Self-Portrait against Red Background

1906 was a German year for Munch. He was 42, living between rented rooms and spa towns in Germany rather than in Norway, drinking heavily and taking water cures for his nerves. That autumn the director Max Reinhardt hired him to design Ibsen's Ghosts for the Kammerspiele, the small theatre Reinhardt was opening beside the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and Munch worked the staging out in heavy greens and browns. The house opened that November with Ghosts as its first production. He painted himself over and over in these German years, and this canvas is an odd shape for a portrait, tall and narrow at 120 centimetres by 70, with the figure standing full length against a flat red ground.