Self-Portrait in Hell

Munch painted this in 1903, a bad year at the end of a worse one. The autumn before, his long, tormented affair with Tulla Larsen, a wealthy Norwegian woman who wanted to marry him, had ended in a struggle over a revolver. The gun went off and cost him part of a finger on his left hand. He was drinking heavily and moving restlessly between Norway and Germany. Here he shows himself naked and alone, standing upright against a wall of flame-coloured light, orange and red sliding down into black. A huge dark shadow rises beside him like a wing or an open grave. He does not look destroyed. He holds himself straight, as if posing, fully aware of where he stands and refusing to sink into it. Five years later a full breakdown would put him in a Copenhagen clinic for months.