Self-Portrait with Cigarette

Edvard Munch · 1895

Self-Portrait with Cigarette - Edvard Munch

Munch rises out of darkness and cigarette smoke, lit from below like an actor on a stage. In 1895 this self-portrait made Oslo argue about his morals and even his sanity; the National Gallery bought it the same year.

The story behind the painting

Edvard Munch painted this self-portrait in 1895. That autumn it was exhibited at Blomqvist's in Oslo together with the 1893 version of The Scream, a Madonna of 1894 to 1895 and Vampire. Munch had planned to show it as one of twin wedding portraits beside his portrait of Dagny Juel, his supposed lover, but her father asked him to take her picture down before the exhibition, and he did. It was a year when Munch showed some of his most famous images side by side.

What to look for

The canvas, 110.5 by 85.5 cm, is dominated by dark shadow. Munch holds a smoking cigarette, and the light falls on him dramatically; John Ravenal compares it to stage lighting, and Sue Prideaux writes that Munch appears from the smoke like a genie from a bottle. Look at the body: the art historian Patricia Berman points to a thin, dissolving figure and sallow skin. The haze of smoke seems to blur the line between the man and the darkness around him.

Meaning and intent

In the 1890s, Berman explains, the cigarette was a marker of marginal identities, a sign of deviancy and of blurred lines between class and gender. By painting himself with one, Munch rejected traditional values and placed himself among the bohemians and decadents. His decaying body, in her reading, challenged the social and health norms of his time. The self-portrait is less a likeness than a declaration: this is who I am, outside respectable society, and I will show it openly.

Legacy

The exhibition caused controversy. Johan Scharffenberg, then a medical student, saw the painting as proof of Munch's amorality and mental degeneration and called him a corrupting influence on Norwegian youth; Berman traces such attacks to thinkers like Max Nordau. Still, the National Gallery bought it in 1895, and it now belongs to the National Museum of Norway. Munch made a lithograph of the same title in 1908 to 1909. In 2006 it travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the retrospective Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul.

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L'artista

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

self-portrait · National Gallery of Norway · National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design

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