Hermann Schlittgen

Hermann Schlittgen was a German illustrator and caricaturist who worked for Simplicissimus, the Munich satirical magazine, and was part of the international artistic community of Hamburg and Munich that Munch encountered during his extensive stays in Germany in the early 1900s. Munch painted several portraits of German friends and acquaintances in these years — a sustained engagement with portraiture that produced some of his most direct and unsentimental likenesses. The Schlittgen portrait, held at the Munch Museum, belongs to a group of portraits in which Munch stripped away the psychological violence of his Symbolist figure paintings in favor of a more immediate, almost documentary engagement with his sitter. The Simplicissimus circle to which Schlittgen belonged shared Munch's interest in satirical social observation.

Munch renders Schlittgen with a directness and economy characteristic of his German portrait practice — the face modeled in broadly applied flesh tones, the background kept simple and unified, the figure occupying the canvas with a straightforward physical presence unencumbered by symbolist elaboration.