Set Design for Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts"

In 1906 the Berlin director Max Reinhardt was opening the Kammerspiele, a small intimate theatre attached to his Deutsches Theater, and he asked Munch to design the staging for Ibsen's Ghosts. This is one of the results, worked in tempera on unprimed canvas so it would read like a painted backdrop rather than a finished picture. Ibsen's play shuts a widow and her dying son inside one gloomy room where the past keeps returning, and Munch built that mood into the setting. Reinhardt singled out the black armchair, saying its darkness summed up the whole atmosphere of the drama. At the back the room opens onto Norwegian mountains and a grey, rain-soaked light that was meant to break into dawn by the play's end. Munch designed several such settings for Reinhardt that season, and they were later grouped together as the Reinhardt Frieze.