Dance on the Shore

Dance on the Shore from 1900 belongs to Munch's recurring engagement with the motif of women dancing or walking on the shoreline at Åsgårdstrand — a subject that combined the specific Norwegian summer world he inhabited with the Symbolist resonance of the dance as a figure for life's cyclical passage. This version, held at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, is one of several treatments of the shoreline dance motif that Munch produced across the decade; each varies in emotional register from celebratory to elegiac. The women's white dresses against the dark fjord water and the pale summer sky created for Munch a combination of beauty and sadness that he found inexhaustible.

Munch places the dancing figures in a strongly horizontal composition dominated by the dark band of water and the lighter sky, the women's white forms creating vertical accents that break the landscape's insistence on the horizontal. The handling is broadly Expressionist, with the figures barely individualized but their collective presence strongly felt.