The Women on the Bridge

Around 1935 Munch was 71, living at Ekely, his property on the edge of Oslo, and going out very little. He was still painting the wooden pier at Åsgårdstrand, a small resort village down the Oslofjord, which he had first painted in 1901. About a dozen oil versions exist across those decades, some with girls in bright dresses and loose hair, some, like this one, with grown women in hats. He worked from memory and from his own earlier canvases as much as from the place. In Germany, where his reputation had been highest, museums pulled 82 of his works off the walls as degenerate art in 1937, two years after this. The pale manor behind the figures is the Kiøsterud house, with the crown of the old linden above it, and both still stand in the village.