Professor Jacobsen 1908 - 1909

Edvard Munch made this portrait of Professor Jacobsen sometime in his career using charcoal or a similar drawing stick on paper. Look at the scratchy, searching lines, they’re like thoughts forming on the page. You can almost feel Munch circling around his subject, trying to capture not just a likeness, but something deeper. I love the raw, immediate quality of the drawing. The lines are so direct, so unpretentious. The texture of the paper comes through, giving the whole thing a kind of vulnerability. See how the shadow under the professor's brow is formed of a tangled web of marks? That kind of density gives weight and presence to the image. Munch’s art, like that of his contemporary, Van Gogh, is an ongoing conversation about the human condition. It’s a reminder that art isn’t about perfection or answers, but about embracing the messy, beautiful ambiguity of life.