The exhibition will open at the gallery from the 13th March 2025.
On display until the 15th June 2025, the exhibition will be the first to focus on Edvard Munch as a portraitist and will feature works never before seen in the UK such as Munch’s portraits of lawyer Thor Lütken and physicist Felix Auerbach.
Edvard Munch Portraits will see the artist’s work explored through portraits of his family, his fellow bohemians, his patrons and his friends, from the 1880s to the 1920s.
With tickets for the exhibition on sale now, the display has been curated by Alison Smith, previously Chief Curator of the National Portrait Gallery and now Director of Collections and Research at the Wallace Collection.
Through the exhibition, it will be revealed how how Munch (1863-1944) painted portraits as commissions and for personal reasons, with many pictures doubling up as icons or archetypes of the human condition despite being based on the direct observation of named individuals.
Featuring more than 40 works, this display will be arranged thematically and chronologically, taking visitors on a four-part journey through Munch’s immediate family, his interactions with bohemian radicals, his patrons and collectors and finally his closest confidants, the so-called ‘Guardians’.
It will open with Munch’s early family portraits, created during the 1880s and 90s. Key works will include Evening (1888) and Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy (1886). The second section of the exhibition will focus on what happened when he left home to study art formally in the mid-1880s, with the third section concentrating on the artist’s relationship with his patrons and collectors.
The fourth section will feature what happened when Munch settled permanently in Norway, his return facilitated by a group of men he called his ‘Lifeguards’ or ‘Guardians’ – close friends and supporters he found amongst writers, artists and patrons. This group of sitters is celebrated here as well as the the models who would sit for Munch regularly, such as Birgit Prestøe in Seated Model on the Couch (1924) and Sultan Abdul Karem in Model with a Green Scarf, notably the only non-European sitter to be painted by Munch.
Talking about the exhibition, Rosie Broadley Joint-Head of Curatorial & Senior Curator of 20th Century Collections, National Portrait Gallery said: “We’re excited to present this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to shine a new light on Munch’s deep social connections, and bring together portraits which have never been seen in the UK. I’d like to thank Alison Smith and colleagues at the Gallery for their hard work on this show, key lenders for their collaboration and our supporters AKO Foundation, Viking and the Asbjorn Lunde Foundation.”
To book tickets visit: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/edvard-munch-portraits/