Edvard Munch

In 1892, Munch began to realise an idea he had been contemplating for several years: a series of pictures illustrating an emotional sequence. Munch developed this theme and eventually settled on the title The Frieze of Life, a theme which came to incorporate all of his major work to date. His first sequence of images was exhibited in Berlin in 1893 under the title Der Liebe (Love). This exhibition included six paintings and pastel studies for planned paintings. Together, these compositions trace a path of love from innocence, to passion, to emotional pain, to jealousy and then to despair. Third in the series was a compositional outline in pastel, exhibited as Love and Pain.

Munch's friend, the writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, gave the title Vampire to this composition after seeing the exhibition, and it was soon adopted by Munch himself. Przybyszewski wrote: "A man broken in spirit; on his neck, the face of a biting vampire. The background - a remarkable mixture of blue, purple, green, yellow dashes of color, mixed together, flowing together, next to each other like small, prickly splinters of crystal . . . . he cannot rid himself of that vampire nor of the pain, and the woman will always sit there, will bite eternally with the tongues of a thousand vipers, with a thousand venomous teeth" (quoted in Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch's "Life Frieze", op. cit., p. 186).

Heller considers the present version as a key distillation of Vampire, as Munch evolved a more focused composition from his first sketches: "Whereas previously Munch had depicted the entire figures of both the man and the woman, he now concentrates only on the upper half of the body to bring the viewer closer to the figures. The basic result of this is a greater sense of intimacy: one no longer sees a distant figure group from which one is greatly removed, but is forced to see the man and woman extremely close, both physically and spiritually. . . . The scene was no longer a purely anecdotal one, but became expressively powerful and could thus project a psychological mood more effectively" (ibid. p. 182).

Heller dates the present work to 1893, a dating which is reinforced by the compositional similarity of this pastel to Munch's first paintings of the subject. In these images, such as the painting in the Göteborg Konstmuseum, Munch places a rhyming shadow of the two figures at the upper right, much like the shadow in the present work. In later versions, however, Munch moved this shadow to the centre to surround the figures, as in the Munch Museum's painting of circa 1893-94 (fig. 1) and the lithograph and woodcut of 1895-1902.

In the present work, Munch balances lighter and darker readings: a tender embrace of emotional comfort with the ominous power of the dominant female. The lighter tones of the background encourage this ambiguity, and even the looming shadow can also suggest the emotional bond uniting the two figures. As Munch continued to develop the image, he tended toward darker backgrounds with more ominous undertones. Heller relates this evolution to Munch's belief in a connection between love and death, as his mother had died when he was a child, and his sister when he was sixteen. For Heller, Munch explores this dark emotional connection in Vampire: "Loving a woman endangers man, for in approaching woman he also approaches death and thus threatens his existence and identity" (ibid., p. 188).

FIG. 1, Edvard Munch, Vampire, circa 1893-94, Munch-Museet, Oslo