Under the Stars

The Munch Museum dates this canvas only loosely, to sometime between 1900 and 1905. In the 1890s, in Berlin, Munch had built a set of images of lovers locked together, a man and a woman whose bodies almost merge. In this picture the pair has been taken out of doors and put under the night sky. A woman with a pale face sits holding a man whose head is sunk against her, the stars above them painted as loose spirals, and behind them runs a row of low houses with lit windows. Munch kept the painting himself, and it came to Oslo with the huge body of work he left to the city in his will. In 2017 the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård, invited to curate a show at the museum, picked it for Towards the Forest, an exhibition he built largely from works that had spent years in storage.