Seated Nude

Seated Nude by Edvard Munch from 1902, held at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, belongs to his series of nude figure studies made during this period of intense figure work. The seated pose — one of the classical positions of the nude figure, allowing study of the body's compressed form — was among the standard subjects of academic life drawing that Munch had absorbed through his training and European exposure. Munch's treatment of the seated nude, however, goes beyond academic exercise, bringing his characteristic psychological directness to a subject that in his hands rarely loses the sense of an individual human presence even when rendered in a generalized way.

The seated position compresses the figure into a more contained form than the standing nude, and Munch uses tonal modeling to define the body's planes and volumes against a simplified background. His handling of the seated figure's weight — the sense of physical mass resting on a surface — is achieved through confident directional brushwork.