Edvard Munch

Family of the artist
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, 9th May 2002, lot 205
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Oslo, Kunstforbundet, Edvard Munch, 1958
Riehen/Basel, Foundation Beyeler & Schwäbisch Hall, Kunsthalle Würth, Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art, 2007, no 184, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount at all four corners and at various points along all four edges, floating in the mount. Apart from two 2cm. flattened creases to the upper right edge, some very faint staining to the left edge, possibly due to a previous overmount, and some light surface dirt, this work is in very good condition. Colours: The colours are more vibrant in the original.
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Edvard Munch was a key pioneer of Expressionism whose influence on the course of modern art cannot be overstated. In depicting nature in a highly individual, internalised manner, he drew upon the tradition of stemningsmaleri, or 'mood-painting', characteristic of Nordic art towards the end of the nineteenth century. Munch abandoned the plein-air naturalism which had dominated Norwegian landscape painting in favour of an emotionally charged and resonant vision of nature. In the present drawing, Munch reverted to one of his most widely popular and acclaimed motifs, the Women on the Bridge, which was originally conceived circa 1901-2 during an intensely turbulent period in his life. The composition takes as its starting point a scene which Munch would have witnessed in Åsgårdstrand, a resort a few miles to the south of Oslo, and the location where he painted his famous Frieze of Life.

Women on the Bridge takes the stages of a young woman's development from adolescence to maturity as its principal theme, and relates closely to the Frieze of Life paintings. Munch's exploration of the issues of sexual awakening and morality is powerfully symbolic; he has emphasised the centrality of the women to the composition with a bold and assertive contour, and their isolation between two points of land is a visual metaphor for their transitional stage in life. Munch's draughtsmanship is characteristically organic and sinuous, demonstrating his trademark expressive forms and distorted perspective. Between 1901 and 1935 Munch produced a total of twelve known oil paintings and a number of variations in etching, lithograph and woodcut, all based on the composition of Women on a Bridge. The present drawing is believed to date from the 1920s and relates most closely in composition to the 1903 painting, On the Bridge, which is currently in the collection of the Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm. It has been suggested that Munch may have created the present work as a preparatory study for a lithograph which he later abandoned.