Starry Night

It says something about Edvard Munch's career that his Starry Night hangs not in Oslo but in a German industrial town. When Munch first showed in Berlin in 1892 the reaction was so hostile the exhibition was shut down within a week, and the scandal made his name in Germany years before Norway warmed to him. Around 1900 he painted this quiet night on the coast at Åsgårdstrand, the little fjord resort where he spent his summers: a dark shoreline, a heavy sky, the stars more felt than counted. Karl Ernst Osthaus, who was assembling one of Europe's boldest modern collections in Essen, bought Munch early, and this canvas has been in the Folkwang since those first years. It's a calmer cousin of the more famous Starry Night he had painted in 1893, the same shore visited again with the panic drained out of it.