The Girls on the Bridge 1901

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edvardmunch

National Gallery, Oslo, Norway

painting, oil-paint

portrait

painting

oil-paint

landscape

oil painting

neo expressionist

expressionism

cityscape

post-impressionism

expressionist

Dimensions 136 x 125.5 cm

Edvard Munch made 'The Girls on the Bridge’ in Oslo using oil paint. Look at how the strokes of colour have been dragged, one after the other, across the canvas to build the composition, each dab and dash creating surface tension through its texture. I feel for Munch here, as the thickness of the paint varies across the canvas – thick around the dresses of the girls, and thinner in the sky, so it's almost as if he’s searching for something but he is not sure what. You can almost see him thinking, trying to catch that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you look out across a vista. It reminds me of other painters, like Van Gogh, who were so good at capturing a fleeting moment, a feeling in the pit of your stomach, that they could make an entire painting feel so true, raw and real. What a conversation these painters were having, across countries and across time! They each captured the world as they saw it, so that we can see it today.

Comments

artera about 1 year ago

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Edvard Munch's (1863-1944) art is so closely associated with themes of anguish and despair that it is easy to forget that he also painted scenes of great lyrical beauty. When this painting was made he was based in Germany, but he frequently returned home to Norway, and this charming picture was completed during one of these brief interludes. The scene is set on a bridge leading to the steamship pier at Asgarstrand, where Munch rented a house during the summer. This is an early version of the subject but, as was his custom when he was happy with an image, Munch reworked the theme endlessly, experimenting with different arrangements of the figures. He aso tried it out in different media: along with several paintings of this subject, he also produced lithograph and woodcut versions. On one level, Munch's painting is a celebration of the long summer nights in Norway, when it never got completely dark. Indeed, the original title of this picture was Summer Night. In addition, though, it is also about the sexual awakening of the girls. In this context, the phallic shape of the tree takes on a new significance. During the 1890s, the artist conceived the plan of linking a number of his pictures together to form a Frieze of Life, which he described as "a poem of life, love, and death." One section of this was devoted to puberty and the first stirrings of innocent desire. Here, Munch may have been influenced by Frank Wedekind's controversial play, The Awakening of Spring (1891), which dealt with the subject of adolescent love.