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Lot Essay
The present woodcut from 1918 is Munch’s final and most significant rendering of the subject of The Girls on the Bridge, a motif that he had worked on as early as 1901 in a painted version now in the National Gallery, Oslo, Norway. The scene depicts the jetty in the seaside village of Åsgårdstrand, on the Christiana fjord north of the capital, where Munch owned a small house.
The painted and the woodcut version closely resemble each other in composition, yet the softer lines of the painting, still rooted in the style of the art nouveau, are here articulated in a harder, expressionist manner, accentuated by the woodcut medium. The present composition, like the other printed versions, is reversed on its horizontal axis and shows a formal and psychological mirroring of the scene.
During 1908-09 Munch had suffered from an emotional collapse, which may have been caused by the death of his muse Aase Nørregard. It has been suggested that the figure of the girl in white in another of Munch’s seminal woodcuts, Two Human Beings: The Lonely Ones, was inspired by Nørregard and it is tempting to think that the figure of the girl in white in The Girls on the Bridge, with her head downcast and looking into the black expanse of water below, was also inspired by Munch’s memories of his departed friend.
The three silent figures stand in a unified group, huddled together as if threatened by the looming linden tree and its reflection in the water below. The dense vertical striations in the sky and on the floor of the jetty seem to imprison the figures into a kind of paralysis or lethargy. At the same time, the sharp diagonal incisions of the railing collide with the vertical gouges on the floor and in the sky to create a vortex of movement in an otherwise static scene. It is this simultaneous sense of quiescence and internal unrest, which is central to Munch’s temperament, and which makes The Girls on the Bridge a quintessential work in his printed oeuvre.
The painted and the woodcut version closely resemble each other in composition, yet the softer lines of the painting, still rooted in the style of the art nouveau, are here articulated in a harder, expressionist manner, accentuated by the woodcut medium. The present composition, like the other printed versions, is reversed on its horizontal axis and shows a formal and psychological mirroring of the scene.
During 1908-09 Munch had suffered from an emotional collapse, which may have been caused by the death of his muse Aase Nørregard. It has been suggested that the figure of the girl in white in another of Munch’s seminal woodcuts, Two Human Beings: The Lonely Ones, was inspired by Nørregard and it is tempting to think that the figure of the girl in white in The Girls on the Bridge, with her head downcast and looking into the black expanse of water below, was also inspired by Munch’s memories of his departed friend.
The three silent figures stand in a unified group, huddled together as if threatened by the looming linden tree and its reflection in the water below. The dense vertical striations in the sky and on the floor of the jetty seem to imprison the figures into a kind of paralysis or lethargy. At the same time, the sharp diagonal incisions of the railing collide with the vertical gouges on the floor and in the sky to create a vortex of movement in an otherwise static scene. It is this simultaneous sense of quiescence and internal unrest, which is central to Munch’s temperament, and which makes The Girls on the Bridge a quintessential work in his printed oeuvre.