Description
Separation
Separation by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1894 that carries inventory number MM.M.00884 at the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. It measures 150 x 115 cm. A woman in a long white dress stands at the left, turned away in profile, and her long golden-yellow hair streams horizontally across the whole picture to the right. There a man stands in a dark blue coat, head bowed, his face pale and drawn. Between them a shore curves past a small white house, an orange sun hangs low over the water at the left, and beside the man a plant with red leaves climbs upward. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.
The work belongs to Munch’s cycle The Frieze of Life. What links the two figures is neither a glance nor a touch but that band of hair: the woman is already leaving, yet her hair still reaches the man, like a tie not quite cut. The red leaves beside him and the red trail running down his coat are often read as a sign of a wound; that is an interpretation and not something the painter wrote down.
The canvas is painted extraordinarily thinly. Large areas are bare, unpainted sand-coloured ground with the weave of the cloth showing through, and the colour is in places only breathed over it. The surface is cracked and worn, which in this work is not damage but a consequence of how Munch worked and of how he treated his canvases, which he often left out of doors.
Our reproduction is hand-painted throughout in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke and always to order; it is not a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one copy to the next.
The painting is light and airy despite the darkness of its subject, so it works well in a living room, a bedroom or on a wider hallway wall. Its sand, blue and creamy white tones sit with light wood and white walls, while the red leaves at the right edge act as the one warm accent; because the motif is drawn out across the width, it sits well above a longer piece of furniture.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller horizontal format to a large canvas, and we can also make it to a size you specify. Other works by the same artist are among the paintings of Edvard Munch, and his life and work are covered in the biography of Edvard Munch.
| Year: | 1894 |
| Original size: | 150 cm x 115 cm |
| Style: | Symbolism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Munch Museum (Munchmuseet), Oslo |
