Le Retour des ouvriers

After 1916 Munch settled at Ekely, a property on the edge of Oslo, and his subjects grew quieter and more everyday, farm work, gardens, the life of the district around him. This is one exception, a crowd of factory workers walking straight at us at the end of a shift, filling the whole width of the street. He returned to the motif over several years, and this version dates to around 1920. It is an unusually modern subject for him, the anonymous industrial crowd of a growing city, painted in rough, hurried strokes that keep the figures moving. Norway was barely 15 years into its independence, its towns filling with exactly this kind of working population. The men come forward as one mass, more crowd than separate faces, pressing the street to its edges.