Desde Karl Johan

Munch was 25 in 1889, and that spring he did something almost unheard of for a young painter in Kristiania. He filled a hall with his own work and nothing else. The show won him a state travel grant, and by October he had gone to Paris. This view up Karl Johan, the broad street that runs to the royal palace, belongs to the months in between. Daylight, a few figures, nothing happening. Three years later he painted the same street in the evening with the crowd walking straight out at the viewer, and that is the Karl Johan people remember. He never signed this one. It stayed with him for the next 55 years and came to the museum in Oslo with the roughly 1,100 paintings he left the city in his will.