Portrait of Hans Jaeger III 1943 - 1944

This is Edvard Munch’s drawing of Hans Jaeger, no date, and it looks like it's made with charcoal or graphite on paper. It’s all about the raw energy of mark-making. You can see the ghost of lines where Munch was feeling his way around the form, not trying to hide anything. The thing that grabs me is the hat – it’s like a shadow pulled down over his eyes, all solid and dark, while the rest of him is kind of dissolving into the paper. Look at the way the lines around his mouth are almost scribbled, but they still manage to give you this sense of a real, complicated person. The texture of the paper is part of the drawing too; it's not just a smooth surface for an image, but it almost feels like another layer of feeling. It reminds me of some of the drawings by Käthe Kollwitz. Both artists are trying to capture something beyond just a likeness. They're both interested in the weight of human experience, and how that weight can be etched onto a face.