Max Linde

Max Linde was an eye doctor in Lubeck who bought his first Munch in 1902 and then had the painter to stay, on and off, for the next five years. This full-length dates from 1904. Twenty years later Linde's money had gone in the German inflation and he was selling his collection, which is how the portrait reached the museum in Halle in 1925. In 1937 the Nazi campaign against modern art pulled 147 paintings and prints out of this museum, and Munch was one of the condemned artists, yet this canvas stayed on its wall. Nobody has established why. In 1943 it was loaded by mistake onto a transport of pictures looted in France, went south, and was in Munich by 1945. It came back to Halle only in 1988, under a cultural agreement between the two German states. Linde stands with hat and gloves in one hand against three nearly flat fields of colour.