Edvard Munch – To Kvinder på Stranden - Two Women on the Beach (1898)

Louisiana poster with the work, Two Women on the Beach (1898), by the Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, (1863-1944). The poster was published in connection with the Louisiana exhibition, Edvard Munch—painter and photographer, in 1988. The exhibition showed, among other things, how Munch also used photography as a background for his art: Two women on the beach is a woodcut on paper - the starting point is a photograph of Munch's aunt and sister.

In Munch's production, one encounters not least a large number of self-portraits, which can be seen as a protracted self-confrontation. From the apparently self-confident 23-year-old, to Self-portrait at 2 and a quarter of a night, where Munch, at 80, has painted himself as an old man—with death as a shadow behind him.

In connection with Munch's painted self-portraits, a number of photographs appear. Munch himself spoke about his Fate Photographs—the photographed self-portraits from 1902-1908, which both resemble the painted self-portraits and which also express the same fateful melancholy: Munch used photography as a tool in his work with painting, a form of work of which the Louisiana exhibition showed many examples on.

Munch designed several of his motifs based on man's challenges with identity: the relationship to society, to nature and to himself. Like Kierkegaard and Freud, Munch had a special psychological ability to look inward.

From his own traumatic experiences, Munch developed his very own symbolism, and created images that express man's deepest emotional experiences, an extremely subjective art, an expressionism in Munch's sense.