Light After The Scream: Edvard Munch’s Rare Midsummer Peace
6 Video Views·Dec 16, 2025
Painted in 1901, Summer Night at Åsgårdstrand reveals a side of Edvard Munch far removed from the anguish of The Scream. Beneath a lavender sky, figures gather in quiet communion along a village road washed in Nordic light. The brushwork pulses with life — vivid pinks, golden hues, and trembling contours that render the landscape itself as a living organism. This was Munch’s moment of equilibrium: the rare, luminous interlude when solitude and serenity replaced turmoil.
This masterpiece, a cornerstone of The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, stands as a testament to the painter’s capacity for renewal. Having endured personal upheaval and creative struggle, Munch found in Åsgårdstrand a world alive with color and breath. Offered at Sotheby’s New York on 18 November, this radiant vision anchors a sale that brings together modern icons from Klimt to Picasso — a once-in-a-generation collection celebrating the eye and spirit of one of America’s greatest patrons.
It's hard to imagine that an artist who painted something like The Scream,
such an icon so embedded in our consciousness,
also was invested in these beautiful elegiac images of the world.
There's a moment almost of redemption. The sun begins
to come up and he starts looking at his surroundings
in Osgold Strand with a fresh golden light.
This particular painting I think we do get to see the side of Munch that we
don't really think that we know.
I'm Pat Berman. I'm an art historian and I've been working on Munch.
Oh, I'm so embarrassed to say it. How about four decades?
We're standing in the middle of a roadway in a tiny little village
of Osgold Strand south of Christiania, which was the name of Oslo in the 19th
century. This is Midsummer Night in late June.
It's really the most evocative night of the year in Norway.
It's an ancient festival and it's a night of
bonfires, of midnight sun, which is about celebrating the blossoming of
new life. So the frame is this moment of
celebration but what I see here is something a little different.
To me it's almost like a sense of expectation. This little congregation of
women and girls in the foreground and they're all kind of dressed up
and I love the fact that they all wear these kind of signifying hats.
They were like a bouquet of flowers, he said, about these brightly dressed women.
And then over to the right in the middle ground there are a group of people who
are kind of relaxing against the rock, absorbing the summer evening. The upper
part of the painting seems to me to be so delicately rendered with very gated
light of the Nordic summer night. One of the
things that I first noticed about the painting is this
really powerful collapsing telescoping perspective.
We're seeing the figures in the foreground cropped
so they kind of spill out into our laps. It's kind of the strategy he used with
the painting The Scream as well, which pulls us in and also destabilizes
us. This is a brief moment of happiness and
calm within a tumultuous period in Munch's life. He bought a house
there in 1898. This was always the place where he went
to seek peace. He was carrying at that moment the
burden of a very complicated relationship that he had with Tula
Larson, with whom he'd been carrying on a very
intense relationship for a couple of years, up
to the point where he had talked about marriage.
He then started moving away from her. He increasingly said,
no, I can't really be a husband to you. My work is my life.
So if this painting is encapsulating that moment
of having traveled so much, having been organizing exhibitions, having
needing to borrow money to sustain himself,
suddenly he finds himself back in his little house, his little garden, his
little village, with the people around him who are
giving him no threat, asking nothing of him. He would
wander around, he painted the children, he painted
folks who were working people in the village.
This series of works from Oskar Strand, most famous of them is The Girls on the
Bridge, show a more colorful, peaceful, atmospheric
Munch, who's more interested in the communion
of the figures with the landscape, where the Oskar Strand shoreline, he says,
becomes the perpetually shifting lines of life,
and where the landscape of the fjord merges with the emotional landscape that
is his true subject. The moment has soon passed and by 1902
he's back in Berlin, back on the course of the self-destructive
behavior that lead to his breakdown in 1908.
We know this was a very important painting for Munch personally because he
chose to exhibit it seven times before 1911, in the cities
of Berlin, in Oslo, in Prague, and indeed in
Vienna, where it was shown at the succession
of 1904. Munch was extremely strategic and careful about the works that he
chose to exhibit, so we know that this one
was particularly close to his heart. When I think about this painting,
it is anchoring the world that he lived in at that moment,
in that summer, in that place, and feel this kind of radiant strength
and beauty from that landscape, those people,
and that hand at work.