Bathing Boys

In 1897 Munch came home to Norway after years based mostly in Berlin and Paris, and the next year he bought a small house in Åsgårdstrand, the resort on the Oslo fjord where he spent his summers. Boys swimming off that shore were a subject he kept returning to. He had painted them in 1894, scratched the scene into a drypoint plate in 1896 and would cut it in wood in 1899. On this canvas one boy stands in water up to his thighs, seen from behind, while two others float with arms and legs spread wide against the dark blue sea. Around them the shallows dissolve into loops of orange, brown and green. In 2017 the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård chose it for Towards the Forest, the exhibition of rarely shown works he helped choose at the Munch Museum.