Landscape

Landscape of 1904 at the Munch Museum represents Munch's sustained engagement with the Norwegian natural world as a counterbalance to the intensely psychological figure compositions that made his reputation. His landscape work across four decades was dominated by the fjord landscape of Åsgårdstrand and the coastal scenery of the Oslo fjord region, with occasional departures to other Norwegian locations and the German countryside around Warnemünde and Lübeck. By 1904 his landscapes showed the same expressive intensity that characterised his figure subjects — colour heightened beyond natural observation, form simplified to its essential structure — but the absence of human psychological drama gave them a different register: expansive rather than claustrophobic, open rather than enclosed. The Munch Museum's comprehensive holdings of his landscape work document this less-known dimension of his production alongside the celebrated symbolic compositions, providing a more complete picture of an artist whose range extended well beyond the anguished psychological subjects that dominate his public image.

Munch renders the landscape with the expressionist directness of his mature style — the forms somewhat simplified and the color organized for expressive impact rather than naturalistic description. His brushwork in landscape subjects maintained the loose, energetic quality of his figure work, the same expressive touch applied to trees, fields, and sky as to his human subjects. His palette in late landscapes tended toward the warm greens and blues of the Norwegian summer and the rich colors of the autumn.