L'artista e la sua modella

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.