Metabolism

Munch put this at the centre of his Frieze of Life and said it was as necessary to the series as a buckle is to a belt. Then he kept changing it. The version he finished around 1899 had no tree in it. Between the naked man and the woman stood a large plant sheltering an unborn child, and somewhere between 1915 and 1918 he painted the trunk that is there now over the top of it. The frame belongs to the work as well. It was carved with skulls lying among roots along the bottom and the roofs of a town along the top. In 1927 it was taken off for an exhibition and swapped for plain wood, and the picture stayed in that plain frame until the 1970s, when the carved one went back on.