In Photos: Edvard Munch Exhibition at the Met Museum, NYC

The Dance of Life (1925)Some people fall in love and their love is reciprocated. Others get caught up in sinister, scary, cruel relationships like the woman who’s dancing with a green-faced phantom. Some remain alone, like the woman in white, while others are widowed, like the woman in black. This painting expresses Munch’s view of life as a dance of desire and fate in front of an eerie pale moon reflected in the dead-still sea on a Scandinavian summer’s night. It was so important to him as a statement of his pessimistic philosophy that he painted it twice, first in 1900, again in 1925
Photograph: Ove Kvavik/Edvard Munch