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Lot Essay
This powerful portrait drawing of the important Swedish playwright August Strindberg was made a year after he met Munch in Berlin in 1892, the year of the artist's controversial exhibition at the Verein Berliner Künstler. Munch painted an oil portrait of Strindberg during the turbulent autumn of 1892 in Berlin, and despite their fractious relations towards one another and the sitter's open critism for the work, the artist presented it to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm out of respect for his friend (fig. 1). He also referred to the present 1893 drawing, complaining that it showed him with strangely slanted eyes.
Among the group that frequented Berlin's tavern "Zum schwarzen Ferkel", an important bohemian meeting place, Strindberg enjoyed the recognition and esteem he always thought he deserved while socializing with the likes of Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin and Frederich Neitzsche. Of most importance to Munch was the meeting with Strindberg with whom he discussed the philosophy of Nietzsche, occultism, psychology and the dark sides of sexuality which would have a direct influence on Munch's most famous motifs such as "Anxiety", "Ashes", "Madonna", 'Vampire' and "Women in Three Stages". Strindberg was the most difficult of the Ferkel group as he was on the threshold of a new marriage and was also building up to the so-called 'Inferno crisis' which was later to erupt in Paris. Their genius was so similar that it inevitably lead to friction and thus resulted in a love/hate relationship that would last for years.
Munch's most popular image of Strindberg, the lithograph Schiefler 77, was only made after the two men had met again in Paris in 1896. The relationship between them remained uneasy and was characterised by nervousness and hysteria on Munch's side and paranoia on Strindberg's. The drawing of 1893 provides an important link between the earlier painting and the lithograph. If one takes into account the reversal of an image during the printmaking process, it is indeed surprising how closely the print follows the drawing of three years earlier. In the present drawing, Munch has already succeeded in capturing the sitter's appearance, as he fixes the viewer in his penetrating gaze.
Among the group that frequented Berlin's tavern "Zum schwarzen Ferkel", an important bohemian meeting place, Strindberg enjoyed the recognition and esteem he always thought he deserved while socializing with the likes of Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin and Frederich Neitzsche. Of most importance to Munch was the meeting with Strindberg with whom he discussed the philosophy of Nietzsche, occultism, psychology and the dark sides of sexuality which would have a direct influence on Munch's most famous motifs such as "Anxiety", "Ashes", "Madonna", 'Vampire' and "Women in Three Stages". Strindberg was the most difficult of the Ferkel group as he was on the threshold of a new marriage and was also building up to the so-called 'Inferno crisis' which was later to erupt in Paris. Their genius was so similar that it inevitably lead to friction and thus resulted in a love/hate relationship that would last for years.
Munch's most popular image of Strindberg, the lithograph Schiefler 77, was only made after the two men had met again in Paris in 1896. The relationship between them remained uneasy and was characterised by nervousness and hysteria on Munch's side and paranoia on Strindberg's. The drawing of 1893 provides an important link between the earlier painting and the lithograph. If one takes into account the reversal of an image during the printmaking process, it is indeed surprising how closely the print follows the drawing of three years earlier. In the present drawing, Munch has already succeeded in capturing the sitter's appearance, as he fixes the viewer in his penetrating gaze.