Edvard Munch – The Woman in Three Stages

The Woman in Three Stages

The Woman in Three Stages by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1894, held under inventory number RMS.M.00252 by the Art Museums of Bergen (KODE). The original measures 250 x 164 cm and is the largest work on this shelf. Three female figures stand side by side, and at the far right a man stands apart from them, separated by a dark vertical post.

At the left a woman stands in a long white-cream dress, seen in profile and turned away from the viewer, her long pale hair falling down her back. The ground beneath her is sandy ochre, and behind her a blue shoreline curves away. At the centre stands a nude woman facing us directly, her arms raised behind her head and her hair red-orange; she stands on dark green, and a pinkish mauve band curves behind her. To her right a woman stands in a long black dress, also frontal, with a pale face, dark hair and large dark eyes staring straight out.

At the far right a man in dark clothing with a pale face and slightly lowered head is set into a dark blue rectangle resembling a doorway; a vertical dark red-brown post separates him from the women. Between the woman in black and the man, dark red dripping forms climb from the lower edge. In the upper left corner a dark green-black elongated mass lies against blue. A signature sits in the lower left corner.

The work is also known as the Sphinx and belongs to the Frieze of Life. The three female figures are usually read as three ages of life or three images of womanhood, with the man at the side as an onlooker who stays outside; that is an established interpretation rather than a museum fact. What is not in dispute is the arrangement: three figures at the same scale, and a fourth physically separated by an architectural element.

Munch handled a canvas of this size with very thin paint. The backgrounds are laid in broad, sparse passages through which the weave is visible in many places, while the faces and hair are carried out more densely. There are almost no contours; the figures separate from the ground only by a difference in tone, and the edges of the dresses in places leave the underpainting showing.

Ours is hand-painted canvas art, made in oil, 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. A museum-quality reproduction at this format takes most of its work in the large quiet planes of the background, where any unevenness shows.

Because of the original size and the horizontal arrangement of four figures, the painting needs a long uninterrupted wall: above a longer sofa, in a dining room, or in a hall with enough standing-back room. In a small room, choose a smaller size, or the figures crowd together. The wall should be light and neutral, since the painting brings quite enough colour of its own; the light should be even across the whole width, because a single beam on one side leaves the other in shadow.

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.