Comment:
In the Munch Museum there is a massive volume into which Munch pasted many of his most important graphic motifs and some drawings. In addition to 99 heavy cardboard pages it includes more than twenty loose cardboard pages, most of which were inserted between the pages of the first part of the book. Munch wrote a great number of passages on these loose pages, most often in multicoloured block letters, sometimes illustrated with drawings that were either pasted in or drawn directly onto the cardboard. Among the loose text pages is a title page on which the legend THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL appears in red and green crayon (MM.T.02547-a03). Even though there is little to indicate that the loose text pages and the large volume were originally planned to make one complete entity, the entire book has been called The Tree of Knowledge.

Whether this book was the result of a mania for getting his work in order or whether it was an attempt to realize Munch’s old plan of collecting his most important motifs with the intention of publishing them is hard to say.

The Tree of Knowledge contains neither labels nor inscriptions that might give us a hint as to when it was put together. Many of the works of art pasted in, especially the drawings, must have been made before 1900, but many of them were executed much later.

The loose pages can be identified by the letter "a" in their object numbers, like the above-mentioned title page. (GW)