Mulher. Esfinge

Munch painted this large canvas in 1894, in the years he was building his Frieze of Life, a running series about love, anxiety and death that he reworked for decades. Here a woman appears three times across one shoreline: a girl in white gazing out to sea, a nude standing full-front and unashamed, and a figure in black drawn back among the trees. Munch's circle in Kristiania and Berlin argued constantly about women, freedom and the so-called new woman, and he gave the picture the subtitle Sphinx, woman as a riddle a man cannot solve. A pale, brooding man stands off at the right edge, shut out of the scene. From this composition Munch would later draw The Dance of Life, one of his best-known works.