Edvard Munch – The Dance of Life

The Dance of Life

The Dance of Life by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1899-1900, held under inventory number NG.M.00941 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 191 x 125 cm and lies across. The scene shows dancers on the grass beside the sea under a moon whose reflection falls on the water as a single upright column of light.

At the centre a couple dances: a man in black and a woman in a red dress that winds around his feet. Their faces are close but they do not look at each other. A young woman in white stands alone at the left, arms at her sides and head slightly inclined; an older woman in black stands at the right, hands down and face severe and closed. More couples turn in the background, given as dark and coloured planes without detail. Above them runs a band of sea with the moon’s reflection, and above that a pale night sky. The three principal figures stand in a row, almost as on a stage, each occupying its own part of the canvas: white at the left, red at the centre, black at the right. It is that arrangement which makes the scene read more like a tableau than a dance.

The painting is a central work in Munch’s cycle The Frieze of Life, in which he gathered his motifs of love, anxiety and death. The three female figures are usually read as three ages of one woman: the girl in white, the mature woman in red, and the widow in black. That is an interpretation, not something the painter wrote down. It is likewise often said that he was prompted by a play by Helge Rode; that too is a supposition. Munch repeated the motif later in several versions and counted it among the central works of the cycle; this is the largest and best known of them.

The paint is laid in broad, flat fields with clear outlines. The red dress is the most saturated plane on the canvas and takes the eye first; the white and the black at the sides frame it. The strokes are long and follow the shape they build, and in places the layer is thin enough for the weave of the canvas to show through. The grass is green and blue-green, and the sea smooth and lighter. The moon’s column is the only vertical in the upper half and holds the scene together; without it the horizontal bands would fly apart.

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 red dress, which must stay clean and full without becoming a flat patch. As hand-painted canvas art this motif asks above all for precision in the relation between the three principal figures.

The format is markedly horizontal and the painting large, so it needs a wide unbroken wall and some distance: a living room, a dining room or a broad corridor. A light, quiet wall serves it best and leaves the red room to breathe; against a red or strongly coloured wall the central plane is lost. Hang it at eye level in even light. As wall decor it works best above a longer piece of furniture, where it has the full width available.

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; at this width a simple, not overly broad moulding serves it best. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.