Consul Christen Sandberg

In 1901 Edvard Munch was living for stretches in Moss, a small port town south of Kristiania, the city we now call Oslo. That summer he set up this near-life-size portrait of his friend Christen Sandberg, a naval man turned businessman who also served as a German vice-consul and moved in the same bohemian circles as the painter. Munch stands him straight at us, hands pushed into his pockets, belly out, cheeks warm against the yellow ground, a faint smile. What is easy to miss is how long the picture stayed unfinished. Munch could not resolve the lower half of the body, and over the next decade he had the canvas altered more than once, in 1903 and again around 1909 to 1910, changing its size to make the standing figure work. The man you see here was fixed early; the legs he stands on were argued over for years.