03/04/25
Edvard Munch Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London
13 March – 15 June 2025
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is indisputably well-known, but his fame comes primarily from just a few of his works – The Scream (1893), of course, and perhaps Madonna (1894) and Love and Pain (1895, also known as Vampire). His portraits – despite there being hundreds of them – have flown under the radar, even in his native Norway, and many of the 45 gathered here for this enlightening exhibition have never been seen before in the UK.
Since the exhibition is being shown at the National Portrait Gallery, the curator, Alison Smith, was clear in pointing out that, as per the venue’s remit, the sitters’ biographies should be seen as at least as important as the artist’s, but, inevitably, in learning about them, we learn about Munch himself. It nevertheless remains a challenge to discern which works are indeed to be classified as portraits from among Munch’s wider practice, since he was often vague and inconsistent with his titles, and he also frequently used features from his sitters in other non-portrait works. For example, as Smith writes in the exhibition catalogue: “The unhappy love life of Munch’s close friend, the writer Jappe Nilssen … helps explain why Munch adopted his hunched form to convey the feelings of loneliness and despair in Melancholy and why the eerie features of the Satanist poet Stanisław Przybyszewski haunt the different versions of Jealousy.”
Read the full review here