Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu

The artist who faces us here is clearly worn out, yet the manner in which he is painted suggests vitality and energy. The figure, the chair and the sickbed are rendered with bold colour fields and large, sweeping lines. The dominant tones are yellow, green and brown, with interpolations of red and blue. The details are toned down, but the shape and position of the head and its open mouth seem to allude to the face in the artist's own painting The Scream from 1893 (The National Museum, NG.M.00930).

Around the turn of the year 1918--1919, Munch fell ill, possibly with the Spanish flu, a pandemic that killed many millions of people across Europe in the years 1917--1920. In a series of studies, sketches and paintings, Munch documented the impact the illness had on him in its various stages. With its focus on sickness and convalescence, the painting evokes human vulnerability and mortality, themes that preoccupied Munch throughout his career. The chair is a recurrent prop in several of his best known depictions of sickness and death, such as *Spring *and Death in the Sickroom (The National Museum, NG.M.00498, NG.M.00940).

Ageing and change are aspects of life Munch addresses in many of his late self-portraits. The reference in the title to the Spanish flu reinforces the idea of disease as existentially life-threatening. Close contact with serious illness and death had been a feature of Munch's younger years, forming a theme he explored in works such as The Sick Child and Spring (The National Museum, NG.M.00839, NG.M.00498). In many of his surviving letters, Munch often expresses a fear of illness and worries about his own health. In recent years, however, it has been questioned whether Munch did in fact catch the Spanish flu in 1919, or whether the painting should rather be viewed as a deliberate dramatisation (Steihaug 2013).

The work is the latest of four painted self-portraits by Munch in the National Museum's collection (The National Museum, NG.M.01915, NG.M.00470, NG.M.01229, NG.M.01867). It belongs to a late phase in his production and was painted a few years after he settled at Ekely, on the western outskirts of Kristiania (today within Oslo). The large format of the work, its broad painterly register and powerfully expressive quality are typical of his portrait art in the first decades of the new century. Also characteristic is the concise style with bold colours, a shallow pictorial space and the sweeping brushstrokes.

This is one of Munch's largest and most monumentally conceived selfportraits. An undated sketch in red crayon probably served as a preliminary study (The Munch Museum, MM.T.00218-11 verso). There also exist several loosely related drawings and two smaller works, but in these the subject is differently framed (Woll 2008, M 1295, M 1297).

Together with works such as Man in the Cabbage Field and Autumn Ploughing (The National Museum, NG.M.01865, NG.M.01863), the painting has assumed a prominent place in the museum's presentation of the later phase of Munch's production. It was gifted to the National Gallery by Charlotte and Christian Mustad in connection with the museum's 100th anniversary in 1937.

Øystein Ustvedt

The text was first published in Edvard Munch in the National Museum. A comprehensive overview (Oslo: National Museum, 2022).

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