Set Design for Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts"

On 8 November 1906 the Berlin director Max Reinhardt opened the Kammerspiele, a small chamber stage beside his Deutsches Theater where the audience sat close to the actors. He chose Ibsen's Ghosts for the first night, the play about a widow keeping up a respectable front while her son pays for his dead father's secret life. From Munch he wanted mood sketches rather than building plans, and this is one of them, painted in tempera straight onto unprimed canvas. Two things in it are said to have caught Reinhardt at once. The walls, he remarked, were the colour of diseased gums, and the theatre should find a carpet in that same tone to put the actors in the right mood. The other was the massive black armchair, which he said summed up the whole atmosphere of the drama. Here it is the darkest shape in the room, pulled up to the table where the family stands.