Workers on their Way Home

In July 1913 Norway passed its first law on cinemas, giving local councils the power to license every public showing of moving pictures. Film was new enough to worry lawmakers, and that same year Munch began this canvas, more than two metres wide, of men coming off a shift and walking straight towards us. When Tate Modern staged its 2012 exhibition The Modern Eye, about Munch's interest in photography and film, it singled out this painting for a device linked to the cinema, figures that seem to be moving towards the viewer. The men at the front loom large, heavy in the shoulders, as if seen from very close. At the lower right one worker is painted so thinly that the street shows through his body, a little like a double exposure. The picture was still in Munch's possession when he died in 1944, and it came to the city of Oslo with the rest of his bequest.