Are they lovers or strangers?They stand close enough to share the same shore, but not the same world.

In Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), Munch places a man and woman with their backs turned to us, facing the sea. The distance between them feels small in space and enormous in feeling

Munch returned to this motif for decades, in paintings, etchings and woodcuts. It evokes both human abandonment in nature and mutual alienation. So the loneliness here is not simply being alone. It is the stranger loneliness of standing beside someone and still feeling unreachable