Red and White

Through the summers around 1899, Munch kept returning to Åsgårdstrand, a small bathing town on the Oslofjord where he was slowly assembling his Frieze of Life, a cycle about love and death. This canvas holds two of its women. One stands in white, turned away toward the water. The other faces us in deep red, closer, older in feeling. Munch thought of them as stages of a single woman, the innocent and the passionate, and they open the love story that runs through the whole frieze toward its darker end. Behind them the pine trunks close into the blue dusk of a northern summer night, the same shoreline light he painted again and again. He hung this among the others when he showed the frieze together in Berlin in 1902.