Self-Portrait with Cigarette

When Munch showed this in Kristiania, today's Oslo, in the autumn of 1895, a cigarette was not a neutral thing to be holding. It read as a badge of the bohemian and the decadent, a life lived pointedly outside respectable middle-class Norway, and that is exactly how Munch, then 31, wanted to present himself. He lets the smoke do the work. His body dissolves into a brownish haze, lit from below so the face and the hand with the cigarette float forward out of the murk. Everything solid about a traditional portrait has gone soft. Munch approached the National Gallery himself with an offer to sell them several pictures, and this was among the ones they took.