Drinkers

In March 1906 Munch's work hung at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, next to the young painters critics had just nicknamed the Fauves, the wild beasts. That same year he was drifting between spa towns and hotels in Thuringia, in central Germany, trying cures for his nerves and for his drinking. Drinkers comes out of that year. Men in dark suits sit close around a white café table with tall glasses, painted in broad, flat colour. The Munch scholar Arne Eggum later discussed it in an essay on Munch and Fauvism. The museum lists it alongside Card Players in Elgersburg, painted at a Thuringian spa the winter before, and Munch came back to the same drinking table in pictures of the late 1920s. He signed this one high on the right, E Munch 1906.