Lot Essay
The Madonna motif can be first found in a painting Munch made for the Frieze of Life in 1894. This series consisted of paintings with themes connected with love and death. Madonna represents the moment of climax and conception, simultaneously recalling the equation for the artist of love and death.
In his so-called 'St. Cloud manifesto' Munch wrote - probably around New Year 1889: "One should no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They should be living people who breathe and feel, love and suffer." Here he set himself the goal of his art, to make the human aspect the focal point of all his work.
In 1895 Munch translated Madonna into the medium of lithography. Once the image was transferred to the stone, he further worked it, using an etching needle, returning to the motif in 1902 when he made a colour composition of it by combining lithography with woodcut. The colour was printed with lithographic stone.
Munch later said of it:
"The pause when all the world stayed its course, your face holds all the beauty of this earth, your lips carmine as the ripening fruit move apart as in pain, the smile of a corpse now gives its hand to death, the chain is completed which binds the thousand generations that are dead to the thousand generations that are to come." Quoted in S.G. Epstein, The Prints of Edvard Munch: Mirror of his Life, Exh. cat. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, 1983, pp. 52-3.
In his so-called 'St. Cloud manifesto' Munch wrote - probably around New Year 1889: "One should no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They should be living people who breathe and feel, love and suffer." Here he set himself the goal of his art, to make the human aspect the focal point of all his work.
In 1895 Munch translated Madonna into the medium of lithography. Once the image was transferred to the stone, he further worked it, using an etching needle, returning to the motif in 1902 when he made a colour composition of it by combining lithography with woodcut. The colour was printed with lithographic stone.
Munch later said of it:
"The pause when all the world stayed its course, your face holds all the beauty of this earth, your lips carmine as the ripening fruit move apart as in pain, the smile of a corpse now gives its hand to death, the chain is completed which binds the thousand generations that are dead to the thousand generations that are to come." Quoted in S.G. Epstein, The Prints of Edvard Munch: Mirror of his Life, Exh. cat. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, 1983, pp. 52-3.