Summer Night. The Voice (Sommernatt. Stemmen)

Summer Night. The Voice (Sommernatt. Stemmen) by Edvard Munch is a profound and emotionally charged print created around 1894. This work exemplifies the artist’s mastery of graphic techniques, specifically utilizing the combined methods of drypoint and etching to achieve a haunting and evocative atmosphere. Printmaking was central to Munch’s practice in the mid-1890s, allowing him to rework and distill the psychological themes that dominated his contemporaneous Frieze of Life series.

The composition presents a solitary figure, standing amidst tall, stylized reeds on the rocky coast, gazing toward a dimly lit horizon. The pervasive feeling of the scene, captured under a moonlit Summer Night, is one of profound isolation and internal reflection. The title suggests a sensory or psychological event—the hearing of a "voice"—a recurring motif in Munch’s art symbolizing the onset of anxiety, internal revelation, or existential dread. The figure’s posture, often identified as the artist, embodies the melancholic alienation characteristic of the fin-de-siècle Symbolist movement.

Munch, the leading figure of the Norwegian artistic avant-garde, excelled at visualizing inner emotional states through external landscapes. In this particular image, the dense cross-hatching created by the etching process contrasts sharply with the soft, burr-laden lines of the drypoint, giving the composition a textural richness that enhances its dreamlike, unsettling quality. The simplified forms and dark contours emphasize the symbolic weight rather than objective reality.

This powerful example of Munch’s graphic output from the 1894-95 period established key visual motifs that he would revisit throughout his career. As essential documents of turn-of-the-century European symbolism, these striking prints are highly valued. This particular impression of Summer Night. The Voice is housed within the distinguished collection of the Museum of Modern Art.