Cinzas

Munch painted this in 1894, in the years he was assembling what he called the Frieze of Life, a cycle about love, anxiety and death drawn largely from his own bruised affairs. The scene is the moment after. A woman stands upright, half undressed with her hair loose and wild, her hands lifted toward her head, while the man crouches to one side, folded in on himself and turned away. Around them the forest has gone dark and the trunks lean with the same unease as the figures. Munch belonged to a Kristiania bohemia that argued fiercely about free love, and the pictures from these years read like the morning after those ideas. An early title he gave it was simply After the Fall.