Edvard Munch Portraits review – in search of the master of jealousy, neurosis and despair

The Guardian

16-03-2025

In the autumn of 1908, Edvard Munch admitted himself to Dr Daniel Jacobson's private clinic in Copenhagen to be treated for acute alcohol-induced psychosis. Over the next eight months, Jacobson helped him give up nicotine as well as drink. Of the stream of images Munch painted in the clinic – never paralysed by any setback – one is a towering portrait of the doctor that appears about halfway through this new show.
Jacobson stands tall, feet widely planted, hands on hips in his three-piece suit. His face is all sharp-eyed intelligence, equal to any crisis. The sitter thought the picture loopy, perhaps because of all the pulsating energy that radiates around him in swift strokes to rival his vigour. But a photograph of the two men, the painting between them, shows it was an excellent likeness. It is quite surprising, therefore, to read the wall-text assertion that this was Munch's act of 'revenge'.
That the words do not match the image is an early difficulty with this long-awaited exhibition, the first in Britain to focus exclusively on his many portraits. That Munch (1863-1944) was no outsider but a garrulously social being may come as news to those who associate him solely with his screaming little hominid, hands to cheeks as if receiving some salacious gossip. The Norwegian painter travelled all over Europe, recipient of any number of honours and bursaries, painting portraits of plutocrats, politicians and bankers, hostesses, collectors and diplomats en route, in addition to many portraits of fellow artists back home.
This show includes some tremendous visions. Here is Felix Auerbach, German physicist and Bauhaus patron, all blood-red mouth and flaming eyes, a smouldering cigar between his fingers, against a crimson background flecked with stars (Munch had been looking at Van Gogh). Hand, sleeve and arm all flow into one continuous shape, so familiar from Munch's expressionist masterworks.
Here is the Swedish writer August Strindberg leaning on a tabletop, one powerful pink fist at the centre of the picture. His fierce face, with Eraserhead hair, stares out from loose, darting strokes that angle steeply down the canvas, rippling through his suit. Alison Smith, in her superb catalogue, suggests that the shadowy presence behind Strindberg is surely some kind of psychic double. Tiny gaps of white canvas burn through the face; never forget, the artist insists, that this is a portrait before it's a person.
The painting of Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, rolling straight towards us as if by some unseen mechanism, the whites of her eyes as blue as her formidable dress, is a terrific image of force. Something stormy hangs in the yellow emanations around her. But the text needs us to know, instead, that Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was increasingly nationalist and antisemitic during Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s, even though this picture is from 1906. We are also told that Munch talked incessantly through the sitting so that she could not; but his sitters rarely got a word in edgeways. He controlled the scene.
It is brave, if conventional, to open the show with a portrait of the artist as pouty young aesthete, not least because it is among the worst of Munch's many, many self-portraits. The painting of his hellfire father is equally unfulfilled. The early work picks up with Munch's sister squinting into the evening sun, with its intimations of thunderous Scandinavian shorelines to come, and his brother studying anatomy at a desk. Before him lie two skulls, one sheared open like a pie dish, the other eyeing him with deadly attention.
There's the Munch we know and love, you might think – master of jealousy, mortality, neurosis, despair. A bleary picture of two figures in a darkened bar looks nearly tense (though the text goes on about women's liberation). There is a shadowy lithograph of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé staring out of half-light, and Munch's celebrated portrait of Ibsen crackling in the dark fug of the Grand Cafe in Kristiania (now Oslo). But pretty soon you may find yourself looking for Munch.
Not the worm, the amoeba, the violent radiowaves or the lone figures hunched on darkling shores, not the vampire madonnas or syphilitic lovers, shadows leaking like stains from their bodies; just something to connect these deathless archetypes with the portraits on show.
Take the lithograph of violinist Eva Mudocci (born Evangeline Muddock in Brixton, London). Munch propped the litho stone on an easel, like a canvas, to draw her directly from life. Long black hair in swirling continuum around a pale face, with its large dark eyes, the image irresistibly invokes the more famous series of Madonnas it inspired, with their lassos of undulating hair. So why not mention, or even show, a Madonna? Perhaps because Munch and Mudocci were introduced by the composer Frederick Delius, there's a scrappy little litho of him instead.
To ignore the way Munch transformed even formal, full-length portraits into universal visions of anguish is bizarre, especially given the exemplary accounts in the catalogue. But the show's definition of portraiture is determinedly narrow. It sometimes seems as if a work qualifies for entry because there are supporting anecdotes or documents; as if biography trumped image.
And though Nietzsche is regularly mentioned, Munch's stupendous portrait of the philosopher on a bridge beneath a Scream-style sky is not here in any of its versions. It can't be because the likeness was imaginary – the two never met – for Munch's self-portrait as a corpse is included. And here the show havers, incomprehensibly. Munch with a skeleton arm gets in, but none of the great self-portraits are here in all their exuberant miserabilism. Not even the astoundingly poignant painting of himself – or anyone facing their end – standing between the clock and the bed, time ticking down to zero.
Of course Munch is intermittently here in the brilliant primary colours, the blinded eyes and vibrating haloes; in the double portraits where characters are opposed; in the skeins of brushstrokes that flow like tidal currents around the outlandish shapes he coined. He is also present, it must be conceded, as a member of this affluent society of sitters, always well known, well collected.
With only around a 10th of Munch's 400 and more painted portraits here, the emphasis is on the sometimes baffling selection of loans. Surely the show could have been larger, stronger, with more significant works from Norway, or at least some concession to the scale of Munch's imagination that put wild portraits of the mistress who shot him, for instance, over tediously traditional portraits of his chauffeur.
Edvard Munch Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 15 June