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Stéphane Mallarmé
Edvard Munch (printed by Auguste Clot (French, 1858-1936))
1897
- Medium
- Transfer lithograph with crayon and scraping in green on cream Japanese paper
- Classification
- Dimensions
- Image: 37.3 × 29.2 cm (14 11/16 × 11 1/2 in.); Sheet: 63.7 × 43.8 cm (25 1/8 × 17 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- Norway
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Stanley Field Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Stéphane Mallarmé is today considered one of France’s most important poets of the second half of the nineteenth century. Although he was known for the obscure imagery and difficult syntax of his verse, Mallarmé enjoyed the friendship of other modern thinkers, in particular, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odilon Redon, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and James McNeill Whistler. Despite the fact that much of his poetry is unabashedly extreme and difficult to decipher, artists continue, to this day, to turn to his evocative verse for inspiration.
Edvard Munch met Mallarmé during a trip to Paris in 1896–97, and he became a regular guest at Mallarmé’s Tuesday night soirees, where he mingled with other visionaries of the day such as August Strindberg and Vincent van Gogh. In this portrait, Munch depicted the poet as a disembodied head, floating almost mystically. The use of green ink recalls the faded green accouterments of Mallarmé’s study. Of this portrait Munch said, “I drew him in half-shadow which matched his character.” Though it is not known whether this was a commissioned portrait, it might have been intended for the…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
