The Artist and his Model

In the winter of 1918 into 1919 the influenza pandemic reached Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, and Munch caught it. He painted himself while ill, hollow-eyed in a dressing gown beside an unmade bed. This canvas belongs to the work he returned to afterwards, a group of pictures made between 1919 and 1921 with a model named Annie Fjeldbu, posed in the bedroom of his property at Ekely on the edge of the city. The artist-and-model subject usually carries an erotic charge. What Munch set up instead is the distance between two people who are not looking at each other. She stands forward in a loose blue garment, facing us, and the man behind her in the dark suit, taken to be Munch himself, has a face painted pale and flat, like a mask.