Fig.1 Separation, 1896

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.”  - Edvard Munch

In Edvard Munch's pictures of 1890s the repetition of images, juggling them in various combinations in order to symbolize different human conditions and relations (A. Clarke, 2009). These include columns of light on the sea, blond young woman in a white dress on the beach, the lustful woman in red, the older woman in black, the image of the suffering man and others. Here he illustrates the man's sorrow at parting from his love - the end of the story begun in The Kiss (1897). As in other paintings, Separation(Fig.1, 1896) is a harmonized combination of two story lines, both represent characters that fulfill each other and help the viewer understand the narrative. The objective on the foreground is the protagonist that that can me both frontal and active,  as here, or in profile and contemplative, and the subjective in the background, the image of the past in his or her mind's eye. The brokenhearted man seems to be leaving to the side, showing his pale face painted with green oil colour, and holding his hand to his chest where the heart is placed, painted with blood-red paint. These two colours are abundant in Munch's works and might be interpreted as colours of anxiety or depression and pain accordingly.

Second central figure in the painting is the silhouette of a woman in bright white dress seems to be a vision or even a thought of the man as the contours of her dress and hair are undefined and are floating through the canvas and might be either coming out of the male character's head, or, otherwise, caress him as a symbolization of a looped memory.

The man seem to be moving aside, to the future, but his path is blocked by the crimson plant, again possibly intended as a mandrake, with its love and death symbolism. He seems trapped in the present, in a heartbreaking memory.

It is not the only painting where Edvard Munch uses the characters with such appearance. As it was outlined earlier, he used to repeat the same pictures in different combinations and compositions to create a concept of the depth of human emotions and relations. Familiar characters to the ones in Separation can be found in his other well-known works as Young Woman in Three Stages (Fig.2, 1895) and Woman on the Beach (Fig.3, 1896).

Fig.2 Woman in Three Stages (1896)

Fig.3 Woman on The Beach, 1896

The usage of green and red hues is also a repeating feature of a number of Munch's works. In both his masterpieces The Scream (Fig.4, 1895) and The Anxiety (Fig.5, 1894) he uses the same composition and the highlighted colours to enhance the dark repressing atmosphere of paintings.  In The Anxiety Munch repeats closely many elements of The Scream. The same jetty that accommodated a single alienated personage appears again, as do the lake in the distance, the two boats, the church, and other structures that line the shore just a little less dimly than before. They are all quoted from the earlier work, as are the gloomy hues and the intense swirls of concentrically enlarging lines that define and ultimately embrace land, sea, and sky.