Munch’s Chairs
As I experience my first April Autumn in a slightly more dulcet and calm Melbourne, it has been a strange in between week, caught between the typical time of Easter bringing notions of new life, birth, and freshness juxtaposed against the more solemn and melancholic aspects of the Anzac memorial weekend. Despite only being through 4 months of the year, having Autumn at this time of year is odd for me. For one, feeling like there is so much time left of the year, but also in a state of mind where one relishes those final few days of warmth, solar clarity and freshness that the oppressive summer resists sits in countenance with the Springtime I am used to; one of optimism, new space and the spawning of new ideas.
Typically in Autumn I personally tend to return either to the writing of or contemplation on one of my favourite artists throughout my life so far; Edvard Munch. I’ve been fortunate to have the work of Munch be a recurring topic in my life, not least as a point of mutual bonding with my beautiful wife. Living in Oslo too, he was hard to escape; with no surprise as no other artist there truly captures the melancholic sense of the national character overlaid with the expansive urban domesticity and introspective interaction with nature. Prior to that, on my first independent trip from home in Northumberland, I went to visit my sister in Glasgow where there was an exhibition on the print works of Munch. There, I was transfixed and ever since I have had a fascination not only with the psyche of the artist but the deep meaning, power and evocative nature of his work. Later in life, but at the start of my career, I’d have the chance to work on the design of a series of benches and furniture for the new Edvard Munch museum in Oslo with the studio I was working for at the time. It felt like my career had peaked, and to be fair few projects have come close to that sense of excitement, care and contemplation that project evoked - partially also because I was younger and far more professionally optimistic (read naïve) at the time.
To me, part of the fascination with Munch is the nature to which the lens looking at the human psyche expands and contracts depending on whether it is an outdoor landscape scene, or an interior domestic scene. The landscapes or vistas ask broader questions about the human condition and the interior scenes often reflect the mood, contemplation, and Munch’s own introspection on a sense of self. In my view that is one of the only ways in which to truly read Munch’s work is to reflect it back onto oneself and pursue a more introspective view of what it evokes, that where like most art is where his work becomes its most resonant. This is reflected in Karl Ove Knausgaard's writing on Munch and his experience curating an exhibition on the artist for the former Munch Museum in Oslo.
In recent years I have become more and more interested in the domestic scenes of Munch’s work, how they capture light, literally contain meaning, and pull the viewer into his most personal of spaces. With that when I was studying my masters in the history of design I wanted to explore what a history of furniture design through Munch’s paintings could look like. The opportunity however never presented itself; to that On Chairs has a more open brief so is therefore as good a platform as any to explore this topic further.
As the Melbourne autumn mellows and deepens around me, bringing with it that peculiar antipodean contradiction of seasonal shift, I find myself drawn further into the domestic interiors of Munch's work once again. In my view, the chairs that populate his canvases are far from background elements or compositional devices; they stand as silent witnesses to human drama, repositories of memory - powerful symbols of psychological states that transcend function.
In "Death in the Sickroom" (1893), perhaps Munch's most poignant exploration of familial loss, Sophie's wicker chair dominates the compositional centre. In the painting it is his 15-year-old sister who is in fact sitting in a chair with her back facing the viewer. Sophie’s final request was to get up out of the bed and sit in a chair. “I so much want to live”, she said, “I think we have such good times together”. But it was in that chair Sophie died. This is a topic and theme that Munch was deeply touched by and would return to throughout his life - the death of his sister. Devoid of her physical presence yet charged with meaning, it becomes what Yin Man Wong aptly describes as a "conduit for collective grief." The painting's sparse, two-dimensional rendering amplifies the deep sense of emotional desolation, with the chair's rigid geometry contrasting sharply with the blurred, ghostly figures of his family.
Death in the Sickroom, Edvard Munch 1893
Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Høstland, Børre
What strikes me most about this particular work is Munch's transformation of domesticity from a space of collective and personal sanctuary to stage. The Victorian ideals of home as refuge are utterly subverted; instead, the chair stands as a monument to absence, to what cannot be held or preserved - we are drawn to focus what, or indeed who is absent from the chair. Munch reportedly kept this chair in his studio for decades after Sophie's death—a physical anchor to memory, ensuring that loss remained tangibly present within his creative space. In his own words: "She sat in the chair, her breath shallow, and then she was gone—but the chair remained, a monument to what we could not hold."
Perhaps nowhere is Munch's fusion of human form and domestic object more evident than in "Model by the Wicker Chair" (1919-1921). This later work exemplifies his mature Expressionist vocabulary more typical of Munch’s later works, with its intense palette of orange walls, green ceiling, and a striking red wicker chair rendered in bold, almost sculptural brushstrokes. The chair stands empty beside a nude female model whose bowed head and vulnerable posture create a palpable sense of introspection and solitude. What fascinates me is how Munch refuses the expected composition—the model does not sit in the chair but stands apart from it, creating a visual dialogue and juxtaposition between her body and the chair. This speaks to alienation, waiting and psychological distance. The chair becomes not merely furniture but a character in its own right, a silent witness to the her inner turmoil. The organic wicker patterns echo the curves of the model's form, suggesting a symbiosis between the two subjects. Whilst the emptiness of the seat evokes absence and unfulfilled longing. This painting, demonstrates how thoroughly Munch had evolved from his earlier Symbolist works towards a bolder, more abstracted approach where domestic objects serve as external manifestations of internal emotional states.
Model by the Wicker Chair (1919-1921), Edvard Munch
Using these two examples we can see that Munch's chairs operate firmly within the Symbolist tradition, prioritising subjective experience over representation. His 1889 St. Cloud Manifesto declared that "No longer would interiors, people who knit and read be painted. There should be living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love." Yet paradoxically, it is often through the absence of these breathing, feeling humans—represented instead by vacant chairs—that Munch most effectively conveys emotional truth. The chair becomes a threshold between the material world and psychological interiority, between the mundane and the existential.
This Symbolist approach evolves into more explicit Expressionist distortion in works like "Model by the Wicker Chair" (1919–21). Here, the wicker's organic patterns seem to merge with the model's flesh, creating what the Munch Museum describes as using "high chroma colors in formed strokes and lines" to evoke a most raw sense of vulnerability in the subject. The chair is no longer simply a prop or setting; it becomes an extension of the human form itself, the woven texture suggesting both entrapment and fertility. This fusion echoes John A. Fleming's assertion that furniture serves as an "inscription of the human body and mind"—Munch's chairs acting as surrogates for corporeal and emotional states.
Vestre's steel Munch chairs designed by Jonas Stokke and Andreas Engesvik
Design & Munch; Contemporary Interpretations
In recent years, the relationship between design and Munch's artistic legacy has evolved into a fascinating symbiosis, perhaps most elegantly expressed in Snøhetta's exhibition design for "Between the Clock and the Bed" at the Munch Museum in Oslo. Named after Munch's powerful late self-portrait, the exhibition seamlessly merged contemplative furniture with curatorial vision, creating a physical embodiment of Munch's psychological landscapes. Large, organically shaped plywood benches covered in soft black mats invited visitors to recline and absorb the works in a posture of reflection rather than academic observation. This approach feels particularly apt for Munch, whose chairs and beds were never mere functional objects but vessels of emotional and existential weight. Ceiling-mounted screens projected slow-motion, close-up footage of brushwork details, allowing one to simultaneously experience the macro and micro elements of Munch's technique—a dual perspective that echoes his own ability to portray both intimate domestic scenes and universal human conditions. What struck me most about this design intervention was its deliberate minimisation of explanatory text, encouraging a direct, personal dialogue between viewer and artwork that mirrors my own approach to understanding Munch. The exhibition spaces functioned as thresholds between everyday life and the artist's interior world, using perspective, colour, and layered elements to create transitions that Munch himself might have recognised in his compositions. As I worked on furniture designs for the new Munch Museum years later, I found myself continually returning to this notion of seating as more than utilitarian—as a frame for experience, a catalyst for contemplation, and a bridge between the physical and psychological realms that Munch so masterfully navigated.
When I worked on the furniture design for the new Munch Museum years ago, I found myself constantly returning to these tensions in Munch's work—between rigidity and fluidity, stability and precariousness, presence and absence. We struggled to find forms that would honour his legacy without sanitising his darker themes into mere aesthetic choices. Though a well resolved design outcome, this tension persists in the design by Andreas Engesvik and Jonas Stokke, which abstract his palette into ergonomic forms with hues dubbed "Skin," "Hair," and "Night." Yet something essential still feels lost in this translation—the existential weight that makes Munch's work so compelling. Perhaps though it is too much to expect of designers that we can truly embody these same evocative feelings in design. Perhaps this helps to better demarcate between the boundary of Art and Design as formal fields.
In "Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine" (1906), painted during his time in Weimar, we encounter Munch at perhaps his most vulnerable and psychologically exposed. Created during a period of profound personal turmoil marked by alcoholism, anxiety and a deepening sense of alienation, the painting offers an unflinching glimpse into the artist's fractured interior life. Munch positions himself hunched at a table, hands folded weakly in his lap, confronting us with his isolation through the simple domestic arrangement of a wine bottle, empty glass and barren plate. What strikes me most powerfully about this composition is how the strong, sloping lines draw our eye inexorably towards Munch's head, set against a vivid field of red that seems to throb with psychological intensity. The two waiter-like figures in the background—curiously fused yet facing in opposite directions—create a haunting metaphor for the divided self, for those opposing forces that Munch felt battling within his psyche. The bottle stands not merely as a still-life element but as a potent symbol of his struggles with addiction and despair, whilst the empty plate reinforces the sense of profound emptiness and disconnection. This is Munch's Expressionism at its most raw and confessional, using domestic objects and spatial relationships to externalise his inner turmoil. As I sit with this image, I'm reminded of how thoroughly Munch understood the chair not just as a piece of furniture but as a stage for human drama—here, a solitary throne from which he confronts both himself and us with uncompromising honesty.
Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine, 1906, Edvard Munch
Perhaps the most revealing treatment of furniture in Munch's oeuvre comes not through presence but through deliberate absence, as evidenced in his final major self-portrait, "Between the Clock and the Bed" (1940-43). Unlike the chair-dominated interiors of his earlier works, here we find Munch standing erect and isolated between two potent domestic objects: a handless grandfather clock and a single bed covered with a patterned rug from his childhood. The conspicuous absence of a chair—that traditional symbol of rest, participation and belonging in the domestic sphere—creates a profound visual void that speaks to his existential state. Where chairs in previous works served as repositories of memory or vessels of psychological weight, their omission here leaves the ageing artist without a place to sit, rest or engage with his surroundings. The bed, far from offering comfort, transforms into a symbol of both his lifelong physical frailty and the inevitability of death, whilst the clock (likened by some scholars to a coffin) stands as a mute witness to time's passage. Here other domestic objects clearly serving as profound metaphorical symbols. Even the title of the painting could be read as a dour joke. Munch's placement between these objects suggests a liminal state—neither seated in participation nor reclined in rest. Here he is suspended between life's duration and its conclusion. This absence of a chair removes any possibility of pause or contemplation, intensifying the painting's atmosphere of existential waiting. As I study this, I'm struck by how Munch's final statement on domesticity relies not on what furniture is present, but on what has been deliberately removed—creating perhaps his most powerful commentary on the temporary nature of our tenure in both our homes and our bodies.
Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed, 1940-1943. Edvard Munch
In our current age of carefully curated domestic interiors and endless furniture catalogues promising comfort and style, Munch's chairs and painted acts of sitting remind us that the spaces we inhabit are never neutral. They are archives of all we have loved and lost, repositories of memory that can comfort or haunt us. As Gaston Bachelard might suggest, they embody "the poetics of space," where ordinary objects become laden with psychological resonance.
As I sit, watching the autumn light fade through Melbourne, I'm minded that Munch’s chairs, frozen in moments of anguish or contemplation, invite us to peer into that same internal abyss he is so well known for—to confront the fragile comfort of domestic certainty and the universality of loss. In doing so, they offer not solace but recognition. Perhaps that's what makes his paintings and his furniture resonate so deeply across time and space, from Oslo to Melbourne, from Munch's time to our own.
References
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