Edvard Munch – Woman Standing in the Doorway

Woman Standing in the Doorway

Woman Standing in the Doorway by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on cardboard of 1906–1907, held under inventory number MM.M.00630 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 45.5 x 54.5 cm and stands upright. A single figure fills the middle, framed by the opening she stands in.

The woman is seen from the front and at full length. She wears a long pale dress of cream and yellow that falls straight to the floor and hides her feet almost entirely; only the toes show, in a few red strokes. Above the waist the painting turns warm and bare: the upper body is worked in ochre and pink, the breasts indicated rather than modelled, the hands brought together in front of her.

Her head is small against the shoulders. The hair is a solid red-brown cap; the eyes are two green-blue marks under a shadowed brow, the mouth a short red line. The face is not a likeness – set down in six or seven strokes and then left, which is what keeps her from becoming a portrait.

She stands inside a doorway. Two pale uprights and a lintel enclose her, painted in white and grey-blue, and behind her the opening is filled with the same cool light. That frame within the frame is what the title names, and it holds the figure in place while everything around her moves.

To the left the wall gives way to an open view. Autumn trees are laid in flat orange, red and yellow, a slate-blue band runs behind them, and teal-green bushes stand at the bottom. A red-brown post with a crossbar rises through it like a mast. The colour there is at its loudest and the drawing at its freest.

To the right the room closes again. A deep blue plane covers the upper corner in wide curving strokes, and below it a dark red-brown shape reads as a chair pushed against the wall. The two sides are opposites: open and warm at the left, closed and cold at the right, the woman between them.

The floor takes up the whole lower third, a broad orange-pink field pulled across in long horizontal drags, with red strokes running towards the front edge. At the lower left a pale pink rectangle lies flat on it, reading as a bed or a rug seen sharply from above.

The support is cardboard and Munch uses it: the paint is thin, and over large areas the tone of the ground shows straight through the colour. The margins at the right and along the bottom are left unpainted, exactly where the artist stopped. The museum records the work as unsigned, and its catalogue lists the painting as Woll M 740.

These years fall in the middle of Munch’s long stay in Germany, and the handling belongs to that time: quick, open, more interested in placing a colour than in finishing a form. The work succeeds by contrast rather than depth. The room is built from flat planes set side by side, and the pale dress is the lightest of them, which is why the eye goes to her first and stays.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. Said plainly: the original is on cardboard, while our reproduction is painted on canvas, the usual support for a hand-painted work of this kind. Because each is painted for its own order, no two match down to the detail, and the small differences are the mark of a hand. The hardest passage is the dress, which must stay light without going chalky.

The format is upright and the mood still, so the painting suits a bedroom, a hallway or a quiet corner of a living room. A plain, pale wall serves it best, since the orange floor and blue corner already carry the colour.

Ten sizes are available from 40 x 50 cm up to 135 x 160 cm, along with a custom size, 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.