Edvard Munch creates an especially powerful image…
1895 CE
In this painting, Munch shows a naked woman with her head thrown back in ecstasy, her eyes closed, and a red halo-like shape above her flowing black hair.
This may be understood as the moment of conception, but there is more than a hint of death in the woman's beautiful face.
In Munch's art, woman is an "other" with whom union is desperately desired, yet feared because it threatens the destruction of the creative ego.
He adds to the Frieze the painting Jealousy (The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group).
If isolation and loneliness, always present in his work, are especially emphasized in these pictures, they are equally apparent in Death in the Sick Room (Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo), one of his many paintings about death.
Here the focus is not on the dying child, who is not even visible, but on the living, each wrapped in their own experience of grief and unable to communicate or offer each other any consolation.
The claustrophobically enclosed space and the steeply rushing perspective of the floor heighten the picture's power.
Images
Edvard Munch: Madonna (1894); oil on canvas 90 cm (35.4 ″) x 68 cm (26.7 ″); Munch Museum.
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People
Regions
North Europe
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