Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche

In 1906 Munch was in Weimar, in Germany, on a strange commission. He was to paint the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who had died six years earlier, so he worked from photographs and second-hand memory. The person supplying that memory was the woman in this portrait, Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She had turned her late brother into an institution. She ran the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, held his unpublished papers, and shaped how the world would read him, editing and arranging what he had left unfinished. Munch paints her seated and composed, in dark clothes against a loose, restless background. She kept the archive until her death in 1935, and in her last years tied it to the rising Nazi party, which took up her brother as one of its own.