Edvard Munch – Ellen Warburg, 1905

She stands in a flowing white dress, her left hand cradling and clasped around her right thumb.  Her eyes look out directly to where the artist is standing and they contain a question.

Perhaps it is about time.

Perhaps it is ‘what will become of me…’

This portrait of Ellen Warburg is at the beginning and the heart of portraits of Hamburg which will follow—the ones that were pivotal in Hamburg during her lifetime from 1877 to 1942.

Helene Julie Warburg (known as Ellen) was 27 years old when Edvard Munch was asked to paint her portrait.  Her parents, Albert and Gerta Warburg, belonged to the Altona branch of the Warburg banking family and Ellen, their oldest daughter, was to be married soon and would be leaving home.  The portrait was to keep part of her with them.

Edvard Munch – Self Portrait, 1904 Edvard Munch – Self Portrait, 1906

This was who Ellen was looking towards while he painted her.  Munch painted himself often over the years with an unsparing eye. In these portraits he looks proper and inscrutable, his eyes blank and somewhat lifeless. And when he arrived in Hamburg at the end of 1904 he was at one of his lowest points in years.  Despair amid success. He was 42 years old and his paintings were widely recognized—he had many requests for portraits by wealthy patrons in Germany.  He’d had 9 international exhibits in 1903, 6 in 1904 and had 11 scheduled for 1905.  But since 1891 when his first Berlin exhibition was shut down after 4 days, he had also been caught in controversy nearly everywhere he went.  His works vividly illustrating his family’s illnesses and deaths had drawn backlash from critics and artists. He had petty and paranoid wars going on with fellow artists from Norway and he was experiencing seemingly endless romantic frustrations with women.  And then: he had been drinking heavily for many months.  He came to Hamburg from Lübeck where, on Christmas day, he had spent time in a brothel.  In his journals Munch reveals how his emotional life was spiraling out of control, but he was reluctant to let go of the manic energy that propelled his work:

“Life — angst has raved inside me ever since I caught the idea—like an illness—since I was born—doubly inherited.  It has lain like a curse which has haunted me.

Still I often feel that I must have this life—angst—it is essential to me—and that I would not exist without it…”

And Munch considered the portrait he did of Ellen Warburg in the early days of 1905 to be one of his best.  Somehow, while painting Ellen, he managed to pull himself back from the brink:  her eyes are a bit tentative but lovely, her pose chaste and her hands a story in themselves. It was possibly the first time she had ever posed for anyone other than her mother Gerta, an amateur painter.  It was painted quickly in two morning sessions on successive days.  Munch described his visit to his Aunt Karen:

“I was commissioned to paint a lady’s portrait and had to travel to Hamburg—it was a daughter of Warburg in Altona. It was difficult because I did not know the lady, but it was quickly finished and I got my 1,000 marks…. It is difficult entering these millionaire’s houses.  Warburg for instance is one of the richest men in Germany. They say he’s worth 40 million!  They invited me to two parties. The woman (Gerta) paints herself, and talks nonstop.  The husband is wary but doesn’t say a word.”

And in his journal he wrote:

---

  In the morning I painted the

Young Miss Warburg – Banker Warburgs Daughter

Full picture – In White dress – Hands

Folding up front

  …. Big beautiful dark eyes –

A calm image — Completely calm in

color and style

In the evening hallucinations…

He had been staying at Giebfried’s, a modest hotel across Hamburg in the urban St. Georg district.  It is south of the Inner Alster lake which is surrounded by luxury hotels and shops, with its elegant strolling street, the Jungfernstieg, running along its western shore and a band pavilion that floats on the water. St. Georg is less ostentatious, known for its lively nightlife with clubs and cafés and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, its main theater, and nearby: the Kunsthalle and central train station of Hamburg.

Kettl Bjørnstad, in his book The Story of Edvard Munch, describes Munch’s first nights in Hamburg:

“He drinks with Giebfried (the hotel owner).  A wreck in the morning.  Fills himself with alcohol.  A sudden attack.  Does not calm down as time passes, as he used to.  He demolishes the room in the evening, believes he is being attacked by his compatriots.

From the street he hears voices.  Who is that talking?  Does he hear the name Munch?  Is that Munch they are saying?  His own name?  Is it the dog’s voice he hears?  The whining poodle?  He goes down to the hotel café, sees there are many serious drinkers there.  Giebfried talks about his wife who is in a sanatorium.  Munch does not know how he eventually lands back in his own bed.

But he awakens the following day and knows he has an appointment.  He has accepted a commission to paint the portrait of a lady.  Fraulein Warburg.  What he will later call one of his best pictures.  An excellent picture.  He paints it in the space of two mornings.  Completed in five hours.” 

Munch’s portraits were usually painted quickly.  He did not ever use photographs and it is remarkable to consider portraiture at this time.  One usually ‘sat’ for a portrait—and standing required even more patience and was an endurance test for a few hours.  And for the artist to quickly capture the gestures and likeness of a person required constant practice and skill.  Finally: to make the portrait come alive the artist must find a particular moment of meaning in the eyes—the art of amalgamating all the glances over the hours and somehow distilling the most potent one.  Some eyes in a portrait will gaze into a distance beyond the shoulder of the artist painting them, others will look to the side or away.  To look directly at the artist where he or she stands has the most powerful effect of presence.

Munch painted Ellen in a way similar to how he once painted his sister Inger, a painting he had done over a decade earlier in 1892.  Inger faces the painter directly, her hands clasped and her eyes looking fearless.  There is a similar muted background and an abstract level of ochre floor.  Both women slightly appear to be floating…

Edvard Munch:  Inger Portrait, 1892:  h: 67.9 in.  w: 48.2 in  Ellen Portrait, 1905:  h: 70.8 in. w:  39.3 in

Both portraits of Inger and Ellen are large, over 5 feet tall.  The painting of Inger is darker:  a blue grey background, darker floor and dark dress with indecipherable violet pattern.  Ellen’s painting is a bit taller, nearly 10 inches narrower than that of Inger, and the background is light:  yellow tone walls, a lighter ochre floor, a pure white dress that is sheer in the yoke and sleeves.  Yet Inger’s face is paler.  Ellen is darker with darker hair, eyebrows and with color on her cheeks.  Due to her head being slightly turned and with thicker hair, it appears larger in proportion to her body than Ingrid’s.

The way the hands are clasped in each painting also tells a story.  Ingrid, who often sat and for long periods for her brother, has clasped her hands in a way that feels relaxed, with her thumb overlapping her knuckles.  In the portrait of Ellen, her hands are closely holding each other, the left hand tightly grasping the thumb of the right.  It is more uncertain, apprehensive.

We know that Inger was a frequent model for Munch in his early paintings.  His work often featured his family; we have portraits of his father, his Aunt Karen who came to take care of the family after his mother died when he was 5, his sister Sophie, who died when he was 15, then his brother Andreas, sister Laura, and the youngest was Inger.  His most controversial paintings had been of grief stricken scenes of sickness, of the radiating family in mourning. And by 1904 the only members of his family still living were his Aunt Karen, his sister Inger, and his sister Laura whose depression had now confined her to a mental hospital. They were across the North Sea in Norway and Munch rarely saw them but often sent letters. Karen and Inger remained the closest to Munch throughout the rest of his life—neither married and they were always there when he needed moral support.

Edvard Munch – Aunt Karen, 1868 Edvard Munch – Inger, 1884

Another of his early portraits was of his Aunt Karen who had kindly stepped in and became a mother figure after her sister died of tuberculosis when Munch was 5. She encouraged Munch in his art and one can see her patience in sitting for a portrait, while her eyes convey a sense of thinking about what else she has to do, that she is merely pausing in the course of a busy day as a favor to her nephew. She is seated but not relaxed. In his 1884 portrait of his sister Inger, she stands in ¾ profile next to a chair. Munch is developing his brushwork but it is a heavy impasto, traditional and thickly painted. 

Between 1885 and 1892 Munch left Norway on grants to study painting in Paris. Upon return to Oslo, he had a breakthrough in his 1892 portrait of Inger. By thinning the pigments with turpentine he let the texture of the canvas come through and that somehow allowed both flatness and depth.  The looser brushstrokes and the power of the gaze of his later portraits are what had drawn new patrons and greater support.

Edvard Munch – Marta Sandal, 1902 Edvard Munch – Helene Schwarz, 1906

He had painted many portraits of women standing, and in various poses of the hands.  In this painted sketch from 1902 of Marta Sandel, Munch tries out a similar standing pose but with one hand on the hip.  The angle and the gaze of Sandel, however, convey a sense of constricted energy, an awkwardness with furrowed eyebrows—an uncomfortable unease.  In another portrait of a woman from Hamburg, this time ¾ length, Helene Schwartz faces Munch and is clasping fingers of one hand with the other. Her gaze is wide, circulating beyond the painter and she appears lost in thought. The looseness of his brush, the vibrant sheer colors and the strength of the portrait show the ease with which he could capture the essence of a person.

Helene Schwarz was five years younger than Ellen Warburg, born in 1882.  She had recently married in 1904 to George Schwarz, a consultant to the Kunstsalon of Paul Cassirer in Berlin which handled Munch’s paintings since 1902.  Growing up in Hamburg, Helene had found work as a ‘lady’s companion’ to Toni Cassirer, the wife of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Toni introduced her to Ernst’s cousins Paul and Bruno who were operating their joint gallery and publishing business and they, in turn, introduced her to Munch.  Helene’s husband, Georg Schwarz, wanted to purchase this finished painting of Helene, but Munch kept it for himself and it appeared in several of his exhibitions. He later sold it to a collector in Norway. It is doubtful that Helene Schwarz and Ellen Warburg ever met in Hamburg, but future chapters will explore their individual paths in Hamburg and beyond.

In the afternoons and evenings in January1905, after painting Ellen Warburg, Munch would drink.  In Kettl Bjørnstad’s reconstruction of those days from Munch’s diaries and other reports we learn:

…back at the hotel.  He spends the evening with an American doctor.  In the restaurant, Giebfried has a little canary in a cage.  It sings all the time.  Munch suddenly becomes livid.  Violent hallucinations.  When he recovers consciousness he is lying on the floor and looking straight up at the faces of Giebfried and the doctor.

   The doctor looks at him anxiously.

   This is going to end badly, Mr. Munch.

Munch gets up and looks about him.  He is surrounded by broken furniture.  Upholstery in tatters everywhere.  Kaiser Wilhelm’s bust lies in smithereens on the floor.

Somehow Munch is forgiven. Perhaps he pays for all of the damage. Giebfried brings him some port in the morning to bolster his courage. He has had a photograph taken with the unfinished painting that shows how it is nearly life size.  When it is complete the portrait is framed and hung in the main hallway of Ellen’s parent’s home on the Palmaille in Altona. On December 31, 1906 Gerta Warburg, Ellen’s mother, wrote to Munch, who had asked to include the painting of Ellen in an exhibition of Munch’s portraits being organized by Paul Cassirer at his gallery.

“Your picture of my daughter is available for exhibition at Cassirer.”

When Albert and Gerta moved to a hotel apartment in 1919, they donated much of their art collection and the painting of Ellen Warburg went briefly back to Munch from 1919-1922. Munch sold it to his friend, the Swiss collector Alfred Rütschi in 1922 and he, in turn, lent the work to the Zürich Künsthaus. It was formally donated there after his death in 1929 as part of the ‘Rütschi Collection.”

Munch with the unfinished portrait of Ellen Warburg and the finished and framed 1905 portrait.

This is the short story of one remarkable portrait and a few more.  But what about Ellen herself?  What became of her? And all the others on paths she and Munch crossed in Hamburg? That is what will follow…