Workers

Workers occur only very sporadically as a motif in Munch?s art in the 1880s and 1890s. However, during the first years of the new century, we see a move away from the artist?s own inner life towards less problematical motifs, such as a number of pictures of bathing children. His colours also strike a clearer, fresher note. As in the two versions of the powerful, boldly coloured "Men Bathing", painted in Warnemünde by the Baltic Sea, where Munch shows us men that are obviously manual workers and not from the middle class. In fact, the positioning of the figures becomes a prototype for many later portrayals of workers; frontal, walking with self-assurance straight towards the observer.

Munch was not the only artist who turned his interest to the working class at this time. The sculptures of Constantine Meunier were groundbreaking, and Munch knew his works well from Paris in 1896, and later from Copenhagen in 1908-09. Also other artists such as Käthe Kollwitz had a burning political commitment in her pictures of workers, and although Munch does not exhibit such burning political commitment in his own pictures as she does, it is clear that he was sympathetic to the workers? cause.

Munch had a strong desire to have a decorative commission in the new City Hall in Oslo that was being planned. He wished to create a workers? frieze. He had already two large decorative projects behind him: the University Festival Hall in Oslo and the workers? dining room in the Freia Chocolate Factory. For various reasons, Munch?s work was not admitted to the City Hall, so that all that now exists is a host of small and large preparatory works.