아침의 하품

By 1913 the man who had painted The Scream 20 years earlier was after something much quieter. A woman sits on the edge of an unmade bed in the first minutes of the day, caught mid-yawn, one arm stretching. There is no dread here and no symbolism to decode, just the ordinary awkward business of waking up, which almost nobody bothered to paint. Munch renders it in loose, bright, high-keyed colour, the Expressionist handling he was known for turned onto a completely undramatic subject. The canvas ended up with Rolf Stenersen, a Norwegian financier and writer who became Munch's friend and a great collector of his work, and it hangs today in Bergen among the pictures Stenersen gave to the city.