Moonlight

A woman's face, pale and luminous, emerges from the dark night.
To the left, a small window reflects the moonlight.
To the right, trees with eerily spreading branches loom close.

Moonlight.
From this quiet night scene, one might imagine a romantic and mysterious female figure.
Some might feel it depicts a tranquil moment of contemplation in silence.

However, what is actually embedded in this painting is the memory of a desperate first love that instilled in the artist a lifelong sense of distrust and fear.

In 1885, Edvard Munch met a woman named Milly Thaulow.
Referred to as 'Mrs. Heiberg' in his private notes, she was the wife of a Norwegian army medical captain.
This illicit, brief affair was Munch's first secret love.
However, it simultaneously brought him deep despair.
The fear of intimate relationships would continue to torment him for a long time thereafter.

In 1896, while staying in Paris, Munch created this memory as a woodcut.
The setting is Åsgårdstrand, where he spent his summers.
It depicts a real yellow clapboard house and a white picket fence.
In an oil painting of the same theme from 1893, almost the entire female figure was depicted.
There was a rich spatial distance between the dark night background and the moonlight.
However, in this woodcut, the view is narrowed down to the extreme, focusing on the area around the woman's face.

Munch adopted an extremely complex experimental approach for this work.
He carved different elements on both the front and back sides of a single woodblock and pressed them sequentially from both sides of the paper.
Furthermore, he cut another woodblock into three pieces with a fretsaw.
He colored each piece differently and then reassembled them to print in layers.
By using thin, highly absorbent Japanese paper, the ink particles softly permeated the fibers.
The woman's face, illuminated by moonlight, appears to glow white like a ghost in the darkness of the night.