Separation

By 1906 Edvard Munch was living restlessly in Germany, drinking hard, his nerves close to the breakdown that would put him in a Copenhagen clinic two years later. In that state he kept returning to a scene he had first painted in the 1890s, a woman walking away. Here she stands at the shore in white, turned toward the sea, while her long fair hair streams back and brushes the chest of the man she is leaving. He is dressed in black, head bowed, one hand pressed to his heart, and that hand is bleeding. The flowing line that carries her hair to his body belongs entirely to its moment, the curling Art Nouveau that filled European design around 1900. Munch painted it in tempera on canvas he left partly unprimed, so the weave shows through the thin color.