Separation

In the 1890s Munch was building what he called the Frieze of Life, a cycle of pictures about love, anxiety and death, and he returned to this scene of parting more than once. A fair-haired woman stands at the shore looking away, already half-gone. The man beside her has turned inward, head bowed, one hand pressed to his chest. Munch said he painted not what he saw but what he had seen, and this is memory rather than a single moment. That is why her hair matters: a long strand of it drifts back across the gap between them and curls around the man, as if her leaving cannot quite cut the tie. Down by his hand a small red plant shows in the grass, level with his heart, which seems to bleed into it.