Self-Portrait

In his best prints – and arguably more so than in his paintings – Munch perfectly matched medium and content and created highly condensed images, which are visually as succinct as they are complex. Self-Portrait is reduced to four elements charged with meaning: the right skeleton arm alludes to the hand of the artist, whilst presaging his inevitable death; his pale, disembodied face hovers on a dark surface, calling to mind a death mask, as well as that first of all prints, the veil of Veronica with the face of Christ; the inscription of the artist’s name and the date of the print at the top mimics the entablature of a tombstone, a reference also to the lithographic stone; and finally the intense, velvety black of the background, the colour of mourning, signifying eternal night.

The present second state is the definitive version of Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait. In the first, unfinished state the background is still patchy, without the impenetrable blackness. In the third and fourth states, the skeleton arm and the inscription at the top are obliterated, thus losing all the memento mori connotations, which make this image one of the most chilling yet touching self-portraits of modern art – reminiscent in essence, if not in spirit or style, to James Ensor’s Mon portrait en 1960 (also in the Hegewisch Collection).
The present impression is printed on a greyish card, which over time always takes on a greenish hue. It is a particularly effective support for this subject, compared to the European white or yellowish Japan papers Munch sometimes used for this print, as it adds to the 'unhealthy' and doomed aspect of the sitter.