Edvard Munch's Frieze of Life

The Frieze of Life started as a handful of pictures on a gallery wall. In December 1893, on Unter den Linden in Berlin, Munch showed six paintings under the title Study for a Series: Love. That group grew into a cycle he later named the Frieze of Life – A Poem about Life, Love and Death. In 1894 he added Anxiety and Ashes among other motifs, and the whole Frieze was first hung together at the Berlin Secession in 1902.

It was never a closed set. Its themes run through the rest of his work, above all in the mid-1890s, in sketches, paintings, pastels and prints: the stages of life, the hopelessness of love, anxiety, jealousy, and separation in life and death. He made four versions of The Scream, two painted and two in pastel, and turned Puberty (1894–95) into a lithograph and an etching as well.

Seen side by side, the works share a palette as much as a mood. The Scream's red sky comes back over the crowd on the bridge in Anxiety, and red returns again in the woman's flame-coloured hair in Vampire. He finished the series with The Dance of Life in 1899.