Red Virginia Creeper

The house is real. It still stands in Åsgårdstrand, the little coastal town south of Oslo where Munch spent his summers and set some of his best-known pictures. Every autumn a Virginia creeper turns the wall of a house like this deep red, and Munch took that ordinary fact and pushed it until the building seems to bleed. In front, a man with a greenish, frightened face hurries straight toward us along the road, cut off at the shoulders by the frame, as if fleeing something in the house behind him that we are never shown. Munch painted it around the turn of the century and hung it in Berlin in 1902 among the works he grouped as his Frieze of Life. The same house sits in the background of his Girls on the Bridge.