Bending and upright Nude

In the spring of 1902 Munch finally got the room he had wanted. At the Berlin Secession the pictures of love, jealousy and death he had been making since the 1890s hung together as one sequence, the Frieze of Life, which is how he had always meant them to be seen. A panel like this one comes from the other part of his working year, the studio hours with a model and no programme behind them. He painted it on bare unprimed wood and never signed it. Two women, one bending forward, one standing. The catalogue of his paintings puts it at 1902 or 1903 and gives it the number 515. It came to Oslo with the roughly 1,100 paintings he left to the city when he died in 1944.