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The artist: Edvard Munch (1863—1944)

Munch’s career took off in 1880s Oslo, where he worked alongside a circle of progressive artists. He was inspired by the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, including Gauguin and Van Gogh, as well as the work of Nietzsche.

Munch developed his own distinctive way of painting that focused on human emotion, often based on his life and memory.

By painting the inner landscape of the mind, he was trying to connect with universal experiences.

The curator’s pick: ‘Melancholy’ (1894)

This work is particularly special because it is one of the first to embody Munch’s characteristic style. Each painting in his 22-piece series The Frieze of Life, which included his famous work “The Scream”, addresses a different emotion and inner state. “Melancholy” deals with the condition of despair. It speaks as powerfully to us now as the day it was painted.

Technique

Munch liked to paint outside as well as in the studio. He never abandoned painting from observation but incorporated imagination and memory. He enjoyed thinning out his paint with turpentine, here using long-drawn-out, thin strokes combined with other richer, denser passages.

He adopted a graphic artist’s technique to identify areas of colour, and distilled his forms with dark outlines to define shapes more clearly.

Foreground figure

Munch explored the state of melancholy through his memory of his friend Jappe Nilssen’s failed love affair with a married woman. She ultimately rejected Nilssen, and he is portrayed in contemplative mood gazing out to sea, echoing Rodin’s “The Thinker”. As in “The Scream”, he placed a very prominent figure in the foreground, which [connects directly with] the viewer and plays with boundaries.

Setting

Munch was inspired by the eerie moonlit atmosphere of Norway’s long summer nights. Like many of his famous paintings, this work was set in the coastal town of Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo fjord, where he spent many summers.

He was intrigued by transitions: “Melancholy” is set as day turns into night on the shoreline, to reflect the ebb and flow of mental states.

Use of colour

Everything in the picture is meant to reflect Nilssen’s state of mind. The colour of his flesh is akin to that of the rocks in the foreground and the shoreline, with moody deep blues and purples. In this work, as in many of Munch’s, he distils form and is not distracted by fussy detail, focusing instead on expression and emotion.

Minimal details for maximum charge

In the background, the eye is led to a jetty, showing a woman in white, a man in a darker tone — possibly Nilssen’s rival or himself in a fantasy — and another carrying two oars towards a boat: perhaps for a journey the couple are about to take at the beginning of their relationship.

He uses just a couple of brushstrokes to convey the characters.

Munch sought to extract the maximum psychological charge with minimal detail and rendering.

Another example is how the house is largely left blank.

Munch was concerned not to overwork a painting — but leave the viewer to fill in.

The Norwegian industrialist and collector Rasmus Meyer bought “Melancholy” in the first decade of the 20th century. He set out to assemble a comprehensive group of Munch’s pictures, getting to know the artist and often buying directly from him. He acquired the work for his private collection, with the intention that it would become public. When he died in 1916, his children donated his collection to the city of Bergen, which opened a museum in 1924. “Melancholy” is still the centrepiece.

Barnaby Wright is deputy head of The Courtauld Gallery and a specialist in late-19th-century and 20th-century art. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Courtauld’s current exhibition, “Masterpieces from Bergen”, runs until September 4. Read the FT’s review here.

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