Two Human Beings, The Lonely Ones - Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholia. His work often included the symbolic portrayal of such themes as misery, sickness, and death.
Munch’s artistically formative years took place in Paris in the late 1880s and Berlin in the 1890s. In Germany he began to make a name for himself and became involved with the Jugendstil publication Pan, which actively promoted the graphic arts. In 1895 the magazine’s co-founder, Julius Meier-Graefe, published a portfolio containing eight drypoints and etchings by Munch. The set included Two human beings (The lonely ones) (opposite, below). The mood of existential loneliness is rendered all the more poignant by the presence of a man and woman staring together out to sea at the rocky beach at ?sg?rdstrand, yet physically and psychically separated from each other.