Death and Life

In the early 1500s, German painters liked to show a young woman caught in the arms of a skeleton, a warning that beauty ends in the grave. Munch took up that old theme in Berlin in 1893 and 1894 and carried it into his own century. The naked woman and the skeleton still kiss at the centre. Around them he added something from modern science. Down the left edge rise wavering red strands that the Munch Museum reads as a stream of sperm, seen as if through a microscope, and at the right edge stand two thin, pale embryos. Conception, desire and death share one tall canvas.

The paint is laid on very thinly, and bare canvas shows through in many places, part of the technical experimenting Munch did during his Berlin years. In 1894 he scratched the same embrace into a metal plate for one of his first prints, a drypoint called Death and the Woman.