One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch's painting of a man locked in a female vampire's tortured embrace -- her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin -- created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago.
ARTKABINETT social network of fine art collectors celebrates Halloween weekend with a loving look at this scary masterpiece.
Some believed the Norwegian artist's anguished 1894 masterpiece to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite sister.
Some years later, Nazi Germany condemned it as morally "degenerate".
This painting was originally titled "Love and Pain". A critic named Stanislaw Przybyszewski mistakenly interpreted this painting as being vampiric in theme and content.
The painting became known as "Vampire" only after his erroneous assessment of it. The woman in the painting is consoling her lover, not sucking his blood.
Vampire has become one of Munch's most sought-after and reproduced images, despite remaining in the hands of a private collector for the past 75 years. Vampire, is often seen as the sister of The Scream, completed just months earlier (shown here).
Vampire was part of Munch's seminal 20-work series The Frieze of Life, which included The Scream. It is the most significant version of four Vampires he completed in 1893 and 1894, and was first exhibited in 1902 in Berlin, where his works caused shock and awe.
Vampire was sold to the avid Munch collector, John Anker, in 1903, and is the only work from the original series in private hands. It was acquired by a private collection from Anker and his wife, Nini Roll, in 1934, and has since remained there ñ albeit loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 2008.
Vampire has not been viewed in Britain since 1974. Simon Shaw, head of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby's in New York, said: "There have been past Munch works to be sold in recent times, such as a wonderful group of works in 2006 and a painting earlier this year, but this one is a real, knock 'em dead masterpiece."
The work was sold again on November 3, 2009 at Sotheby's to another private collector for $38,162,500. This exceeded it's original $35 million estimate.
Before this recent sale, Simon Shaw, head of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby's in New York, said: "There have been past Munch works to be sold in recent times, such as a wonderful group of works in 2006 and a painting earlier this year, but this one is a real, knock 'em dead masterpiece."
Vampire caused a sensation when it was unveiled back in 1894, touching on turn-of-the-century fears about women's liberation. Some critics were outraged by its perverse, almost sado-masochistic depiction of passion.
Mr Shaw added: "It was shocking to Berlin society just as it is shocking today."
Munch, however, always insisted it was nothing more than "just a woman kissing a man on the neck".
This picture was not originally titled "The Vampire" but received this name from a later art critic. The title in inappropriate, conjuring a one-way predatory relationship to the painting.
The picture portrays two people in a complicated and painful love, having injured one another numerous times.
Nonetheless, the man is consumed by a true devotional love but aware of the impossibility and pain of this relationship.
He sinks into the bosom of the woman while she feels the irresistible urge to cling maddeningly to him, devouring their love but simultaneously is overbearingly hurt and frustrated. Thus, their desperate, hopeless, and painful "union" endures. Munch lays bare this experience of love that some of us have unfortunately experienced.
History
In December 1893, Unter den Linden in Berlin held an exhibition of Munch's work, showing, among other pieces, six paintings entitled Study for a Series: Love. This began a cycle he later called the Frieze of Life -- A Poem about Life, Love and Death. "Frieze of Life" motifs such as The Storm and Moonlight are steeped in atmosphere.
Other motifs illuminate the nocturnal side of love, such as Rose and Amelie and Vampire.
In Death in the Sickroom, the subject is the death of his sister Sophie, which he re-did in many future variations. The dramatic focus of the painting, portraying his entire family, is dispersed in a series
of separate and disconnected figures of sorrow. In 1894, he enlarged the spectrum of motifs by adding Anxiety, Ashes, Madonna and Women in Three Stages (from innocence to old age).
Around the turn of the century, Munch worked to finish the "Frieze". He painted a number of pictures, several of them in larger format and to some extent featuring the Art Nouveau aesthetics of the time. He made a wooden frame with carved reliefs for the large painting Metabolism (1898), initially called Adam and Eve.
This work reveals Munch's preoccupation with the "fall of man" myth and his pessimistic philosophy of love.
Motifs such as The Empty Cross and Golgotha (both c. 1900) reflect a metaphysical orientation, and also echo Munch's pietistic upbringing. The entire Frieze showed for the first time at the secessionist exhibition in Berlin in 1902.
"The Frieze of Life" themes recur throughout Munch's work but find their strongest outpouring in the mid1890ís. In sketches, paintings, pastels and prints, he taps the depths of his feelings to examine his major motifs: the stages of life, the femme fatale, the hopelessness of love, anxiety, infidelity, jealousy, sexual humiliation, and separation in life and death.
These themes find expression in paintings such as The Sick Child (1885, shown right), Love and Pain (1893-94), Ashes (1894), and The Bridge.
The latter shows limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over which loom the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses. Munch portrayed women either as frail, innocent sufferers (see Puberty and Love and Pain) or as the cause of great longing, jealousy and despair (see Separation, Jealousy and Ashes).
Munch often uses shadows and rings of color around his figures to emphasize an aura of fear, menace, anxiety, or sexual intensity. These paintings have been interpreted as reflections of the artist's sexual anxieties, though it could also be argued that they are a better representation of his turbulent relationship with love itself and his general pessimism regarding human existence.
Many of these sketches and paintings were done in several versions, such as Madonna (shown here), Hands and Puberty, and also transcribed as wood-block prints and lithographs.
Munch hated to part with his paintings because he thought of his work as a single body of expression. So to capitalize on his production and make some income, he turned to graphic arts to reproduce many of his most famous paintings, including those in this series.
Munch admitted to the personal goals of his work but he also offered his art to a wider purpose, "My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with lifeóit is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity."
Still attracting strongly negative reactions, in the 1890s Munch did begin to receive some understanding of his artistic goals, as one critic wrote, "With ruthless contempt for form, clarity, elegance, wholeness, and realism, he paints with intuitive strength of talent the most subtle visions of the soul."
One of his great supporters in Berlin was Walter Rathenau, later the German foreign minister, who greatly contributed to his success.
