Der Kuss

Munch worked on this image of a kissing couple for years, and this 1897 painting belongs to his Frieze of Life, the long cycle he built about love, jealousy and death. The couple stand at a window, and the strange thing he does is let their two faces melt into a single blank shape where they meet, no features, no line between them. Earlier versions kept the figures more separate, but Munch kept pushing the motif until the merging itself became the subject. The room is dark and the light comes only from the window at their side, and even that he covers with a heavy curtain. For Munch this fusion was not simply tender. He wrote about love as a kind of loss of self, the individual dissolving into another, and the picture holds both readings at once, closeness and disappearance. The clothes and bodies are painted so loosely that at a distance the pair reads almost as one dark column against the light.