Girls on the Pier

By 1904 Munch's living came mostly from Germany. That year he became a member of the Berlin Secession and signed with the Berlin publisher Bruno Cassirer, who took his prints exclusively, and in 1905 the Hamburg gallery Commeter took his paintings on the same terms. He spent autumns and winters in Berlin and his summers back in Norway, and one Norwegian motif he kept returning to was this one, girls on the jetty at Åsgårdstrand, a small resort on the fjord, under a pale summer-night sky. The first version dates from about 1901. He went on repeating the composition until about 1930, seven paintings in all, along with a group of related pictures showing older women standing in the same place. The one in Fort Worth, painted around 1904, is among the most freely brushed of them.