Mason and Mechanic

In the summers of 1907 and 1908 Munch was living in Warnemünde, a small resort town on the German Baltic coast, trying to steady himself after years of restless travel. The people he watched there were fishermen, builders, ordinary working men, and they began turning up in his painting. This was his first large canvas of workers shown as figures to be reckoned with. A mason and a mechanic stride straight toward us, filling the frame, painted in the loose broad strokes and raw colour he was using in those Warnemünde years. He gives them no anecdote and almost no setting, just the weight of two men walking home from a job. A few years later, back in Norway, these anonymous labourers would grow into the marching crowd of his Workers Returning Home.