Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed

Munch was in his late 70s when he began this, painting it out between 1940 and 1943 while the German army occupied Norway and the Nazis were pulling his work from museums abroad as degenerate. He stayed shut away at his estate outside Oslo, and this is close to the last thing he made. He stands stiffly between a tall grandfather clock and his bed. The clock has no hands and no face, and its shape, a round top over a long case, quietly rhymes with his own body. Behind him the wall is hung edge to edge with his paintings, the life's work. He died in January 1944, a few months after finishing it, at 80.