Edvard Munch – The Yellow Log

The Yellow Log

The Yellow Log by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1912, held under inventory number MM.M.00393 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 159.5 x 129.5 cm. The scene is a snow-covered pine forest in winter with a felled log lying through the middle of it.

The log is the subject. Its sawn end faces the viewer directly and is painted as a large bright yellow disc at the lower centre of the canvas, cut across by a white line. From there the log withdraws upwards and back in steep perspective, a yellow wedge growing narrower until it is lost among the trees. That single run carries the whole space of the picture.

In front of it and beside it rise tall pine trunks. Three are especially strong: one at the left edge, one to the right of centre and one at the far right. Their bark is not brown but pink-violet and grey, and across it are painted dark loops and circles that read at once as bark markings and as ornament.

The ground is under snow. The snow is not white but built from planes of white, lilac and blue, with brown and green traces of disturbed earth showing beside the log. At the left in the middle distance lies a second yellow log, set horizontally, its smaller sawn end turned outward.

Behind stand dark green firs and a row of slender bare trunks, with the blue-green depth of the forest between them. Dark branches close the upper edge. There is no sky anywhere: the forest reaches all four edges and the scene stays closed.

The paint is thick and decided. It is laid in broad strokes that make no attempt to hide, and in places it stands proud of the canvas. The yellow logs are the densest part of the picture, while the snow is dragged out in long horizontal strokes. The opposition of yellow against violet carries all the colour tension; green and blue stay in the background.

The structure is unusual and is what makes the picture memorable. The log runs into depth on a steep diagonal while the upright trunks cross that diagonal and hold it back. So the painting offers a deep space and a flat pattern at the same time, and the viewer moves between the two. Munch did not resolve the contradiction; he left it open.

Our version is hand-painted in oils on canvas, stroke by stroke, and is never printed. Because every canvas is made individually to order, no two match down to the last detail; small differences in the paint are the mark of a human hand and not a fault. In this fine art reproduction the hardest passage is the yellow: it has to stay clean and bright, or the scene sinks into brown and the log stops glowing.

The format is landscape and the scene bright and strongly coloured, so this piece of wall art carries a larger wall and some distance, which lets the perspective of the log open out. It works well in a living room, an office or a hallway. The wall should be calm and light, because yellow quietens against a dark ground and loses its light. Hang it at eye level, with even and neutral lighting.

Nine sizes are offered from 45 x 38 cm to 231 x 180 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the painter’s work is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and work on the Edvard Munch blog.