窗边之吻

Munch spent the winter of 1891 and 1892 in Nice on a Norwegian state grant, and the kiss motif took shape there in a run of variants painted within months of each other. This is one of the earliest of them.

Two figures stand joined at the face beside a window. In the versions that followed, the two heads fuse further until the features go altogether, and by the woodcut he cut in 1897 the couple has become a single dark shape against the grain of the block. Munch kept the motif inside the Frieze of Life, the cycle about love and death that he went on rearranging for decades, moving pictures in and out of it. This canvas never left him. It went with everything else in his studio to the city of Oslo when he died in 1944, which is how it came to hang in the museum that holds his estate.