Untitled 10 

Curator: Welcome. We're standing before an intriguing work by Edvard Munch, tentatively titled "Untitled 10." It's undated, a colored pencil and drawing. The scene seems almost biblical but also deeply, almost jarringly, personal. Editor: It has this strangely joyful anxiety about it. A domestic tableau, but rendered with the raw immediacy of a sketch – the kind you might scribble on the back of an envelope while wrestling with a feeling too big to put into words. Curator: Exactly. There’s a tension between the subject—what appears to be a family group—and the looseness of the execution. The lines are hurried, almost frantic in places, and the colors are vibrant but unevenly applied. It disrupts any easy reading of domestic bliss, don't you think? Editor: Absolutely. Those bright, almost clashing hues - the blues against the flesh tones—create a strange kind of disharmony. Is that a bowl of…eyes?...the figures in the image, everything floats precariously. Like it might all just dissolve back into the ether at any moment. Curator: One of the things that strikes me is how Munch is grappling with figuration and abstraction here, perhaps at the same time. We have the figures, clearly rendered as human forms, but then they’re placed within this abstracted landscape with bold expressive marks. It's reminiscent of his Symbolist contemporaries, who sought to convey emotional states through non-representational means. Editor: Yes, it's a tug of war between observation and inner experience. This colored pencil and drawing might even show the internal struggles that come with family—between affection and alienation, closeness and distance. You know? The beauty and the bother of kinship. Curator: Well put. It reflects a broader tendency of the time: trying to use these visible forms to capture very non-visible feeling. Editor: And in that tension is precisely where the power resides. It is this unfinished and searching, rather than arriving at any neat conclusions. It gives the viewer an awful lot to do! Curator: Indeed. Thanks for pointing it out. Editor: My pleasure.