Portrait of Käte Perls

In 1913 the Berlin art dealers Hugo and Käte Perls traveled to Norway to sit for Munch, and this is his portrait of Käte on her own. She is turned in three-quarter view with her head slightly lowered, her gaze drifting past the viewer, thoughtful and a little withdrawn. Käte Perls was one of the few women running an art business in Germany at the time. She and her husband dealt in Cézanne, Gauguin and the young Picasso, and their Berlin villa had been designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe. Their world did not survive what came after. The gallery closed in 1933 under the new Nazi government, the couple separated, and Käte, who was Jewish, moved her trade to Paris and then New York. Arrested in France in 1940 and held in a camp, she reached the United States by way of Havana in 1943 and died of cancer two years later. Munch painted her more than once, but this quiet single portrait is the one that hangs in Basel.