Vampire or lover – what do you see in Munch’s (other) masterpiece?
Do vampires exist? When Edvard Munch first painted the scene we now call Vampire in 1893, its association with the demonic, blood-sucking creatures of folklore had not occurred to him.
Munch called it Love and Pain, a less violent, more tender title for this image of an undressed woman bending to kiss the nape of a despairing man. She cradles his head in her lap, her orange-fire strands of hair streaming across his face, like veins.
But it was not until the Norwegian artist exhibited the painting in 1890s Berlin that his friend, the critic and occult enthusiast Stanisław Przybyszewski, saw something more sinister: a woman sucking the life from her lover. It was Przybyszewski, not Munch, who gave the painting the title that endured.
“A broken man and the face of a biting vampire on his neck… There is something terribly calm and passionless in this picture: an immeasurable, fatal quality of resignation,” wrote Przybyszewski. “...The woman will always sit there, biting forever with a thousand vipers’ tongues, with a thousand poison fangs.”
Next month, one of the earliest, most recognisable versions of the painting will return to public display at the Munch Museum in Oslo, following a restoration project by the museum’s conservators. As ever, it will be labelled: Vampire.
But like all folklore, the painting’s adopted title was a projection of deep, collective anxieties – in Przybyszewski’s case, about sex, liberation and power.
“The woman is treated as a very strong, dominating figure, and that was a new kind of thing – a male more passive,” says ?ystein Ustvedt, art historian and author of the Munch Museum’s introduction to the artist.
“The new woman was emerging in Berlin that year,” adds Sue Prideaux, author of the biography Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. “Ibsen had written Hedda Gabler [in 1890]. Strindberg was brought to Berlin to put on Miss Julie [about an aristocratic woman raised by her man-hating mother]. So the idea of the deadly woman was swirling about in the air.”
So was the idea of vampires. Bram Stoker had yet to publish Dracula (1897). But the blood-sucking, immortal undead were rampant in popular European lore. Even Munch picked up on the analogy. In an earlier letter, says Prideaux, he wrote of his love for Milly Thaulow, his married lover, describing her as a vampire woman in her embracing of free love.
Munch was 30 when he first executed the composition, one of about 15 motifs he would return to almost compulsively (another is The Scream, painted in the same year).
Before then, his early life as the son of a military doctor in Oslo (then Kristiania) had been blighted by death, grief and despair. Munch’s mother died of tuberculosis just weeks after his fifth birthday. In 1877, his elder, favourite sister Sophie suffered the same fate – Munch was 14.
Munch’s depressive father was unsupportive of his artistic ambitions and his education was mostly informal. The young Edvard escaped to Paris in 1889, where he encountered post impressionism: Toulouse-Lautrec’s graphic energy; Van Gogh’s emotional brushwork. He infused it with Nordic melancholy, developing a style expressive of interior lives, moving away from plain, direct representation.
He would further develop his ideas in bohemian Berlin, as part of a social group where he found some acceptance. (The man in Vampire was modelled by Munch’s Berlin friend, the Swedish writer Adolf Paul; the female model’s identity is uncertain.)
Nevertheless, there were early flashes of the intense, psychologically charged painting that would make him one of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century, even in his realism years.
His first versions of The Sick Child, painted in 1885-6, could be interpreted as precursors to Vampire – a serene, pale girl with red hair attended by a woman, whose head is bowed in despair – Sophie and Munch’s aunt, Karen Bj?lstad, painted from memory. Prideaux notes that Munch called it his first “soul painting”.
Vampire, which Munch reworked at least six times in paint and countless more in graphic drawings and block prints, was part of a group of 21 paintings that would later become known as the Frieze of Life, scenes that trace the emotional progress of man: flowering, passion, anxiety and death (a version of the frieze, including the most celebrated Scream, hangs in its own room at the National Museum of Norway).
But Vampire is one of the most sought-after. In 2008, an 1894 version sold in New York for $38.1m (￡24.2m). A Vampire lithograph sold at Sotheby’s this year for more than ￡150,000.
Why did Munch keep reworking these scenes? Partly, they represented a breakthrough.
“In the early 1890s, he moved from realism to a much more emotional style, and that was the beginning of Munch’s modernism,” says Ustvedt. “He steadily came back to them, made new versions, graphics and other variables – so they were crucial to his understanding of himself as an artist.”
Reworking was a tenet of modernism, says Ustvedt. Munch’s contemporaries reworked paintings, too: Monet’s endless cathedrals and water lilies, for example. They are new versions, rather than replicas, of popular sellers that were also a lucrative source of income.
The Oslo museum houses Munch’s own collection of his works, which he bequeathed to the city just before his death in 1944. But the artist was almost wilfully careless with his canvases, often dripping candle wax over them and leaving them lying about in his garden.
The Vampire under restoration has long been scarred by a gash, cause unknown, in the top, right-hand corner of the canvas, now repaired.
In 1988, the painting was stolen by P?l Enger, a former professional footballer and gang member. Later in 1994, Enger stole another Munch masterpiece: The Scream from the National Gallery of Norway (that heist and Enger are the subject of a new documentary available on Sky Now).
Enger was a clunky, almost amateur thief. Both times he was caught and the paintings returned, but Vampire was left with several scratches. And even earlier in the 20th century, it had endured assorted, ham-fisted attempts at restoration involving layers of varnish and wax, much of which had deteriorated.
Munch may not have originally intended his flame-haired woman to be vampiric – at least not consciously. “Later, in about 1933, Munch said it was just a woman kissing a man on the neck,” says Prideaux, “Vampire was entirely made up. Titles didn’t really matter to him, so they sometimes changed through the years.”
The people around him saw her as a vampire, so she became a vampire. His paintings associate sex with death and despair, so it is a convenient title. But paradox is always present in Munch’s work.
In a talk at Sotheby’s this year, Munch superfan Tracey Emin, said she saw the woman not as demonic, but “cradling and protecting – I don’t see someone tucking into someone’s neck”.
“It is both sinister and tender,” says Prideaux. “It depends when you look at it.”
“Munch is very good at the doubleness of things,” says Ustvedt. “You can read his paintings in different ways. Is The Scream figure screaming, or is it keeping the scream out? Does Vampire show a kiss or a threat? Tension is what makes these works so fascinating.”
Vampire will be on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo in October