Die Frau in drei Stadien

In the early 1890s Munch was living between Kristiania and the bohemian cafes of Berlin, building a series of paintings he called the Frieze of Life about love, anxiety and death. This is one of its keystones. He sets three women side by side as stages of one life as he saw it, a woman in white looking out to sea, a naked woman facing us directly, and a figure in dark clothes standing among the trees. Off to the right a man stands alone by a trunk, eyes down, a red flower at his feet. Munch would rework the idea a few years later into The Dance of Life, one of his best-known pictures.