Edvard Munch – Separation

Separation

Separation by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1894, held under inventory number MM.M.00884 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 150 x 115 cm and lies across. The scene is a shore: a woman in a long white dress is leaving at the left, and her long golden-yellow hair streams horizontally across the whole canvas to the man at the right.

The woman is seen in profile and turned away; we hardly see her face, and the body is given as a single bright plane that dissolves towards the lower edge. At the right a man stands in a dark blue coat, head bowed, his face pale and drawn, one hand hanging at his side. 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. The grass is green and blue-green, and the sea is smooth and lighter than the sky. The scene divides in two: the left half open and light, the right closed and dark, and the middle empty grass with only the band of hair running across it. Nothing else joins them.

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. Munch assembled The Frieze of Life over several decades and understood it as a series of scenes about love, anxiety and death that can be read together.

The paint is laid thin and in broad, soft planes with no worked-up drawing. The hair is one long stroke that thins and branches towards the right. The woman’s outline does not end in a line but blurs into the grass, so that the figure looks as though it were already dissolving. In places the layer is thin enough for the weave of the canvas to show through. The palette is narrowed to white, golden yellow, dark blue and green; the only warm accents are the sun, the hair and the red leaves, and it is those three that carry all the meaning.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, brush stroke by brush stroke, made to order and never a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one to the next; those small differences are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. The hardest passage here is the hair, which must stay one flowing stroke instead of becoming a row of separate strands. As a hand-painted oil reproduction this motif asks above all for a steady hand along the long horizontal.

The format lies across and the scene is quiet, so the painting suits a bedroom, a living room or a hallway where there is room enough for the long horizontal of the hair to open out. A light, quiet wall serves it best; against a patterned wall the soft transitions are lost. Hang it at eye level in soft, even light. As hand-painted wall art it works best alone, since the whole composition is set in one direction and does not tolerate a neighbour pulling it back.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. You choose the frame in our 3D app, where mouldings and colours can be tried against this motif; a narrow pale moulding does not interrupt the horizontal. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.