Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Edvard Munch learnt quickly that \u201cwhen I paint a person his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness. He himself believes, however, that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.\u201d\u00a0For all the pleasures of passionate eloquence and radiant colour in the National Portrait Gallery\u2019s new exhibition Edvard Munch Portraits, you see why few of his subjects cared for Munch\u2019s depictions. His essential idea that personality is a battleground, created by conflicting desires and repressions, pours into each painting and makes everyone appear troubled or awkward.\u00a0Portraying \u201cmy glorious hero\u201d, his friend and Dagbladet\u2019s supportive art critic Jappe Nilssen,\u00a0Munch painted a towering, glumly earnest figure in expensive purple, against slashing animated green strokes. Nilssen hated it: \u201cHe has given full rein to his vicious side and could easily have painted a more beautiful portrait.\u201d The longer you look, the more unnerving the picture becomes, the wild marks around the luxurious attire cohering into a menacing shadow.\u00a0\u00a0As relentless is a double portrait of the writer with his doctor, \u201cLucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen\u201d. The sinuous, tall medic hovers gravely over the seated, defeated, now grey and furrowed Nilssen. This was nicknamed \u201cThe Death Sentence\u201d.Munch\u2019s own doctor, psychiatrist Daniel Jacobson, who strutted \u201clike a pope\u201d among his neurotic patients, was rewarded with a portrait, legs apart, arms akimbo, subsumed in flames. \u201cBig and dominant in a fire with all the colours of hell,\u201d Munch gloated. Jacobson thought it \u201cstark raving mad\u201d.\u00a0August Strindberg, appalled at his massive heavy head, fierce gaze and demonic air, exclaimed: \u201cTo hell with likeness! It should be a stylised portrait of a poet. Like the ones of Goethe!\u201d When Munch made another attempt, Strindberg threatened to kill him.\u00a0\u00a0Politician Walther Rathenau, however, got the point. Confronted with his powerful presence as a life-size silken black silhouette with shiny patent shoes, grasping a cigar whose smoke becomes decorative yellow twirls, he joked: \u201cAwful character isn\u2019t he? That\u2019s what you get for having your portrait done by a great artist \u2014 you look more like yourself than you really are.\u201dThat extreme psychological truth was what Munch sought, both by depicting people as individuals and, in his 1890s symbolist pictures \u201cThe Scream\u201d, \u201cVampire\u201d and \u201cMelancholy\u201d, making them icons of intense emotion. He wanted to paint \u201cliving people who breathe, feel, suffer and love. People should understand the holy quality about them and bare their heads before them as if in a church.\u201d\u00a0Women mostly became femmes fatales \u2014 from the high-contrast lithograph \u201cThe Brooch\u201d, vampish violinist Eva Mudocci with cascading hair and pale face in 1902, to \u201cSeated Model on the Couch\u201d (1924),\u00a0Birgit Prestoe, whom Munch called his \u201cGothic Girl\u201d, rendered in his dilute, thin late manner. Straightforward female portraits here are weakly generic, apart from his beloved sisters in the summer seaside pair \u201cEvening\u201d \u2014 manic depressive Laura Munch, staring vacantly yet intently, lonely in a twilit fjord landscape \u2014 and the exalted \u201cInger in Sunshine\u201d, squinting at the light.\u00a0The exhibition\u2019s pulse, therefore, comes from charismatic, complex men, beginning with Munch himself: the full-frontal \u201cSelf-Portrait\u201d at 19, expression haughty but vulnerable, face half shadowed, half in brilliant light, and the innovative lithograph; \u201cSelf-Portrait with Skeleton Arm\u201d, with disembodied head emerging from pitch darkness, a gleaming white bone in the foreground seeming to be the artist\u2019s arm.\u00a0Both imply a figure caught between life and death. From a childhood marked by the loss of his mother and sister, Munch explained: \u201cAs long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm\u2019s edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall in to the abyss.\u201d\u00a0A trio of sensitive early portraits, 1885-86, are perhaps alter egos. Fellow painter \u201cJ\u00f8rgen S\u00f8rensen\u201d, head angled downward, carved from light that isolates him in a black void, is brooding, introspective. \u201cKarl Jensen-Hjell\u201d is a nonchalant, sickly artist-dandy, desperate to enjoy bohemian life though ill with tuberculosis. \u201cAndreas Munch Studying Anatomy\u201d, the artist\u2019s brother eyed mockingly by a luminous skull, suggests similar fragility. All three men died young.\u00a0From these sombre works, 20th-century Munch leaps into modernity: expressive and decorative colour, bright detached strokes giving verve and vitality, dashing painterliness offsetting the sober cast of characters. Living in Paris and Berlin, he absorbed the impact of Van Gogh especially: the stunning opening to this section, Jena physicist \u201cFelix Auerbach\u201d, comes from Amsterdam\u2019s Van Gogh Museum and follows the Dutch master in its empathetic charge, emphatic outlines, asymmetry and sonorous orange-red background. Auerbach stands out majestic and serious.\u00a0Expanding that monumentality, Munch\u2019s tour de force between 1904-09 is a sequence of glorious, full-length, life-size male portraits, their sweep here unfortunately interrupted by a freestanding wall jutting between them.\u00a0Munch the psychologist of unease appropriating the swagger of Sargent or Vel\u00e1zquez. The first, gentle L\u00fcbeck ophthalmologist \u201cMax Linde\u201d, looks as if he can\u2019t flee the picture fast enough. In large black overcoat, holding hat and cane, he is about to walk out to face the world, reluctantly, steadfastly: a nervy bourgeois straight from Thomas Mann\u2019s Buddenbrooks.\u00a0His neighbour, Hamburg-Stockholm banker \u201cErnest Thiel\u201d, stiff, arms crossed defensively, is shadowed by the outline of an eerie stoop-backed figure. This unfinished canvas so disturbed Munch that to Thiel\u2019s shock \u201che suddenly put his fist straight through it, and sent the easel dancing across the floor.\u201d\u00a0With short-tempered artist \u201cLudvig Karsten\u201d,\u00a0Munch came to physical blows on Midsummer Eve 1905, when painting him, with mixed hostility\/affection,\u00a0as a flamboyant fl\u00e2neur in a white suit against a dazzling yellow wall, smiling roguishly, \u201calways ready for some sarcasm\u201d.\u00a0The group concludes with the exceptional portrait of economist \u201cChristian Gierl\u00f6ff\u201d in 1909, the year Munch, recovering from a breakdown, left Europe\u2019s capitals to \u201clet the molecules settle down after all my inner turmoil\u201d in his new home, peaceful Krager\u00f8. A sliver of its harbour and sea is glimpsed behind the steep rock face, which bears down on Gierloff without crushing him. Blue dabs around his balding head suggest both perilous tumbling stones and a halo.\u00a0Flurried mauve, turquoise, white, loose strokes, drips, streaks, rain down the picture; Gierloff\u2019s hat, held in an open gesture, is an impasto lemon-blue vortex. Amid instability, Gierloff stands assured in his dashing yellow coat, looking outward. The seascape and free facture herald Munch\u2019s later career as a fluid northern landscapist rather than primarily a figure painter. If there is an element of self-portraiture in every work here, this is a happy place to leave him.March 13-June 15, npg.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Edvard Munch learnt quickly that \u201cwhen I paint a person his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness. He himself believes, however, that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.\u201d\u00a0For all the pleasures of passionate eloquence and radiant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":241483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-241482","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241482"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241484,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241482\/revisions\/241484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}