Head by Head

Munch painted this in 1905, the year Norway dissolved its union with Sweden. He spent much of it away from Oslo. That summer at Aasgaardstrand, the small coastal village where he kept a house, he had a violent quarrel with a fellow painter, Ludvig Karsten, and soon after left the country for several years of German spa towns and nerve clinics. He had been circling this pairing for a while, in paint and in woodcut: a woman leaning in with her eyes closed, a man looking past her. He kept the canvas. Munch held on to most of his own work, and at his death in 1944 he left roughly 1,100 paintings to the city of Oslo, this one among them.