Kiss by the Window

In November 1892 the Union of Berlin Artists invited Edvard Munch, then 29, to show his work in their halls. The reaction was so hostile that the members voted to close the exhibition after only a week. Critics called the pictures unfinished, slapdash, an insult. The newspapers ran with it, and the row, later remembered as the Munch affair, actually made his name across Germany. This painting hung in that show. Two lovers stand at a curtained window, and where their faces meet Munch has let them dissolve into a single blank shape, no features at all. That was part of what offended people, since it looked to them barely painted. He would return to the same embrace again and again over the coming years, in paintings and prints, as one panel of the long cycle he called the Frieze of Life.