Edvard Munch
1894-96
Oil paint on canvas
This monumental painting was part of Edvard Munch’s series exploring human experience, ‘The Frieze of Life’. It demonstrates his embrace of Symbolism, an artistic movement that sought to reflect profound ideas through symbolic or evocative forms and colours rather than by closely depicting nature.
Here, Munch arranges three imagined women on a shoreline at twilight, representing a progression from youth to maturity and old age. Munch uses colour to convey different qualities: the pure white of fragile innocence on the left, the red hair and fleshy pinks of seductive, sexual maturity, and the pale skin and deathly black of old age. Munch’s anxiety-ridden vision of womanhood is further reflected in the mournful man to the right, standing close to a strange flower that appears to bleed.