The Dance of Life

On a midsummer shore couples dance, and at the center a man turns with a woman in red, flanked by a woman in white who seems all innocent expectation and one in black who stands apart in grief - the three ages of love and woman. Munch fills the scene with his flowing, melancholy line. Now in Oslo's National Gallery, the Dance of Life is a central panel of his Frieze of Life - love, desire, and loss compressed into a single haunted dance, joy and isolation circling together under the pale northern night.