Currently not on view
Self-portrait,
1895
Published by M. W. Lassally, German, active early 20th century
Munch spent much of his long career experimenting with new ways of communicating the human emotional experience. Among his favored subjects were his own face and body, which convey the artist’s understanding of his physical and mental fortitude—or fragility—as it shifted throughout his life.
Munch made this self-portrait as he was developing the composition used in many of his works: a frontal figure set against a minimal background. Here, the somber, deep-black ground is relieved only by the artist’s skeletal arm; his face, with a haunting, vacant expression; and the white rectangular form that illuminates the base of his neck. We are faced with a stark image of the thirty-two-year-old Munch contemplating his mortality during a wonderfully vibrant moment in his career, when he was embraced by avant-garde artistic circles that advocated explorations of psychological and physical unease.
Janet Rauscher, Editor, Princeton University Art Museum
More Context
“I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies—the heritage of consumption and insanity—illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle,” Munch wrote in an undated private journal. Although he lived to the age of eighty, Munch’s fragile health and family history gave him cause for concern: his mother and one of his sisters succumbed to tuberculosis (called “consumption” at the time), another sister was institutionalized for mental illness, and his brother died of pneumonia at age thirty. In this haunting and funereal<br>self-portrait, Munch graphically fused his deepest personal anxieties with the bare essentials—name, date, disembodied head, and skeletal right arm—of his mental and physical identity.
More About This Object
Information
1895
Europe, Germany, Berlin
- Gustav Schiefler, Verzeichnis der graphischen Werks Edvard Munchs (Oslo: J. W. Cappelen, 1974)., no. 124, p. 101
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1982", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 42, no. 1 (1983): p. 50-70., p. 52
- Gerd Woll, Edvard Munch: the Complete Graphic Works (New York: harry N. Abrams, in association with the Munch-Musset, Oslo, 2001)., no. 116
