Coastal Landscape

Munch painted this stretch of Norwegian coast in 1918, the last year of the First World War. Norway stayed out of the fighting, and by then Munch had withdrawn from the city to live quietly on his own land near the Oslofjord, working outdoors in almost any weather. The man who had painted The Scream a generation earlier was now largely a recluse, turning out landscape after landscape. What that solitude looks like is here in the handling. The paint is thin and dragged, the rocks, water and sky laid in with quick separate strokes rather than blended, and in places the bare canvas still shows through. Munch liked to leave finished pictures outside in the open air, exposed to sun, rain and snow, a rough treatment he called the kill-or-cure. Some of the weathering you see on his canvases from these years he put there on purpose.