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Lot Essay
Edvard Munch's haunting image known as Vampire began its life with a different, far less sinister name: Love and Pain. The transformation of this title tells us much about how an artwork's meaning can shift through interpretation and context.
Munch created this image as part of his Frieze of Life, a series exploring fundamental human experiences. The scene depicts a woman with flowing red hair bending over a man, her lips pressed to his neck – a moment Munch himself described simply as "a woman kissing a man on the neck." He considered Vampire important enough to pair it with the iconic Madonna, exhibiting them together in the early 1890s.
According to one account, the composition came directly from life. A friend visiting Munch's studio was asked to kneel before a red-haired model, who then leaned forward and kissed his neck. Munch captured the moment on canvas, completing the painting quickly.
The dramatic title change came after Munch exhibited the work in Berlin in 1893. Art critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski wrote a vivid description of the painting, seeing in it "a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire's face." He described the work as containing "something horribly peaceful, bereft of passion" and "an immeasurable fatality of resignation."
This interpretation resonated, and Munch adopted the title Vampire. He later noted that it was the title that made the image "literary" – in other words, the name itself added layers of narrative and symbolism that perhaps weren't inherent in the visual scene alone.
August Strindberg, the famous Swedish playwright, offered his own intense reading in 1896, describing "a shower of gold falling on a despairing figure kneeling before his worse self," seeking "the divine unhappiness of being loved, or rather of loving."
So invested was Munch in this image that he spent years developing it in printmaking, creating some of his most innovative technical solutions in the process. Starting with a lithograph in 1895, he stripped away the setting, placing the figures in a claustrophobic space enclosed by dark shadows.
Color proved essential to the work's meaning, particularly the woman's red hair, which Munch once described in writing about a lover: "It had twisted itself around me like blood-red snakes - its finest threads had entangled themselves in my heart." He hand-colored many early prints, but eventually developed an elaborate combination printing technique to reproduce the red mechanically.
By 1902, Munch was combining lithography and woodcut – possibly the first time he used this mixed technique and extremely innovative for the time. He experimented with sawing a red "wig" from a woodblock to print over the lithograph, then tried various configurations of multiple blocks and stencils. Eventually he created a complex system using six different components: lithographic stones for the key image and the crucial red hair, plus carved woodblocks for different areas of color – which is the version on offer here.
What makes Munch's Vampire particularly fascinating is that he constantly varied the printing sequence of these components. When he printed the main image and hair last, the figures' individuality stood out. When he printed the colored blocks last, the figures became frozen in an abstract cocoon of color, emphasizing the universal, symbolic nature of the theme.
Each impression was unique – different facets of the same symbolic meaning, much like Monet's series paintings of haystacks viewed under different light conditions. This technical experimentation reflects Munch's deep engagement with the theme and his understanding that a work's meaning could shift depending on how it was presented.
The impression presented here has recently been deaccessioned from the Munch Museum and bears their collection stamps on the reverse. It is in exceptional condition, as one would expect from a work that formed part of the artist's bequest to the City of Oslo upon his death in 1944. In her catalogue raisonné of the artist's prints, Gerd Woll addresses the complex task of categorizing the variant impressions by dividing the known corpus into ten groups, each representing a different combination of lithographic and woodblock techniques. This impression belongs to a group believed to have been printed by the artist in 1913.
Munch created this image as part of his Frieze of Life, a series exploring fundamental human experiences. The scene depicts a woman with flowing red hair bending over a man, her lips pressed to his neck – a moment Munch himself described simply as "a woman kissing a man on the neck." He considered Vampire important enough to pair it with the iconic Madonna, exhibiting them together in the early 1890s.
According to one account, the composition came directly from life. A friend visiting Munch's studio was asked to kneel before a red-haired model, who then leaned forward and kissed his neck. Munch captured the moment on canvas, completing the painting quickly.
The dramatic title change came after Munch exhibited the work in Berlin in 1893. Art critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski wrote a vivid description of the painting, seeing in it "a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire's face." He described the work as containing "something horribly peaceful, bereft of passion" and "an immeasurable fatality of resignation."
This interpretation resonated, and Munch adopted the title Vampire. He later noted that it was the title that made the image "literary" – in other words, the name itself added layers of narrative and symbolism that perhaps weren't inherent in the visual scene alone.
August Strindberg, the famous Swedish playwright, offered his own intense reading in 1896, describing "a shower of gold falling on a despairing figure kneeling before his worse self," seeking "the divine unhappiness of being loved, or rather of loving."
So invested was Munch in this image that he spent years developing it in printmaking, creating some of his most innovative technical solutions in the process. Starting with a lithograph in 1895, he stripped away the setting, placing the figures in a claustrophobic space enclosed by dark shadows.
Color proved essential to the work's meaning, particularly the woman's red hair, which Munch once described in writing about a lover: "It had twisted itself around me like blood-red snakes - its finest threads had entangled themselves in my heart." He hand-colored many early prints, but eventually developed an elaborate combination printing technique to reproduce the red mechanically.
By 1902, Munch was combining lithography and woodcut – possibly the first time he used this mixed technique and extremely innovative for the time. He experimented with sawing a red "wig" from a woodblock to print over the lithograph, then tried various configurations of multiple blocks and stencils. Eventually he created a complex system using six different components: lithographic stones for the key image and the crucial red hair, plus carved woodblocks for different areas of color – which is the version on offer here.
What makes Munch's Vampire particularly fascinating is that he constantly varied the printing sequence of these components. When he printed the main image and hair last, the figures' individuality stood out. When he printed the colored blocks last, the figures became frozen in an abstract cocoon of color, emphasizing the universal, symbolic nature of the theme.
Each impression was unique – different facets of the same symbolic meaning, much like Monet's series paintings of haystacks viewed under different light conditions. This technical experimentation reflects Munch's deep engagement with the theme and his understanding that a work's meaning could shift depending on how it was presented.
The impression presented here has recently been deaccessioned from the Munch Museum and bears their collection stamps on the reverse. It is in exceptional condition, as one would expect from a work that formed part of the artist's bequest to the City of Oslo upon his death in 1944. In her catalogue raisonné of the artist's prints, Gerd Woll addresses the complex task of categorizing the variant impressions by dividing the known corpus into ten groups, each representing a different combination of lithographic and woodblock techniques. This impression belongs to a group believed to have been printed by the artist in 1913.