Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones

A man and a woman stand at the edge of the sea, both turned away from us, close together and yet not touching. Munch first painted this pair in the 1890s, on the pale shore of Asgardstrand, the small Norwegian resort where he spent his summers, and then he could not leave it alone. For roughly 40 years he made the same two figures again and again, in oil, in etching, in woodcut, altering the colors and the distance between them each time. This oil version dates from around 1906, during his years working in Germany. When he cut the scene as a woodcut, he sawed the block into separate pieces so that he could ink the man and the woman apart from one another.