The themes of loneliness, sex, and death are given powerful expression in Edvard Munch’s color woodcut Two Women on the Shore. A young girl, clad in white, gazes yearningly across the dark sea toward an unknown future. She seems oblivious to the deathlike figure beside her which she is fated to become. Incorporating the rough texture of the woodblock and limiting himself to basic shapes and a few colors, the Norwegian artist created a disturbing image of the fruitlessness of love and hope.
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Woodcut printed from one block (sawn into three sections) in dark blue, green, black and red-brown ink with additions in green crayon on cream Japanese paper
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Gustav Schiefler,Verzeichnis des graphischen Werks Edvard Munchs bis 1906 (Berlin, 1907), p. 97, no. 117.
Gustav Schiefler, Edvard Munchs graphische Kunst (Dresden, 1923), p. 21, no. 117, pl. 39.
Werner Timm, The Graphic Art of Edvard Munch, trans. by Ruth Michaelis-Jena with Patrick Murra (Greenwich, Conn., 1969), pp. 62 and 311, no. 73 (ill.).
James N. Wood and Sally Ruth May, The Art Institute of Chicago: The Essential Guide (Chicago, 1993), p. 198 (ill.).
Gerd Woll, Edvard Munch: The Complete Graphic Works (New York, 2001), pp. 144-147, no. 133 (ill.).
Ann Arbor, Mich., University of Michigan Museum of Art, “The Artisitic Revival of the Woodcut in France, 1850-1900,” November 4, 1983-January 8, 1984, pp. 147-148, cat. 87 (ill.), cat. by Jacquelynn Bass and Richard S. Field; traveled to the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Conn., February 1-March 25, 1984, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, April 17-June 3, 1984.
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth”, February 14-April 26, 2009, pp. 148, 151, fig. 166, cat. by Jay A. Clarke
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio”, September 17, 2022 - January 16, 2023, p. 25, fig. 4 (ill.), cat. by Jay Clarke, et. al.
Sold by Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago, to the Art Institute, 1963.
Schiefler 117
Woll 133 II/2
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