Girls on the Pier

Girls on the Pier by Edvard Munch from 1904, held at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is a later version of one of his most iconic subjects — a composition he returned to repeatedly between 1899 and 1920. The original Girls on the Pier, now in the National Gallery of Norway, established the archetypal image: young women standing on the wooden pier at Åsgårdstrand, looking down at the reflective water below. The subject condensed multiple Munchian themes — female adolescence, the reflective surface, the threshold between land and water — into an image of melancholy beauty. The Kimbell version demonstrates Munch's practice of revisiting successful compositions in different chromatic registers.

Munch organizes the composition around the strong vertical of the pier railings and the horizontal expanse of the water below, with the girls' figures creating a cluster of tones against the contrasting tones of sky and water. His use of reflection in the water gives the lower half of the composition an almost abstract quality.