The Brightness Before Him: Edvard Munch and his Model Hanna

Edvard Munch, Under the Chestnut Tree, 1937, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

The Volvo’s dashboard registered -12 degrees Celsius and flashed a syrupy green light over the taxi driver’s face. Norway’s Gardermoen Airport is a 40-minute cab ride from downtown Oslo, an extravagance I wouldn’t have allowed myself normally, but this trip in the winter of 1990, my first to Scandinavia, included a stipend. For the longest time, I’d imagined my initial Nordic visit would be to my ancestral Finland, but when my former professor couldn’t accept an invitation as a visiting artist at Oslo’s National College of Art and Design, I happily agreed to go in his stead. 

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) first walked through the oversized doors of the granite-trimmed building at 1 Saint Olavsgate in 1881. Then, it was the Royal School of Art and Design, and the city was known as Kristiania. By the time I got there, the school’s name had changed, and the city’s, too, although the building and its rooms hadn’t much. Munch drew and painted from the model here as I would do soon. 

Bente, a painting student, mentioned Munch’s name a half-dozen times during my informal orientation. These students grew up with him: Munch’s paintings are reproduced on posters, buses, t-shirts for tourists, and even soda cans. Outpacing Ibsen and Grieg, Munch is oil-rich Norway’s leading cultural export. It’s understandable, then, that young people might take the depressive, compulsive hermit-artist for granted, to both love and reject, like a distant parent or grumpy uncle. 

Bente’s impeccable English drifted easily in the airy spaces—though her spiked fuchsia-dyed hair remained firmly in place. “Here’s the life room,” she said. “Daily from nine until three. Usually, just the one model.” The model, Hanna, arrived on time, read her book, took her breaks, and left promptly. Students were no longer in the habit of drawing her, according to Bente. “We’d seen too much of her as first-year students. She’s old and a little eccentric.”  I got the sense Hanna held a full-time emerita position. The Norwegian students (all aspiring Neo-Expressionists—it was 1990, after all) had heard Hanna’s stories dozens of times already, like tiresome tales at holiday tables. A step ahead of me in the hallway, Bente added, “She sat for Edvard Munch.” Puzzled about Hanna’s age, and unable to do the simple math fast enough, I figured I must have heard Bente wrong. 

Eric Aho, Hanna, 1990, drypoint, collection of the artist

The chill of the life drawing room settled in the lungs at first. From the tall dirty windows, a pulse of daylight throbbed weakly above the city rooftops. Munch must have looked out from these windows, too, onto the same heavy orange sun. Hanna wore a pilling purple sweater over a blouse with a wide lace collar atop a black skirt of thin wool. A woven plastic grocery bag, its red and yellow stripes faded, sat with her wine-colored purse on a table by the door. Bente introduced us and Hanna looked up from her book. She smiled at the mention of “Amerika,” and again, broadly, when Bente conveyed I’d like to draw her. 

With no space heater available, it didn’t seem fair to draw her nude. Instead, I sat across from her, pad and copper plates on my lap, as if we were visiting in her living room. Hanna was happy to chat. Bente translated Hanna’s northern dialect. The art students, many around my age, largely avoided Hanna, as they would steer clear of any old person repeating details of a life that seemed irrelevant to theirs. These students must have already endured stories of war and hardship from their grandparents. Why would they subject themselves to her tales—even if she had been Edvard Munch’s model? 

Christian Krohg, Sick Girl, 1881, oil on canvas, © Nasjonalmuseet fur Kunst, Oslo

I worked on my own in the life room, printshop, and around Oslo. In his day, young Edvard Munch had been guided by the accomplished teacher and capable realist Christian Krohg (1852–1925). During Munch’s first year of study, Krohg completed his Sick Girl (1881) and shared the canvas with his students. A conversation between teacher and protégé developed, and Krohg soon folded Munch into the brotherhood of badly behaved, manifesto-bound Kristiania Bohemians. The two artists discovered an additional bond: each had lost a mother and a sister at a young age. Munch’s own version of the subject, The Sick Child, followed five years later. Munch was 23 at the time he painted it, a fact that resonated with me at age 24 in my first stint as a visiting artist. 

Munch considered The Sick Child his first important painting, a “breakthrough” from which much of his subsequent work flowed. Themes of melancholy, anxiety and thwarted desire have led to his popular renown today as a painter of darkness. Most are unaware that later in life his focus would turn toward light and the life-affirmation of nature. Many of these later paintings depict the brightness of the outdoors, the purity of snow and of forests, with figures fitted into these landscapes. The recent exhibition “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth'' at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts went to great lengths to better understand Munch’s later engagement with nature’s “wild abundance,” as Jill Lloyd writes in the catalogue.

The Sick Child, strains with illness, death, sorrow and fear. Its central figure is commonly understood to represent Munch’s sister Sophie (though she did not have red hair) who suffered from tuberculosis, the same disease that robbed five-year-old Edward of his mother and nearly took his own life. She sits upright in bed, her profile sharpened in contrast to the sobbing figure of Munch’s beloved Aunt Karen, his mother’s sister. On the wall to the right lurks Munch’s viridescent terror—the disease, death itself—personified as a bulbous shadow. Over time, a shadow across a wall would become a familiar Munch-ian device.

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1885-1886, oil on canvas, © Nasjonalmuseet fur Kunst, Oslo

Munch painted The Sick Child and its looming spectre on six separate occasions, surely haunted by these early losses in his family. His obsession is fitting, as the verb “to haunt” comes from the Old Norse heimta, meaning “to bring back home.” As he has painted her, the girl is unbearably fragile. Munch unraveled his training in naturalism—that method to illustrate life—into a scene that clings feebly to the painted surface. Marks, delicate and discordant, scored into wet and dry paint at various stages, not only render physical Munch’s frenzied fear, but also show the extent of his close observation. His training to extract detail from life, while no longer a direct painterly concern, had, nevertheless, fine-tuned his perceptual abilities. 

In a statement published 43 years later he revealed, “I discovered my own eyelashes had their part in the pictorial impression.” Indeed, faint vertical marks drag over the painting’s surface to indicate the sweep of Munch’s own eye blinks. Blinking is, of course, involuntary. Each of our 12 to 17 blinks per minute constitutes a temporary loss of vision, a foreshadowing of a condition that would plague Munch in years to come. In 1930, the year following the published remarks on the mechanics of his own vision, the sight in Edvard Munch’s right eye was compromised by an intraocular hemorrhage. At age 66, with the vision in his left eye already weakened, he was prescribed bed rest and total isolation at home by his doctor. 

Edvard Munch in the garden at Ekely. Photo: Inger Munch © Munchmuseet

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in Front of the House Wall, 1926, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

Ekely, the 45-acre estate on the outskirts of Oslo where Munch had resided and worked since 1915 and had once found creative freedom, now became a place of confinement. There were to be no disturbances lest his full recovery be compromised. Here, in this sanctuary turned sanitorium, the strict remedy—no telephone calls, no telegrams, no mail, and above all, no visitors—must have terrified an already reclusive Edvard Munch more than his disability. 

Against his doctor’s orders, fascinated by his disturbed vision, Munch painted and drew some of his most unusual works during this period. Many appear to show the floating blood-clotted forms that were lodged in his inner eye and affected his vision. He grew obsessed, as any artist would, by the prospect of a permanent loss of sight. On at least one occasion, Munch rendered the dark spots of the ocular scotoma as a skull. Other obstructions, presumably as the eye healed and the blockage cleared, appeared as parcels of crows. No matter how the forms shifted over his year of recovery, Munch remained curious about the shadowy multicolored retinal intruder.  

Edvard Munch, Disturbed Vision, oil on canvas, 1930, © Munchmuseet

As his sight returned, the dark shadows and eerie forms retreated from his work. Munch’s famously gloomy outlook on life may also have lifted, if briefly, due to renewed contact with people after this year of isolation. When Munch did venture out again sometime in June, he responded with an uncharacteristic joy to the brightness and fecundity of the world around him. The passersby of his Summer on Karl Johan (1931) are outlined in clean pinks, violets, and yellows. A row of girls in crisp white dresses stretch across the canvas like freshly washed sheets drying in the sun—hopeful, pure … free of disease. 

On one of these brilliant midsummer afternoons, forty-four years after he finished the first version of The Sick Child, Edvard Munch answered a knock on his door to meet a plainly dressed woman, young Hanna. The youthful brightness of the twenty-year old before him would soon enter his home and inhabit his painting. 

Edvard Munch, Apple Tree in the Garden, 1932-42, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

Munch had been a shut-in the year before Hanna’s knock, and it had been more than two years since he’d worked with a model. Hanna would be the first to pose for him after the return of his eyesight. She became Munch’s principal model, and they worked together for ten years, until 1942, midway through the Nazi occupation of Norway. 

Hanna set the scene of that first encounter for me; my imagination has filled in her narrative. Munch might have blinked and squinted his weakened eyes in the white sunlight of the open door. I picture him leaning in closer from the door jamb as he does in some of his self- portraits. As Hanna’s features came into focus, he considered her hair, posture, and attire. Their eyes met. A blush filled her high cheeks, over which rose a pair of aqueous pools. The bleached blue sky beyond her cut sharply above the gabled roof and wide eaves of Ekely and the untended grounds surrounding it. 

After a moment, Munch jotted a few lines on a calling card and again looked into Hanna’s eyes. The sepia ink from his pen, still wet at the junctions of the letters, soaked into the cream-colored card and specified a date and time for her to return to his studio. Munch knew his visitor wasn’t from the city. “You look like the north,” Hanna told me he said. He handed her the card across the threshold.   

Hanna Selquist Brieschke (1911–1996), Munch’s new model, had arrived in the capital city two and a half years earlier at age 19. She’d traveled from Senja, an island on Norway’s Arctic coast, with the intention of continuing on to America. But by the time Hanna sought passage, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 limited Norwegian newcomers to just a few thousand a year, stranding her in Munch’s city. 

Some have noted Hanna Selquist’s movie-star beauty, even her passing resemblance to Marlene Dietrich. Despite the importance of her meeting with the internationally famous Munch, she wore no makeup (at 21, she was either too poor or too frugal—she didn’t say). She wore the one dress she had selected for her intended trip to America, and the modish perm of her auburn hairdo wouldn’t have been out of place on the cover of Photoplay or Moviegoer magazines of the era. She was, after all, still determined to leave Norway behind and planned to look the part. 

Hanna was well aware of Munch before she knocked on his door; he’d been Norway’s most famous artist since his first exhibitions in Berlin brought him global notoriety. It was Hanna’s friend and roommate Birgit Prestøe, Munch’s previous model, who suggested she could find employment with the painter. 

Edvard Munch, Standing Female Nude, Watercolor, crayon on paper, 1932-42, © Munchmuseet

The Girl from Nordland, 1932, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

They set right to work. Hanna posed for him in the house, in the studio, and in the garden. It’s clear how much Hanna’s presence delighted Munch. The Girl from Nordland (1932) is probably Munch’s first painting of Hanna and his first painting from the model since losing his eyesight. She’s nude, seated squarely in the wicker studio chair that appears in numerous other paintings. Her grip on the chair equals the resolve expressed in her face. Eyes forward, Hanna returns Munch’s gaze. Her legs shift to the side in a twist of modesty, her poised feet the only sign of coquettishness. There’s the voguish hairdo—auburn red, green for the shadows. Her torso is muscular. The room around her glows crimson from the patterned red fabric of the studio screen behind which she dresses and undresses. Munch’s painterly attention lingers on the reflected, scarlet-tinged light on her thigh and calf in the well of the chair. There are several versions. As if he were making up for lost time, these new pictures of Hanna are intense and deliberate. 

There were rumors that Munch had sex with some of his models, and while this may have been true there’s no actual record of these affairs other than folios of suggestive drawings with erotic overtones. Munch’s intimate relationships with women throughout his life were complicated by an early affair with a married woman and an alleged romance with a cousin. According to Hanna, Munch was respectful and professional, even paternal. She lived with him for a time; he set up a bed for her in a corner of Ekely’s large kitchen. Munch went out of his way to give her privacy after their daily work sessions concluded. 

Munch paid Hanna well. Her first earnings left her flush with independence and a welcome sense of security. She treated herself to new clothes, shoes, and, to her delight, makeup. She purchased the dress and fur-collared coat she’d eyed in the window of Steen & Strøm, downtown Oslo’s fashionable department store.

Summer would be over soon enough; the morning air was already cool. The fur collar now framed her freshly powdered face when she returned at the appointed time a few days later. “Where’s the girl I met before?” uttered Munch. His disappointment must have stung. Hanna’s carefully painted lips and penciled eyebrows mimicked those of the starlets on the cinema posters outside the nearby Colosseum Kino, Scandinavia’s largest cinema. “Come back when you’ve found the simple Nordlandspiken—the girl from the north,” Munch said to her as he turned away and closed the door.

Edvard Munch, Hanna Brieschke in Åsgårdstrand, 1932, oil on unprimed canvas, © Munchmuseet

Edvard Munch Painting in the Outdoor Studio at Ekely (near Oslo), c. 1925. © Lutz & Co. Munchmuseet

The next day, Hanna, duly chastened, returned free of makeup and in her usual modest attire. Nothing more was said of the incident. Soon thereafter, Munch invited Hanna to join him at his summer home at Åsgårdstrand about two hours south of Oslo by train. He had a long-established connection to Åsgårdstrand and considered the little mustard-colored house a “happy home.” It’s easy to understand that his enthusiasm for this new model would extend to introducing her to a cherished place. There, he worked on several versions of what is known as Hanna Brieschke in Åsgårdstrand. In the first, Munch rendered Hanna’s features delicately with thinned paint. The canvas was subsequently given his infamous “horse cure” and left outdoors long enough for the weather to rough it up, perhaps in an effort to counteract the gentle marks and presence of his subject. 

Nevertheless, she shines forth in bright, dry, open summer light. Unlike the Hanna in The Girl from Nordland of only a few weeks earlier, this Hanna is casual in her white blouse, black culottes, and mid-heeled shoes. Her hair, brass-hued in the sun, emerges from beneath a round cap. In a subsequent version from that same working visit, the narrow street wraps around her like a cape as it recedes up the hill, where a woman in black fills a jug at a public water station. A sharp-edged house shape on the right reveals a passage of raw linen. The traces of green in her face freeze her features in concern: a barking dog confronts her, and a white duck at the bottom of the picture appears to nip at her toes.

With the end of summer, and the subsequent return to Ekely, Munch wished to use the remaining mild days to paint on the shore of Oslofjord, less than a 20-minute walk from the estate. Sometimes they would meet there; occasionally they walked together. Hanna posed on the rocks, and bathed in the shallows at the shore—his first mermaid subject in decades. Munch painted so quickly that as he raced to secure a new surface the dashed canvases and boards fell from the easel with the September leaves. They lay scattered about the rocks at Hanna’s feet, flotsam in an eddy of astonishing creativity. “I was surrounded by Munch,” she beamed in recollection as she shared this memory. 

Edvard Munch, Bathing Woman and Children, 1935, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

My own drawings and etchings of Hanna piled up during those weeks at the art school. After long workdays and confused by the absence of anything resembling daytime, I was unable to sleep at night. I wandered around a frosted Oslo, with paper in a stiff folder tucked under my arm and an overstuffed pastel box in a haversack. Oslo’s life doesn’t go inside in winter; nor does it appear to sleep. From a bench in a small neighborhood park near the port, I scrubbed the brittle pigmented sticks on the large sheet draped over my lap like a blanket. Figures paced in front of an orange-hued block of flats.

Eric Aho, Oslo City Park, 1990, pastel on paper, collection of the artist

I worked fast in the cold, wearing fingerless gloves. Colored dust accumulated in small piles as snow drifted over my boots. A pair of police officers accosted me. “It’s not safe here,” one of them said. “Oh, you’re drawing something. We thought you might be unwell,” said the other in English with an intonation that rose and fell. Oslo unsafe? How was I to know the frigid little park was a nest of drug deals, a place to avoid? The cobalt blue shadow I dragged across the burnt sienna wall belonged to the sex-worker on the corner awaiting her next client. 

After searching for these Oslo pieces, I finally found their roughed-up package. The damage must have been caused by that leak from the ice dam in the corner of my Vermont studio some winters ago. Unpacking the 30-years-forgotten box just now, the various pieces of tape dried and cracked, the SAS and KLM airline labels faded and curled, I’m relieved to see the city park drawing is intact as are a few others. In one, the moon is encircled in a Munch-ish sulfur-green halo. Sadly, only a single drypoint print of Hanna has survived the years of questionable storage solutions. The art school in Oslo held onto at least one of my drypoints, though I’m sure recycled the copper plates long ago. 

I don’t recall anything outstanding about my efforts in Oslo aside from those memorable sessions with Hanna. Hanna carried her experiences with Edvard Munch into the drawing studio as easily as she toted the bags she set on the table by the door. She kept close her intimacy with the flawed, awkward, yet at times personable Edvard Munch—his presence was palpable. 

This felt familiar to me. When I was a child, I often joined my father on Sunday visits with men and women from the old country in the Finnish communities in Fitchburg and West Townsend, Massachusetts. I listened as they told their stories in slow, guttural staccato phrases punctuated with pauses. Coded in their 19th-century peasant language and gestures were vivid accounts of themselves at frozen outposts, begrudging teenaged conscripts to Czar Nicholas’s army at a time when Finland was part of the Russian Empire. Likewise, Munch remained malleable in Hanna’s mind all those years. To see Munch, indeed, to feel as though I’d encountered Munch myself, my imagination needed only to follow young Hanna onto his porch at Ekely. Her anecdotes and body language gave life to the details. 

Fifty-eight years later, I studied the woman who, for a decade, had worked so closely with Edvard Munch. As I listened and drew, my eyes—as Munch’s had—traced and retraced Hanna’s silhouette. Her face, now translucent as parchment, revealed hints of bluish venules too delicate for my black stump of charcoal. “I was far too young for him,” Hanna shared, her smile belying her nearly 80 years, “and he was far too old for me.” A youthful infatuation, and even adoration shone through her flirtations. She leaned in closer and placed her hand on my arm. She looked into my eyes. “Now, here you are—far too young and I’m far too old!” She blinked and laughed and resumed her pose.

Rumors of Hanna’s collection of Munch paintings circulated among the art students. Did they really believe she’d picked up the scattered and discarded remains of their workdays? Hanna’s granddaughter, Mona, with whom I began a correspondence, confirmed there was no such secret treasure of paintings. She shared that Hanna prized a note written on Munch’s usual stationery, but “the one letter from Munch to Hanna,” was all her grandmother had as a memento from the hand of Edvard Munch. There might have been others, but if so, they were lost to a fire in 1982 that took Hanna’s home and possessions. 

Edvard Munch, Alma Mater, 1940, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

By 1933, Hanna had married. Hanna said that Munch began to address her differently in his many hand-scrawled notes (presumably like the one she held onto). On occasion, he referred to her as “Honorable Lady,” a salutation both humorous and formal. Though her marriage to Leonard Olsen was short-lived, a daughter, Evy, was born on New Year’s Day of 1934. In a recent note, Mona, Evy’s daughter, confirmed, “Hanna worked hard” and made a point to add, “She was a free spirit.” Still, Leonard disapproved of her sessions with Munch. Hanna didn’t worry about what her husband or others thought about her modeling work. While there are no paintings of Hanna pregnant—many suspect she was granted a “leave” from modeling at this time—Mona told me Munch attempted to paint Evy at age 4 or 5: “She had difficulty sitting still, so nothing came of it.” 

Soon Hanna was back to modeling for Munch. In 1937, Munch painted Hanna again in Under the Chestnut Tree. It’s a frank picture, if not a joyous one, charged with something different—an implied sensualism, even eroticism, in a clear pictorial response to Matisse. This time, Munch encouraged Hanna to wear the provocative fur that had so compromised his impression of her five years earlier. (Hanna retold the doorway encounter several times over the weeks.) Now that Hanna was married, it appears Munch could summon a new response to her presence. Under the Chestnut Tree signals mysterious change, perhaps more so than any Munch portrait since The Sick Girl. For much of his working life, Munch oscillated between states of ease and dis-ease.  Uncertainty, indeed anxiety—his dis-ease—permeated many of Munch’s figurative subjects. We know and recognize Munch in his discomfort. We expect it. We’re surprised, then, by his canvases painted at the water’s edge on occasion or in the open spaces of landscapes where Munch could free himself of unsettling confines and respond with an ease encouraged by the subject.

Under the tree in his garden, for the first time he painted Hanna as herself.  She’s no longer the Nordlandspiken—the northern girl—whose wholesome romantic ideal lingered between worlds both real and imaginary. Nor does Hanna continue as a stand-in for Faust’s Gretchen, as she had in the series begun at Åsgårdstrand. Indeed, the rich experience of that first summer resulted in what Munch scholar Sue Prideaux called “a new treatment of woman” as a subject. “She is neither whore nor Madonna, she is simply another human figure.”  This new sensibility is manifest in the portrait where Hanna is a person not an idea. Moreover, under the blooming horse chestnut on that marvelous day, we see Munch’s ease reveal a vital expression of interconnection with the natural world.

Edvard Munch, Spring at Ekely, 1942, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

Edvard Munch, Two Women by the Veranda Steps, 1942, oil on canvas, © Munchmuseet

By the time Hanna last posed for Munch in 1942, she had a new husband, Paul Briescheke, and had given birth to another daughter. Munch responded to Hanna’s expanded motherhood by revisiting a much earlier theme in a new version of Alma Mater, but its embrace of idealized maternal love would mark Munch’s last exploration of allegory.

Two Women by the Veranda Steps (1942) , which may be his final painting of Hanna, reads to me as emblematic of a transition, possibly between models. With the Nazi occupation of Oslo, Hanna felt it was time for a change. She longed for the comfort of her hometown, Silsand, and soon she moved back to the northern island of Senja with her family. When the war came to an end, Hanna found the winters easier spent in Oslo and began moving between the two places with the change of the season. After the fire destroyed her Senja home, Oslo became her sole residence once again and she resumed her work as an artist's model. Hanna continued at the art school for a few more years after my brief residency. An Oslo artist she posed for late in her life kindly helped set her up in a retirement home, or so I heard. Hanna died in 1996.

I left for my return flight at an ungodly morning hour under dark winter skies. Styrofoam-stiff snow squeaked underfoot and muffled the rattle of the taxi’s studded tires. As my driver steered us to Gardemoen, the spasm of the aurora borealis stained our faces in apt Munch caricature as its violets and absinthe greens fluttered over Oslo. Until that moment, I’d seen the northern lights just once before, on a September night camping in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest. As far as I know, Munch never painted the arctic phenomenon. Of course, he painted winter nights moonlit and starry; he painted hot-embered summer skies, too. Maybe the nordlys—as it’s known in Norwegian—was too much of a spectacle, too otherworldly for Munch.

Edvard Munch, Melancholy, 1892, oil on canvas, © Nasjonalmuseet fur Kunst, Oslo

The driver turned in his seat after pulling up to the terminal, and I emptied my pockets of Norwegian bills and coins. A few years later, I could’ve paid for my ride with the 1,000 kroner note (in circulation 2001-2004) that honors Edvard Munch. On one side, his youthful visage is set against a landscape loosely derived from his 1891 painting Melancholy. On the reverse is a rendition of his enormous hopeful image The Sun. 

Soon after my return from Norway, I had occasion to correspond with the writer John Updike. I shared slides of my Oslo drawings and prints, including the drypoint of Hanna. Each was carefully labeled by hand in fine-point marker and organized in a plastic sleeve. I inserted them into a manila envelope together with a brief account of working with Hanna I had typed on a beige IBM Selectric. A week or so later Updike wrote to thank me for the story, which has continued to bump around with me these past 33 years. About the enclosed slides, he said, “They look terrific, if I can trust my aging eyes.” 

Edvard Munch, The Sun, 1909, oil on canvas, © Oslo University