, it is of a dark-haired, moustachioed man who casually looks out at us, but look more closely and at the bottom edge of Lutken’s sleeve a miniature moonlit landscape appears with two mysterious figures embracing: they are “suggestive of love and death,” the gallery proposes. 

By the early 20th century, Munch was one of the most exhibited artists in Europe. In the exhibition’s third section, which examines Munch’s relationship with his patrons and collectors, Munch lets loose on his brushwork with brighter palette to reflect the dynamism of those wealthy and influential people.

In 1908, after collapsing from stress and alcohol poisoning, Munch admitted himself to a private ‘nerve clinic’ in Copenhagen run by Dr. Daniel Jacobson. In time, Jacobson requested a portrait, and Munch posed him in a powerful stance resonant of Holbein’s iconic portraits of Henry VIII.  Although Munch recovered well, the clinician’s controlling manner (as perceived by Munch) made him wary, the display label tells us, and the artist took his revenge, painting him as an arrogant figure against a blistering swirl of red and yellow as if he’s engulfed by flames. It is one of Munch’s most expressive portraits. Jacobson was baffled, “Just look at the picture he has painted of me, it’s stark raving mad.”

Thor Lütken, Edvard Munch, 1892. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong

After his recovery, in 1909 Munch settled permanently in Norway. There, close friends and supporters whom Munch described as his “lifeguards” or “guardians” helped the artist in difficult times. Their portraits (Lütken’s among them) are celebrated in the final section of the exhibition. They were so important to him that he refused to be parted from their portraits, which acted as substitutes for the men when they were not around.

There are some great insights gained by reading the display labels in this show. Apparently, August Strindberg didn’t like his portrait. Painted with energetic diagonal brushstrokes, Munch makes the Swedish dramatist look fierce, impulsive, yet Strindberg wanted it to be more stylised, like a portrait of a poet, he said, “Like the ones of Goethe!”

In his full-length portrait the immaculately dressed Walter Rathenau, one hand in pocket, cigar in the other, looks every inch the powerful industrialist. Yet, on its completion Rathenau wasn’t so sure about the man he saw in it, remarking, “That’s what you get for having your portrait done by a great artist – you look more like yourself than you really are.”

In 1906 while painting the full-length portrait of Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, formidable in stately blue gown against a swirling field of cadmium yellow paint, Munch is said to have talked incessantly in order to stop her disturbing his concentration. And in the 1885 portrait of artist Karl Jensen-Hjell – a swagger portrait intended for public display – Munch added daring touches like the dash of white paint to suggest a monocle catching the light, which outraged some critics who condemned it as ‘a raw spluttering on canvas’. 

This exhibition is a rare opportunity to see first-hand why Edvard Munch is considered such an important figure of 20th century portrait art. And while taking us “beyond The Scream” we learn more about Munch himself, his personal relationships with his sitters, and above all, his ability as a portraitist to see “behind everyone’s mask”.

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Edward Munch Portraits

National Portrait Gallery, London.

Showing until: 15 June 2025

See: www.npg.org.uk