Edvard Munch

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a gift from the artist (Elisabeth was the sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher. In 1904 Munch made a drawing of her and in 1906 painted a large portrait of her, both of which are now in the Munch Museum, Oslo).

Gustav Schiefler, Edvard Munch, Hamburg, 1906, p. 73, no. 77
Gerd Woll, Edvard Munch, The Complete Graphic Works,  London, 2001, p. 93, no. 66

The image is in good condition apart from a few soft creases to the lower left image and margin (characteristic of this kind of paper), a repaired vertical tear (approx. 4cm.) at the centre of the lower margin, uneven trimming at the left edge and the sheet corners, and light discolouration and scattered short repaired tears at the extreme edges of the sheet. Held in a simple, black-painted frame, under glass.
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Executed in Paris in 1896. Munch's first impression of his portrait of Strindberg  misspelt the writer's name and incorporated the form of a naked woman in the decorative border, much to Strindberg's disgust. These compositional elements were subsequently removed from later impressions, as in the present example.    

Munch first met Strindberg in Berlin in the autumn of 1892. As Michael Meyer writes: 'In Munch, Strindberg found a kindred spirit of his own calibre, such as he had never been lucky enough to encounter before, if one excludes his brief correspondence with Nietzsche' (Michael Meyer, Strindberg, A Biography, London, 1985, p. 256). 

The two men fraternised at the wine cellar Türkes, popularly known as Zum schwarzen Ferkel (the Black Porker), the preferred bohemian haunt for so many Scandinavians of a literary and artistic bent living in Berlin at the time. Soon after they met Munch painted Strindberg's portrait, and in the re-scheduled exhibition that Munch mounted of his paintings, his likeness of Strindberg took pride of place in the middle of the hall in the Equitablepalais (fig. 1).

By the time they joined up again in Paris four years later, however, their relationship had soured. According to Munch Strindberg '...never said a word on arrival but merely laid a revolver on the table in front of him and stayed silent throughout the session.' In his convoluted version of events Strindberg noted in his diary: 'Munch got nervous, grew hysterical when he put on my coat; got up and went home to bed! Returned. Talked about women, like a woman' (quoted in Meyer, ibid., p. 339).

By the end of the decade Strindberg's enmity towards Munch was total. When an issue of the German magazine Quickborn containing Munch's illustrations of various of his works reached him Strindberg wrote to Richard Bergh: 'Tomorrow I shall send you Munch's latest horrible masterpieces. In seven years he hasn't had a new idea, nor even found a new subject to caricature' (quoted in Meyer, ibid., p. 390).  

Fig. 1: Photograph of Munch's exhibition at the Equitablepalais, Berlin with his portrait of Strindberg in the foreground