Jealousy

In the summer of 1907 Munch was living in Warnemünde, a small resort on Germany's Baltic coast, and travelling often to Berlin. There the director Max Reinhardt had just opened the Kammerspiele, a tiny theatre where the audience sat almost close enough to touch the actors, and Munch was making mood sketches for Reinhardt's stagings of Ibsen. This canvas belongs to a series of seven he painted that year, known as The Green Room. Each is set in the same shallow box of three green walls, a dark floor and a low ceiling, with no window or lamp anywhere, much like a stage. A man in a hat stares out at us from the front edge, while behind him, framed on the back wall, a couple embrace, the woman in red. The wallpaper is a loose trellis of green leaves put down in quick, rough strokes. In Munch's day those bright synthetic greens had a bad name, because the pigments used for many wallpapers contained arsenic.