Munch behind the mask

Modernism loves its misfits, but Edvard Munch was not one of them. It is tempting to see the painter as a sui generis Scandinavian, a misunderstood misanthrope brandishing his brush against the tired conventions of art academies and the hypocritical mores of bourgeois society. We know how that story goes. Running through the greatest-hit list from Van Gogh to Pollock, the trope of the artist-as-outcast cuts even deeper in the case of an artist best known for his moody men and solitary shriekers whose life was lived in circles less familiar to us than, say, the Montmartre bohemians or the New York School. ‘Edvard Munch: Portraits’, currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, asks us to give up that myth. Forty-odd views of the artist’s intimates trade the sex, drinks, and screams of the angsty avant-gardiste for a more modest portrait of the artist as a social insider and canny operator.

To make a portrait from portraits is a simple, but shrewd, move. Portraiture can be seen as a second-rate or compromised genre, caught as it is between paint and lives, creation and commission. Art is always contingent, but portraits put that fact front and centre. Sitters, patrons, and markets we might otherwise ignore are now not beyond the canvas, but inside it, where we cannot will them away. Munch bragged he could get ‘behind everyone’s mask’ – this exhibition peels away his.

Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy (1886), Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet, Oslo. Photo: Juri Kobayashi/Munchmuseet; © Munchmusset

Munch was no penniless provincial. He was born at the right time and to the right family. By the late 19th century, Kristiania (present-day Oslo) was no longer the cultural backwater it once was. It was Munch’s own uncle, the historian Peter Andreas, who had helped bring about the movement for political independence from Sweden – something that wouldn’t be fully achieved until 1905, but which was well on its way by the time Munch struck out as a young artist in the 1880s. Thanks to an uptick in the shipping and lumber trades, Kristiania was becoming a place where an artist could make his name and sell his work. Though Munch, no less than others, fetishised the figure of the starving artist imported from Paris and popularised in novels such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), his father, a military doctor, made enough to ensure his son was not overly deprived. Munch never let his audiences forget the trauma his family’s illnesses had brought to his life (‘illness, insanity and death were the black angels that guarded my cradle,’ he liked to repeat), but portraits from this time show a prosperous and industrious family: his brother, Andreas, bent over anatomy books and a skull like Jerome in his study, his sister, Inger, in starched linen and a straw hat, squinting into the cold sun of a wind-tossed afternoon at the family’s summer home in Vrengen.

Back in the city, Munch ran in Kristiania’s bohemian circles. His portrait of their leader, the novelist Hans Jaeger, is arresting in more ways than one. Munch pictures the steely-eyed writer just after his release from prison on trumped-up charges of pornographic content in his novel From Bohemian Kristiania (1885). Jaeger is slumped on a sofa in the back of the Grand Café – his preferred haunt – and yet it is hard to read his as a triumphant return. Up the front of his modest blue smock, a placket twists like barbed wire and draws our eye to a neck oddly cocked. A pair of monocles highlights a flinty and unsparing gaze. We can sense the tension between the sometimes-friends, the writer weighing up an artist who had at one point sought his guidance and was now on the cusp of his own notoriety.

Hans Jaeger (1889), Edvard Munch. Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo. Photo: Børre Høstland/Nasjonalmuseet; © Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design

In Germany, Munch found wealthier intimates. Some of the best paintings in the show are the full-length, grand-manner portraits he made of men whose money made them something like gods in a world that Nietzsche declared godless. Munch grandly dubbed them his ‘Maeceneans’, referring to Maecenas, the patron of Virgil and Horace. They were industrialists and collectors, oculists and occultists. Many of them were Jewish. The lucky ones lived to see their collections sold for a pittance decades later, others, like the businessman-turned-statesman Walter Rathenau, would be murdered long before. In Munch’s portrait, the tycoon takes up the length of his six feet, drawing back his shoulders like a boxer. Patent leather shoes and an immaculately tailored suit are a cut above bourgeois belonging; an unlit cigar suggests both discipline and the appetite that brought the titan of industry to one of the highest-ranking posts in the Weimar Republic. When Rathenau was assassinated by right-wing ultranationalists in 1922, Munch joined the outcry of protesters.

But the time of these ‘swagger portraits’, as the NPG calls them, was short-lived. The inflation that followed the First World War bankrupted more than one of Munch’s Maeceneans. By then, Munch was back in Scandinavia, having in 1908 checked himself into a nerve clinic in Copenhagen run by Daniel Jacobson. The doctor walked, the artist recalled, ‘like a pope among […] us’. He diagnosed Munch with alcohol-induced psychosis, but in an act of catharsis, the painter whom critics had lauded as an ‘anatomist of the soul’ put the psychoanalyst on the couch – though not literally. In Munch’s portrait, Jacobson is king of his clinic. Chest outthrust and legs splayed, he aspires to the peacocking paunch of Holbein’s Henry VIII.

Dr Daniel Jacobson (1908), Edvard Munch. SMK, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen. Photo: Jakob Skou–Hansen/SMK

Jest as he might, it was the cure the artist needed, and Munch landed back in a newly independent Norway as a Knight of the Order of St. Olaf. There, friends old and new ensured that the artist was never in want of commissions or company. When he painted their portraits, he made two: one to sell, one to keep. He wanted to hold close those he called ‘my soldiers, my battalions, the Guardians of my art’. Critics such as Jappe Nilssen and Christian Gierløff protected Munch’s reputation: photographs show the artist in his studio, surrounded by the loyal likenesses of an inner circle that dwindled as the years wore on.

Nilssen wasn’t a fan of his portrait and regretted that everyone else was. ‘I felt very unhappy one day when a girl, who I am very fond of, said it looked exactly like she saw me – that really made me stop and think.’ Pinched into a purple suit, the critic squirms under the artist’s gaze. It was an unwelcome diagnosis – and a power the portraitist didn’t want to relinquish. In a lithograph made a decade before his death, Munch pictured himself as a cadaver on a carving table, body bared to the scrutiny of a modern-day Dr. Tulp, his patron the anatomist Kristian Schreiner. ‘I realise,’ he recalls the artist saying, ‘that you wish to dissect me. But beware, I have my knives too.’

‘Edvard Munch: Portraits’ is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 15 June.