Colour woodcut printed in three colours, blue, green and yellowish brown on thin Japan paper
Sheet: 730x837 mm Image: 495x645 mm
Signed in pencil lower right: Edv Munch
1897
Woll 112.
Estimate
NOK 2,000,000–3,000,000
LITERATURE: Magne Bruteig: Munch – Drawings, Oslo 2004.
Sidsel Helliesen: “Technical aspects of Munch’s prints and drawings», Edvard Munch Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue Munch Museum 2.11.2013-02.03.2014, Oslo 2013, p. 32-57.
Munch’s first sexual experience may perhaps be said to have followed the “Bohemian formula”; in summer 1885 he had an affair with a married but “liberated” woman, and this decisive event served as a fund of experience and a backdrop for many of his pictures on the theme of love. In concrete terms, this is especially true here of “The Voice” …, “Towards the forest” … and “Ashes” … . Bruteig, p. 60.
There are also a number of copies of “Towards the Forest” … in which the annual rings in the wood are used to varying degrees as articulating patterns in the surface of the picture. When working on this colour woodcut, Munch also used his famous jigsaw-puzzle technique. Instead of using several plates for different colours, he cut up a plate with a fretsaw, inked the pieces separately and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. In this way he could print several colours in a single impression. Helliesen, p. 46.
