Edvard Munch – Golgotha

Golgotha

Golgotha by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1900, held under inventory number MM.M.00036 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 120 x 80 cm and is in landscape format. A cross with a stretched body rises above a dense crowd of faces, and the whole scene plays out under a dark blue night sky.

The upper half of the canvas is ultramarine. A band of dull reddish-pink cloud runs across the sky at the left, and dark blue-black masses of hill or tree rise at both edges. At the centre stands a yellow cross, and on it a body painted in yellow, orange and red, markedly elongated and thin; the head is tilted to one side under a dark red covering. The figure is small in relation to the canvas and set high in it.

The lower half is filled completely with heads. Faces press from edge to edge in yellow, white, red, ochre and green, most of them mask-like, some in profile and others looking straight out. Dark blue-black clothing shows between them. At the right of the foreground a hooded figure stands in dark blue with a greenish face, and at the left a bearded man with a pale beard and a reddish cheek. Dead centre along the bottom edge a large pale yellow-green face with a pointed beard stares directly at the viewer and is the most exposed head in the picture. An inscription is written in dark paint in the upper right corner.

The painting was made in 1900, while Munch was being treated at a sanatorium in the Gudbrandsdalen valley. The crucified figure is often read as a self-portrait, an image of the artist surrounded and judged by a crowd; that is an established interpretation rather than a museum fact, and the picture itself does not confirm it. Munch treated the crucifixion only rarely, so Golgotha stands somewhat apart within his work.

The colour is laid on thinly and fast, in places thinly enough for the weave of the canvas to show through. The faces are built from a few broad strokes with no drawing beneath them, and it is exactly this speed that gives the crowd its restless, surging look. The sky is painted in long horizontal sweeps that are not hidden.

Ours is an oil on canvas reproduction, hand-painted with a brush, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw.

As hand-painted canvas art Golgotha needs room, since the lower half is very dense and reads as confusion from close up. It works best on a longer wall, hung a little high, so that the head on the cross sits near the eye level of a standing viewer. It wants a calm light ground, white or pale grey, that lets the blue of the sky breathe; a dark wall swallows it. Artificial light should be warm and angled slightly from the side, so that the yellow cross lights up. It sits well beside other works by Munch from the same decade.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.