The Girls on the Bridge

The Girls on the Bridge is a motif Edvard Munch returned to repeatedly over nearly thirty years, producing at least twelve oil paintings and numerous prints on the subject between 1901 and 1935. The 1918 version is a woodcut printed in multiple colors — part of an intensive engagement with printmaking that ran alongside Munch's work in oil throughout his career. The scene is set on the pier at Åsgårdstrand, the small coastal village on the Kristiania Fjord where Munch owned a house from 1898 and which furnished subjects for many of his most important works. The first version of the motif, an oil painting completed around 1901, was first exhibited in Kristiania that year under the title Sommeraften (Summer Evening) and shown at the Berlin Secession in 1902; it entered the National Museum, Oslo, as a gift from the collector Olaf Schou in 1909. Born in Løten, Norway in 1863, Munch studied at the Royal School of Drawing in Kristiania and came to international attention after his Berlin exhibition of 1892 provoked a scandal and was closed by the authorities within a week. He spent much of the following decade in Germany and France, producing the major works of his Frieze of Life cycle — including The Scream (1893) — before a nervous breakdown in 1908–09 prompted a return to Norway, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died at his Ekely estate near Oslo on 23 January 1944.