Women Picking Fruit

Munch spent most of 1906 in Germany, moving between Weimar, Bad Kösen and Berlin, and much of that year he was working for the theatre. Max Reinhardt had him design Ibsen's Ghosts for the Kammerspiele in Berlin, and out of it came a commission for a frieze in the theatre foyer. The canvases he was making for schemes like that are wide and shallow, meant to hang high on a wall, and painted in thin tempera on unprimed cloth so the surface stays matt and chalky, closer to a wall painting than to an oil. This one has that shape and that technique, over a metre and a half across, and it uses a motif he returned to again and again in those years, women in a garden reaching up into the branches of a fruit tree. It never left his hands. He willed everything in his studio to the city of Oslo, which is how it came to the Munch Museum.