Detail of The Storm by Edvard Munch in the Museum of Modern Art, August 2007

Edvard Munch. (Norwegian, 1863-1944). The Storm. 1893. Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 51 1/2" (91.8 x 130.8 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. Irgens Larsen and acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Funds.

Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 44

Munch painted The Storm in Aasgaardstrand, a small Norwegian seaside resort where he often stayed. There had indeed been a violent storm there that summer, but the painting does not appear to show it, or even its physical aftermath; the storm here is an inner one, a psychic distress. Standing near the water, in an eerie blue half-light, half-dark Scandi-navian summer night, a young woman clasps her hands to her head. Other women, standing apart from her, make the same anguished gesture—to what end we are not sure. The circle in which they stand, and the protagonist's white dress, give to the scene the feeling of some ancient pagan ritual, even while the solid house in the background, its lit windows shining in the dark, suggests some more regular life from which these women are excluded—or perhaps that they find intolerable.

Munch's art suggests a transformation of personal memories and emotions into a realm of dream, myth, and enigma. His exposure to French Symbolist poetry during a stay in Paris had convinced him of the necessity for a more subjective art; there was no need, he said, for more paintings of "people who read and women who knit." Associated with the international development of Symbolism in the 1890s, he is also recognized as a precursor of Expressionism.

Text from: www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=80644