Edvard Munch – Winter Studio under Construction

Winter Studio under Construction

Winter Studio under Construction by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1929, held under inventory number MM.M.00376 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 230.5 x 153 cm. The scene is a building site: workmen are at work in the foreground while behind them the concrete frame of a building goes up.

At the far left a workman in blue overalls and a pale grey-green cap is bent forward. He holds a long-handled tool whose blade sits in a trough in the bottom left corner. His back is to us and his head is down. In front of him and at the centre stand two low pale mortar troughs in grey-blue, each carrying a reddish-brown smear.

Right of centre three workmen stand facing the viewer. The first wears a grey-green hat and blue overalls over a pale shirt and holds a plank across his front. Behind him a second stands in a pale blue shirt, half hidden. The third is at the right in a grey-green cap, blue trousers and a pale blue shirt, leaning on a timber. Their faces are pale and barely worked up.

Along the right edge stands a large ochre-brown timber trestle with reddish-brown boxes stacked on it, and more timber at the very edge. At the far right a tall pale figure with raised arms rises against a grey-green vertical panel. In the middle distance a crowd of small figures moves about in yellow, orange, blue and red.

Behind them the building itself is going up: a pale concrete frame with large dark window openings, scaffolding, and small figures on the roof and the upper floor, with a tall red-orange pipe rising left of centre. The sky is a pale grey-blue and white. Along the bottom runs a pale ochre-brown floor of planks. The motif exists twice, both of 1929 and both in the Munch Museum: our canvas at 230.5 x 153 cm and the smaller MM.M.00870 at 114.5 x 149.5 cm.

The paint is thin, dry and sketch-like. The ground shows through the colour almost everywhere and the strokes are quick and stay legible as strokes. This is Munch at sixty-six, drawing with a loaded brush and finishing nothing. The range is pale and chalky: blues, ochres and greys with occasional reddish-brown accents. It is that speed that gives the scene the feeling of work still going on.

Ours is hand-painted canvas art made in oil, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is painted for its own 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 an oil on canvas reproduction this motif is demanding precisely in the thinness, since the ground has to stay visible; cover the canvas over and the scene loses its lightness and turns hard.

Because the format is markedly horizontal and the scene bright, the painting needs a long wall and some standing-back room for the small figures at the back to read at all. It works above a sofa, in a dining room or in an office. The pale range wants a quiet wall in a warm grey or white; a strongly coloured ground swallows it. Hang it at eye level or a little above. The light should be even and neutral, as a warm lamp pushes the pale blues toward grey.

Ten sizes are available from 60 x 40 cm up to 300 x 200 cm, 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.