Under the Stars

Under the Stars by Edvard Munch from 1900, held at the Munch Museum, painted at the very beginning of the new century, depicts figures or a landscape viewed beneath a starry sky — a subject that, in Munch's hands, would carry existential weight beyond the merely picturesque. The night sky, with its vast expanse of stars, was a subject with deep romantic and symbolist resonance: the individual or landscape beneath the infinity of the cosmos suggesting both beauty and the terror of human smallness. Van Gogh had transformed the starry night into one of the most charged symbolic subjects of the Post-Impressionist generation, and Munch's engagement with the subject acknowledged that tradition while bringing his own Norwegian coastal sky into play.

Munch renders the night sky with his characteristic bold treatment, using swirling or stippled marks to suggest the luminosity of stars against the dark blue-black of the night. His handling of the figures or landscape beneath creates a contrast between earthly solidity and the cosmic expanse above.