Werner Timm - Edvard Munch - 1982

14 Girls on the Beach

9o x 1 4 8 cm. Oil on canvas. Around 1 903/1 904. Hamburg, Kunsthalle

This picture, which was acquired by the Hamburg Kunsthalle in 1 9 5 1 , forms part of the "Frieze of Life" in the version painted for Dr. Max Linde in Li.ibeck. A group of young girls in long white dresses stand in a tight cluster by the water's edge. Close-by to the right a girl in a red dress stands alone and looks across the water to a pleasure boat in the middle distance. One can almost hear the jolly voices from the boat reaching the girls on shore. There is a mood of great tenderness in the picture : Munch seeks to give visual expres­ sion to the state of intense expectation and longing peculiar to young girls. Like so many other works of his it is linked thematically to another of his pictures. It takes up the motif of the wistful young girl

looking out to sea in "The Three Faces of Woman." The flaming red dress of the girl standing away from the close-knit group expresses the ardour of her longing. In an etching of the same motif made a few years later Munch added between boat and girl the long reflec­ tion of the midnight sun-that cosmic erotic symbol so often used by him to indicate the embeddedness of our human emotions in the elemental forces of nature. An interesting comparison can also be made with the picture called "Encounter" dating from 1 894 in which a similar group of girls on the sea shore is faced by a corresponding group of young men.

The colours of this picture are light and radiant. To the blue shades of the sea, the brownish and sand-coloured hues of the beach and the blue, green and brownish-red contours of the stones he adds the dazzling white of the girls in the group and the beautiful red of the girl standing alone. It is a delicate, light, somewhat subdued colour scheme. Its tender mood is reminiscent of pastels.

16 Dr. Linde's Children

1 44 x 1 99 . 5 cm. Oil on canvas. 1 90 3 . Li.ibeck, Behnhaus

On the suggestion of Albert Kollmann, Munch was invited by D r. Max Linde, a wealthy Li.ibeck physician greatly interested in the arts to paint a few pictures in his house. Munch accepted and in 1 902 to 1 90 3 spent two months as his guest in Li.ibeck. Apart from the fourteen pictures of the so-called "Linde-Frieze" and a graphic sequence entitled : "From the House of Dr. Max Linde" the group portrait of the Linde boys is probably the most outstanding work of that period . It is rightly considered the most important group por­ trait of the century.

The composition is clearly based on Munch's first impression of the four boys, who naturally were a little shy and self-conscious when they were called in from playing in the garden to say hello to the foreign painter. With consummate skill he succeeded to express by subtle nuances not only the typical characteristics of their ages but also the emerging personality traits of each child in their postures and facial expressions. The firm stance with legs slightly apart of the boy on the right betrays a budding self-assurance ; the eldest on the left, who leans against the door in a relaxed posture, is clearly a dreamer ; between them the youngest, with his touchingly innocent baby face, and the boy in the centre, staring at the painter with keen, searching eyes. The well-balanced clear symmetry of the composi on is reminiscent of Renaissance paintings.

17 Avenue in Snow

So x 1 00 cm. Oil on canvas. 1 906. Oslo, Munch Museum

The picture appears to represent an avenue towards the end of winter. Snow covers the road and big soft snow flakes fall on the two women in the foreground . The subject might be a simple genre motif without ulterior meaning. And yet somehow Munch trans­ forms it into a thing of fascinating yet strangely menacing beauty. The boldly foreshortened path and the similarly treated undulating line of the tree tops lead straight into the depth of the picture-we seem to be looking into a deep shaft that sucks us in. Notwithstand­ ing the fact that the contours of the trees, the clouds in the sky and the lines of the landscape are soft and rounded the whole scene seems somehow sinister and eery. There is something deeply disturbing in

the heavy curving lines in the top half of the picture as if all the forms were animated from within by an expressive dynamism. This impression is enhanced by the picture's idiosyncratic colour scheme which stresses the blue and purple tones so characteristic for the melancholy mood of certain winter landscapes and makes them clash with the green of the fields and tree trunks . The two women in the foreground who are only j ust within the picture-in fact almost disappearing out of sight-are an important part of a very carefully thought-out composition. They serve moreover to introduce the human element into what might otherwise be a half-unconscious ex­ perience of landscape, and bring home to the beholder the subjection of mankind to the mysterious incomprehensible forces of nature. With his characteristic psychic intensity and the expressive language of his forms Munch has here given visual shape to the existential anguish that oppressed his soul.