Self portrait

Edvard Munch’s obsession with universal themes such as love, death, sexuality, identity and immortality, derived from his upbringing in a house of ’sickness, insanity and death’, as well as his exposure to symbolist art and literature in Paris and Berlin in the 1880s and 1890s. Munch was a Norwegian artist, who in 1892 moved to Berlin, where he spent most of the next sixteen years.

Self portrait is haunting and disturbing, the ghostly head emerging from the black background evoking thoughts of mortality. In an earlier version of this composition the artist’s name appears tombstone-like along the top edge, while a skeletal arm lies along the lower edge. Munch’s melancholic reflections on his own mortality at this time may have been linked to the death of his only brother Andreas in 1895. Some time after 1895 Munch altered the image to the version shown here.

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs