Chopping and Cutting Wood

In the summer of 1902, Munch was dividing his time between Åsgårdstrand on the Oslofjord and various German cities, and this painting of men chopping and cutting wood belongs to his sustained engagement with Norwegian rural and coastal labour. The wood-cutting subject might seem at odds with the symbolic anxieties of his Frieze of Life paintings, but Munch had always maintained a parallel practice of direct observation alongside his more programmatic Symbolist works. His teacher Christian Krohg had encouraged close study of everyday Norwegian life, and Munch's friends among the Åsgårdstrand summer community included workers and fishermen as well as artists and intellectuals. Physical labour, with its rhythmic bodily effort and connection to seasonal necessity, offered Munch material for a kind of painting that was more immediate and less conceptually weighted than the great psychological cycles that made his name. These works speak to a strain of Scandinavian naturalism that persisted beneath his international Symbolist reputation.

Munch renders the wood-cutting activity with the direct, energetic handling that suited the physical subject — the figures engaged in chopping and cutting depicted with the same expressive brushwork he brought to all his figure subjects, the physical energy of the labor conveyed through his handling. His handling of the outdoor light and the specific spatial context of the activity creates the naturalistic atmosphere of the direct observation subject.