Dark Spruce Forest

By the end of the 1890s Munch was known for faces, the anxious lovers and screamers of what he called his Frieze of Life. This has none of them. It is only spruce forest, close and dark, the trunks crowding up to the surface so there is barely any sky. He painted it in 1899, in the years he kept leaving Berlin and Paris to come back to the woods of southern Norway. The mood he had built out of people he now gets from trees alone. Look down at the forest floor. It is not brown so much as a dull red, glowing a little under all that shadow, as if the ground itself were the most alive thing in the picture.