Munch was much more than a scream

Edvard Munch is known as the painter of “The Scream”. But his many amazing portraits show that he was much more than his masterpiece.

Norwegian painter Edvard Munch is better known for, a painting of a tortured human face, revealed in 1893.

But the famous picture is just A small part of the work From the Norwegian artist, who includes thousands of other works, note a.

Munch has created many portraits throughout his career, and 45 of them are now in the National Portrait Gallery of London, which shows family paintings, friends, art collectors and the artist himself.

“The exhibition shows that Munch was a more social person what is often supposed to be, ”he says Alison Smithchief curator of the gallery, to. “It takes us beyond The scream ”.

Born in 1863, Munch was affected by various diseases throughout your childhood. When he was 17 and was bedridden, he wrote in his diary: “My decision now is to become a painter.”

Throughout his 60 years of career, Munch explored topics such as love, death, and loneliness. Beyond The screamsome of his most famous works are Madonna (1894) e The sick child (1886).

The new exhibition includes works between the 1880s and 1920s. It is the first dedicated to the portraits of Munch in England and many of the works presented were never previously exhibited in the country.

One of them, a portrait of 1892 of a lawyer called Thor Lütkenillustrates both the style and the social trends of Munch.

“It is a very monochrome portrait… But if we look closely, we can see how the mango merges into a kind of blue and black landscape to the moonlight, inhabited by two mysterious figures, ”Smith tells Reuters.

Munch was “very connected to artistic currents and intellectuals of their time, ”but portraits like Lütken’s show how the artist also“ sought the protection of active people in the areas of law, business and medicine ”.

O Munch’s portrait style was divisive. “When I paint a person, his enemies always think that the portrait is very similar,” said the artist once. “However, he himself believes that all other portraits They are good, except his own.”

Munch often tried to portray his portrayed as people with failure and complicated. A portrait portrays your friend, the art critic Jappe Nilssenwhich criticized the play: “He gave relay loose by your vicious side And I could easily have painted a more beautiful portrait, ”said Nilssen, according to the Financial Times.

Munch also painted his psychiatrist, Daniel Jacobsonstanding, with his hands in the hips, in front of red and yellow walls, and portrayed the Swedish playwright August Strindberg with a “demonic air”.

The artist again painted this portrait after the playwright manifested his disapproval. Seeing the new board, Strindberg threatened Munch of Deathtells the.

“Munch I always wanted to go beyond the superficial appearance To probe the inner psychology or the motivations of an individual, ”Smith tells Reuters.

“Therefore, portraits work on two fronts. On the one hand, they are representations of a particular person at one point, but they also offer a vision of their inner world,” notes the curator.

Exhibition also includes First Paintings of the Munch Familylike a 1888 portrait of his sister Laura looking at a fjord.

Edvard Munch’s work includes some representations of women who Emphasize female beauty. This is the case of The broocha 1903 painting by the British violinist Eva Mudocci -that would become the muse of the Norwegian painter.