Intaglio prints and woodcuts after 1910

Munch's interest in intaglio prints also grew in around 1913, at the same time as he obtained his own press to print them. When he got all his plates home from Germany in the autumn of 1914, he also worked further on many of them or pulled reprints from the old plates. There are often signs that he inked the plates himself and the prints have a far more experimental look than the more perfect professional editions. One of the more remarkable things that he did was to ink metal plates with normal oil paint which lay on top of a large part of the plates and not only in the grooves. Certain plates such as Life and Landscape in Kragerø, for example, might almost have been painted with a brush, and in every case the results are interesting, if not always equally successful. The majority of intaglio prints from these years are printed in very limited editions but in 1916, however, he had many printed in numbered and dated series by Scheel in Kristiania. However, after this point Munch's interest in intaglio prints appears to have been exhausted.

Woodcut was the graphic method which came to occupy Munch the longest. Even in the earliest woodcuts he used the actual texture of the wood itself, for example as in Kiss III and IV, where one of the plates is actually quite untouched by the gouge or other sharp tools. The entire decoration is made up of the fine lines, growth rings and knotholes in the wood, creating a background which gives the picture life and atmosphere. It is quite certain that Munch must have worked on the woodblocks to strengthen these lines. It is likely that he used sandpaper to remove some of the soft wood, so that the hard edges appear more clearly. In some of the woodcuts from 1917 which used motifs from Henrik Ibsen's play The Pretenders and particularly the one of Skule and Bishop Nicholas in the Forest, this special effect has been taken to the extreme. Here the lines of the wood give a feeling of nebulous unreality where the two heads appear like ghostly spirits. Munch goes furthest along these lines in one of his last woodcuts; according to documentation witnessed by his sister Inger, it was printed on his 80th birthday on 13 December 1943. The motif itself, Kiss in the Fields, is only carved in thin contour lines. The swirling, restless patterns of the cherrywood are what actually create the main emphasis in this woodcut.

In 1915-1917 Munch also printed several more colourful, almost gaudy, woodcuts, where he combined fretsaw technique and direct painting to great effect. This concerned both new blocks, and reprints from old blocks with or without reworking. In order to further increase the opportunities for special colour effects, he also used varying types of stencil cut in linoleum or card. He used these to mask part of the plate or inked them in line with the various sections of the block, laying them over the woodblock before it was printed. Use of such stencils can be found in several examples of woodcuts printed in this period, such as Sunbathing, the new version of Towards the Forest and reprints of older blocks such as Man Bathing, The Lonely Ones and Two Women on the Shore. The moon and the moonlight in the two latter prints come from stencils and in some impressions we can clearly see that he has used the same stencils for both.

Munch's last graphic work, however, was not a woodcut, but a new lithographic version of the portrait of Hans Jæger, originally completed in 1896. The new version is verly similar to the old one, which was only printed in a very limited edition. Munch was working quite intensively on this lithograph only a few weeks before he died in 1944 and the printer brought the finished print out to him after he had fallen ill in January 1944. Although the motif was designed earlier and the new version is a mere repetition, it still has an astonishing freshness and strength in the execution, which clearly shows that the ageing master was in command of both his vision and his craftsmanship until the very end.

That it should be precisely the portrait of Hans Jæger, bohemian and anarchist, abused and driven out by the bourgeoisie and police in Kristiania, which was his final work closes the circle in a thought-provoking way. Hans Jæger was a determined naturalist, wrote his books with an orthography which, incredibly radical, was based on the Norwegian manner of speaking at a time when the written language was still Danish, and he challenged modern artists to write their lives - nothing else. He himself achieved this to the extent that almost all of his books were banned due to their ruthless honesty - particularly in their many erotic descriptions. Of the painters, it was really only Munch who took Hans Jæger seriously, and honestly and ruthlessly looked into his own experience and his own soul for motifs and inspiration.

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