Edvard Munch – Death Struggle

Death Struggle

Death Struggle by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1915, held under inventory number MM.M.00002 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 231 x 174 cm. A bed with a dying figure runs in from the left edge, and the right two thirds are filled by five figures in dark clothing, not one of whom is looking at the bed.

The bed enters the scene diagonally from the left. At its head stands a dark brown-black bedstead with turned posts. On it a figure lies with the head at the left on a pale pillow; the face is a pale greenish grey, the eyes are closed, the hair dark, and the body is under a pale blue-green sheet. Across the bed lies a red and violet patterned quilt in dark red and purple blocks, the strongest colour anywhere in the lower half.

Along the bottom edge is pale blue-green bedding carrying a few small things: a dark scribbled object, a pale yellow-white circular form that reads as a basin or a plate, and a pale ochre shape in the corner itself. None of it is drawn out; all of it is suggested in a few strokes.

The right two thirds hold five figures pressed together, all in dark green-black. At the left of the group is a small, childlike figure with a flat pale blue-grey mask of a face and dark bobbed hair, staring straight out. Beside her is a figure with her hair in a bun and her head tilted, her face pale green, pressing a pink-red cloth to her mouth. Right of centre stands a larger figure with a red-brown, rawly worked face, dark eye sockets and a moustache; the hands are raised and joined at the chest, painted a pale green-white. At the far right is a figure with a very pale mint-green face and wide dark eyes. Another dark head shows behind them.

The background is wallpaper: a warm cream-ochre ground scattered with large oval blotches of red, pink, orange and mauve, like petals or stains. Toward the right the wall darkens into deep maroon-brown. It is that cheerful wallpaper behind the dark figures that takes all the solemnity out of the scene. The motif exists twice: our canvas in Oslo and a smaller version of the same year in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, measuring 182.4 x 140.3 cm. This is not Death in the Sickroom, an earlier and different motif of which this shelf already sells the National Museum version.

The handling is late, broad and dry. The paint is matt, in places thin enough for the weave to show through and elsewhere gathered into dense strokes, above all on the faces, which are the only really worked passages. The wallpaper is dabbed on in separate touches and the quilt set down in a few wide sweeps. Along the left edge a light band and some abrasion are visible. Nowhere do the strokes melt together; everything stays legible as a stroke.

Ours is a museum-quality reproduction painted by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is painted for its own order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. Among famous paintings on canvas this motif is demanding in the faces, since each has to stay a mask with a colour of its own and must not be smoothed into a portrait.

Because the original is large and horizontal, the painting needs a long quiet wall and enough room to stand back so that the five faces read as a group. The scene is dark, so a light warm wall suits it and opens the wallpaper; against a dark ground the right half closes into a single blackness. Hang it at eye level, since the figures are standing and looking straight out. The light should be even and not too strong; a hard lamp flattens the matt surface and drains the colour out of the faces.

Ten sizes are available from 50 x 37 cm up to 231 x 180 cm, which matches the original exactly in width, along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.