Bathing Young Men

By 1904 Edvard Munch had already made his name with anxiety and death, the fevered faces and the famous scream. This canvas belongs to a different mood. That summer he gathered a few friends at Åsgårdstrand, a small bathing spot on the Oslo fjord, for what he treated as a kind of health holiday, and began a large painting of young men in the water. A naked, muscular figure wades out of the cold turquoise sea, his skin still wet from the swim. The picture comes out of what people around 1900 called vitalism, the idea that a living force ran through everything, sun and sea and the human body alike. It was a deliberate turn away from the decadence and factory smoke of the age, toward open air and bare skin. Munch would suffer his own breakdown a few years later, but here the water is bright and the body is strong.