Norway’s first Swagger Portrait, the epit.mes of bohemian pizzazz and panache, the portrait of Jensen-Hjell spawned a genre. It marks the first glamorising of that iconic piece of eyewear, the monocle, as a high fashion stat.mes nt of dandyism and flamboyant sex appeal, used to great effect a few years later in Partridge’s remarkably similar full-length portrait of James McNeil Whistler (late 1880s, in London’s National Portrait Gallery) and adopted as an attention-getter by Karl Marx, Faye Dunaway and multiple fashionistas ever since.
When the audacious picture of Jensen-Hjell was shown in Oslo, Norway’s outrage could be heard in Berlin, where the Association of Berlin Artists, the Verein, invited Munch to exhibit in 1892. Shown alongside The Sick Child and other paintings, it was all too much for Kaiser Wilhelm, who convened an extraordinary meeting of the Verein to close the show after seven days. All hell broke loose, with screaming and shouting and fights breaking out in the street. At midnight, forty-five young artists left the Verein to form the Free Association of Berlin Artists, and thus was born the Berlin Secession. ‘I could not have had better publicity,’ Munch commented astutely. His international career was launched.
- Sue Prideaux
In 1885, artist and member of the Kristiania Bohême Karl Jensen-Hjell, approached the young Edvard Munch to commission a portrait. The resulting painting, executed on an impressive scale, would shake the conservative audience of nineteenth century Kristiania (modern day Oslo), and lay the foundations for a new style of representational painting; one that would come to define Munch’s œuvre and play a role in shaping the canon of Western art.
When Jensen-Hjell first engaged Munch, the latter had recently returned from a trip to Paris and, inspired by the paintings he encountered there, was eager to turn his attention to a large portrait; Jensen-Hjell’s stature, standing at six foot three, provided the perfect artistic challenge. The materials required for such an endeavour were expensive and Munch’s radical artistic vision had so far earned him little favour with the critics, forcing him to rely upon his father and aunt for financial support. Accordingly, Munch and Jensen-Hjell came to an arrangement, with the latter agreeing to pay for the materials necessary to execute the painting and including a dinner in the Café of the Grand Hotel, a key haunt for members of the Bohême in Kristiania. This would prove crucial for the artist in allowing him to gain independence from his family and publicly reject the traditional values of the Norwegian artistic establishment. Painted using loose, Impressionistic brushstrokes and employing a rich and atmospheric palette, Karl Jensen-Hjell anticipates the raw and expressive paintings that would become synonymous with the artist.
Karl Jensen-Hjell reflects a turning point in Munch’s career inspired in part by his exposure to the Parisian avant-garde. In 1885 Munch received funding from his friend and mentor Frits Thaulow to travel to Antwerp and then Paris. Thaulow, already a successful artist in Norway, wrote to Munch’s father expressing his desire for the trip to take place: ‘Everything I have seen of your son bears witness to an outstanding artistic talent, a fact of great interest to me, and for this reason I should wish him to see the Paris Salon’ (Thaulow to Christian Munch, 5th March 1884, quoted in, Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch. Behind the Scream, London, 2019, p. 53). The trip was transformative for Munch’s style, giving him the impetus to forge his own unique path.
Right: Fig. 4, Christian Krohg, Statsminister Johan Sverdrup, circa 1880s, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
Art historian Reinhold Heller has remarked upon the disparate influences that inspired the present portrait, writing: ‘The composition derives its formal vocabulary from Spanish and Flemish Baroque portraiture, as well as from Manet by way of Krohg. Munch’s painting breaks virtually all the demands both of traditional painting’s meticulous finish and plein-air Naturalism’s accentuation of intense light and colour’ (Reinhold Heller, Munch. His Life and Work, London, 1984, p. 31). In the present painting, the lack of finish is archetypally Munch. The paint is applied with thick strokes of unmixed colour to create a composition that is self-consciously painterly. The pose adopted by Jensen-Hjell recalls works such as Manet’s Le Buveur d'absinthe (fig. 3). As with Manet’s painting, Munch chooses an unlikely figure to elevate with the format of a full length-portrait. Heller sees the present work as: ‘an obvious challenge in motif, pose and size to Krohg’s noted portrait of Sverdrop’ (R. Heller, ibid., p. 31). In contrast to his friend’s portrait of the prime minister (fig. 4), Munch chooses a famed dissolute as his subject, creating a powerful critique of traditional artistic and social hierarchies. Propped casually upon a cane and with a cigar in the other, Jensen-Hjell looks down on the viewer through his monocle. In Karl Jensen-Hjell, Munch eschews artifice, using a format often used for dignitaries and subverting it to champion the figure of an artist and radical.
The bohemian circle in which Munch moved in was one of progressive sexual autonomy, in contrast to the conservative social values of Christian Norway, and this new wave of thinking is emblematised in the figure of Jensen-Hjell. As Munch’s art began to reflect more revolutionary ideologies, Munch’s father attempted to censor and, in some cases, destroy his son’s paintings. Painted in a deeply modern style and presenting the subject with a confident stare and stance bordering on arrogance, Karl Jensen-Hjell is a bold declaration of Munch’s artistic vision, as noted by Sue Prideaux: ‘The full-length Karl Jensen-Hjell summed up his frustration with his father. Everything about the picture was a gesture of defiance at the established social order, from its sheer size to the austere intensity of its vision.’ Jensen-Hjell was as Prideaux puts it ‘a well-known immoral roué-about town […]. Supercilious, shabby-elegant, self-assertive, sexually magnetic, notoriously loose-living’ (Sue Prideaux, op. cit., p. 67). Munch painted Jensen-Hjell only twice, and the other picture in which he features, Tête-à-tête, resides at the Munch Museum in Oslo; again it is a work that conjures the bohemian world that Munch and his contemporaries inhabited.
‘Everything about the picture was a gesture of defiance at the established social order, from its sheer size to the austere intensity of its vision.’
When Jensen-Hjell was first painted, its significance was immediately noted by Frits Thaulow who insisted upon its inclusion in the 1885 Kristiania Autumn exhibition. It was the only work that Munch exhibited that year. Just as the Impressionists had rocked the foundations of art history in 1874, the present painting’s inclusion in the exhibition shocked critics: ‘It is impressionism carried to its extreme. It is a travesty of art.’ (quoted in Sue Prideaux, op. cit., p. 67). It was this radical break with tradition - so derided at the t.mes - that would make Munch such a crucial figure in twentieth century art.
The portrait of Jensen-Hjell also marks the beginning of an important trajectory in Munch’s own career. He painted two full-length portraits in 1885 and, whilst Woll dates Jensen-Hjell as the second, Sue Prideaux declares the present work the first full-length portrait executed by the artist. The full-length portrait was to become a key motif within the artist’s body of work, and he would go on to use it for commissioned works and self-portraits. Munch painted five full-length oil self-portraits, the first in 1904 and the final one in 1940-43 just before he died, demonstrating the format’s appeal for him as well as its creative possibilities. Munch executed 34 full-length male portraits of identified figures of which only three, the present included, remain in private collects ions.
MUNCH’S FULL-LENGTH PORTRAITS
The importance of Karl Jensen-Hjell is evident in its rich exhibition history and its inclusion in literary publications worldwide. After its first appearance in the Autumn exhibition in 1885, it continued to be exhibited throughout Europe, appearing in eleven exhibitions before 1900. Its most recent appearance was in a 2005 retrospective of the artist’s work held in Rome. This significance is also reflected in the work’s provenance. It remained with the sitter until his death in 1888 before passing, apparently via a bequest, to Henrik Arnold Thaulow Dedichen and his brother (who was also painted by Munch). It was acquired more than 70 years ago before it was acquired by arguably Munch’s most important patron, Thomas Olsen. Olsen was a friend and neighbour of Munch’s in Norway and was instrumental in the preservation of the artist’s legacy, working with him to retrieve many of the works deaccessioned by German museums once Munch’s art was declared degenerate by the Nazis. Olsen assembled one of the most important private collects
ions of his work, and this work is continued to this day by his son Petter who has recently opened a gallery in Ramme, Norway at the home Munch retained until his death in 1944. The work has remained in his family ever since. Indicative of its continued importance, the work has most recently been requested for the exhibition Edvard Munch, to be held at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2025.