Selling Paintings Highlights - Edvard Munch - The Thunderstorm

Munch painted the storm in Aasgaardstrand, a small Norwegian seaside town where he often stayed. That summer, a severe storm had indeed struck, but this doesn't seem to be the subject of the painting, nor even its after-effects, but rather an internal storm, a mental anguish. Standing by the water, in the mysterious midnight blue of a Scandinavian summer, a mixture of light and shadow, a young woman clutches her head. Other women stand at a distance and repeat her same anguished gesture, the reason for which is unclear. Their arrangement in a circle and the protagonist's white dress suggest some ancient pagan ritual, although the solid house in the background with its illuminated windows suggests a normal life from which women are excluded, or perhaps they themselves cannot tolerate Munch's ancient expression. It reveals the transformation of personal memories or emotions into a dreamlike, mythical, and enigmatic dimension. His contact with French Symbolist poetry during his time in Paris convinced him of the urgent need for a more subjective art: no more paintings of "people reading and women knitting" were needed. A participant in the international Symbolist movement in the 1990s, he would become a precursor to Expressionism.