Music on the Karl Johan Street

Music on Karl Johan Street of 1889 at the Kunsthaus Zürich is an early treatment of Oslo's main boulevard animated by a festive occasion — an outdoor concert or civic celebration filling the street with crowds engaged in the collective experience of public music. By 1889 Munch had developed a sustained interest in Karl Johans gate as a site that concentrated the social and psychological experience of urban modernity, and the street under different conditions — ordinary promenade, festive celebration, the uncanny Evening on Karl Johan — occupied him across a decade of artistic development. His treatment of the music subject shows the Impressionist influence of his recent Paris experience: the crowd as a collective chromatic impression, the figures loosely rendered as participants in a visual and acoustic atmosphere. Kunsthaus Zürich, with its significant holdings of Northern European Expressionism, holds this early canvas as a precursor to the later German Expressionist urban subjects that would cite Munch as their essential predecessor.

The crowd is rendered as an ensemble of figures whose individuality is subordinated to the collective experience of listening. Munch uses the wide boulevard to create spatial depth, figures receding toward a vanishing point.