Evening on Karl Johan
The main street of Oslo — then Kristiania — at dusk, a crowd of pale-faced strollers bearing down on the viewer.
Parliament of Norway Building
The painting shows a real, identified place that you can find today. The exact spot the artist worked from is not necessarily known.
Evening on Karl Johan — at a glance
- Artist
- Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
- Year
- 1892
- Movement
- Symbolism / proto-Expressionism
- Place
- Karl Johans gate, Kristiania (Oslo), Norway
- Viewpoint
- The promenade by the Storting — street and buildings unchanged
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Now at
- KODE Art Museums, Bergen (Rasmus Meyer Collection)
Overview
Evening on Karl Johan is one of Edvard Munch's earliest fully ‘Munch’ pictures, painted in 1892, the year before The Scream. It shows the fashionable evening promenade on the main street of the Norwegian capital, but the strollers are a mass of stiff black figures with white, mask-like faces and staring eyes, advancing straight at the viewer, while a single dark figure walks away from them down the empty road. It is oil on canvas and hangs in the KODE Art Museums in Bergen, in the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
The story behind the painting
Scholarship Munch had walked this street countless times, including, by his own later account, in a state of anxiety while waiting to meet a woman he loved. The bourgeois evening corso — seeing and being seen on Karl Johan — was a fixture of Kristiania life, and Munch turned it into an image of the crowd as something frightening and hollow.
Where was Evening on Karl Johan painted?
Museum interpretation Karl Johans gate is the central avenue of Oslo, which was called Kristiania (or Christiania) until 1925. It runs from the main railway station up to the Royal Palace, past the university and the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. Munch shows the stretch by the Storting, whose long pale building with its lit windows stands on the right; the Grand Hotel, where the city's writers and artists gathered, is on the same block. The street and its buildings are still there and still the city's main promenade.
What is in the painting?
A dense body of townspeople in dark evening dress fills the pavement and comes forward to the very front of the canvas: top hats, bonnets, black coats, and above them rows of blank white faces with dark eye-sockets, barely individualised. To the left the roadway runs back, almost empty, and one lone man in dark clothes walks away down it. The long façade of the Storting, its windows yellow with light, recedes on the right under a blue-green evening sky.
Look closely
The white faces
Rows of blank, mask-like faces with dark eye-sockets, barely told apart, filling the top of the crowd.
The lone figure
A single dark man walks away down the near-empty roadway, against the flow of the crowd.
The Storting windows
The long parliament façade recedes on the right, its windows lit yellow — the one warm colour.
The two motions
The crowd surges forward out of the frame while the road plunges back to a distant point.
Analysis
Composition & perspective
The pavement crowd rushes forward out of the frame; the empty road drives back on a steep diagonal to a small bright window.
Scholarship Munch sets two opposite motions against each other: the wall of faces surging towards the viewer, and the perspective of the road plunging away to a distant point, with the single retreating figure caught between them. The crowd has no ground to stand on that we can see — it simply looms.
Colour and light
Cold blues and greens of dusk against the black of the clothes and the sickly white of the faces, with yellow window-light.
Scholarship The palette is nocturnal and unhealthy — blue-green sky and shadow, black coats, chalky faces — relieved only by the warm yellow squares of the parliament windows. The paint is dragged and nervous.
Meaning and interpretation
Interpretations differ. What the artist documented, what museums and scholars propose, and later or speculative theories are marked and kept separate.
The crowd as menace
The picture is read as an image of social anxiety and alienation: the respectable evening promenade becomes a procession of the dead-eyed, and the individual — the lone figure walking away — is separate from it and perhaps fleeing it.
Part of Munch's ‘Frieze of Life’
It belongs with the cycle of works, including The Scream, in which Munch used the streets and shorelines of Kristiania to stage inner states of fear, love and despair. The link to his own unhappy waiting on the street is his own, later account.
History & provenance
The Bergen collector Rasmus Meyer acquired a major group of Munch's early paintings, including this one; the collection passed to the city and is now part of the KODE Art Museums, Bergen.
Sources
- KODE Art Museums, Bergen — collection entry for Edvard Munch, ‘Evening on Karl Johan’ (‘Aften på Karl Johan’, 1892; Rasmus Meyer Collection)
- Munchmuseet, Oslo — literature on Munch's Kristiania street subjects and the ‘Frieze of Life’
Frequently asked
Where is Evening on Karl Johan set?
On Karl Johans gate, the main avenue of Oslo — then called Kristiania — by the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. The street is still the city's central promenade.
Can you visit the spot?
Yes. Karl Johans gate, the Storting building and the Grand Hotel on the same block are all still there, and the evening promenade continues.
Why do the people look like that?
Munch turns the fashionable evening stroll into a procession of stiff black figures with blank white faces and staring eyes — an image of the crowd as hollow and threatening, and of the loneliness of the individual within it.
Who is the figure walking the other way?
A single dark figure moving down the empty roadway, away from the oncoming crowd — usually read as the isolated individual, and sometimes linked to Munch himself.
Where is the painting now?
In the KODE Art Museums, Bergen, in the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Related paintings
More by Edvard Munch
