Halbakt im blauen Rock

By 1898 Munch had spent most of the decade moving between Berlin, Paris and Norway, painting on whatever he could carry with him. This is oil on unprimed paper, later laid down on cardboard, and he left the paper bare around the figure, so the blue of the skirt sits on a dry matt surface that drinks the paint in instead of giving back a shine. He never signed it. It stayed in his own hands, like most of what he made, and when he died in 1944 he left the whole of it, more than 1,000 paintings, to the city of Oslo.