Badende Männer

In the summer of 1907 Munch was at Warnemunde, a Baltic resort on the German coast, trying to cure himself with sun and salt water. He was drinking hard and about a year from the collapse that put him in a Copenhagen clinic for eight months. What he painted there were men, naked, on the town's men's bathing beach, and those pictures have been read ever since as an argument about health made by someone who had very little of it. This is one of the small canvases from that stretch, 78 by 56 centimetres. He was building toward a monumental version at the same time, the three-part Bathing Men whose main panel is now in the Ateneum in Helsinki. This one he kept. It went to the city of Oslo with the thousand or so paintings he left it when he died in 1944.