Edvard Munch – The Beast

The Beast

The Beast by Edvard Munch is a painting of 1901, held under inventory number KA 18,1965 by the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. The original is oil on canvas and measures 63.5 x 94.5 cm. A woman sits facing the viewer directly, her long dark hair falling over both shoulders.

The figure fills almost the whole height of the canvas and is seen from close up. She sits upright, nude to below the hips, her hands lowered near her lap. The hair is dark brown, almost black, and falls in heavy masses down both sides of the body, past the waist. The face is pale, with pink cheeks, dark brows and a greenish shadow beneath the eyes; the mouth is small and closed, and the gaze goes straight out and slightly to her left.

The body is painted in warm cream, yellow, pink and orange with broad strokes, shaded along the sides with greenish grey. The background is not a room but an arrangement of colour planes: a mustard-olive panel in the upper left, dark green-blue left of centre, and blue and teal at the right in vertical strokes. A curved red line runs in the upper right corner, the only non-figurative mark on the canvas. At the lower left is a blue-grey area. A red-brown signature sits in the lower right corner.

The museum record lists the work as a seated nude, while our shelf and much of the literature give it as The Beast; both names refer to the same painting, and it is the inventory number that identifies it reliably. The dating is not entirely settled either: our specification gives 1901, while the museum record places the work a year later, in 1902. In these years Munch painted a series of seated nudes in which the background is abandoned as a room and used as a plane of colour instead.

The paint is applied quickly and in broad sweeps that are not hidden; in places the weave of the canvas shows through. The hair is made with long strokes from the crown downward, and the body with straighter, almost horizontal strokes that give it softness. There are almost no contours; the forms emerge from the difference between the warmth of the skin and the coolness of the ground.

Ours is an oil on canvas reproduction, hand-painted, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. As a museum-quality reproduction this motif is demanding in the skin, where the yellow has to run into the pink without a hard transition.

The format is upright and narrow, so the painting works well on a narrower wall, in an alcove or beside a doorway, where it has some empty space around it. Because the skin is warm and the background cool, it suits a neutral wall – white, pale grey or sand – that doubles neither side. Hang it at eye level, since the scene is built on a direct look. The light should be even and warm; cold light takes the yellow out of the body and pushes it toward grey.

Ten sizes are available 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.