NEW YORK – Edvard Munch’s “Vampire,” a dark, brooding painting of a woman with cascading red hair kissing a man’s neck, may set a new record for the Norwegian artist when it goes on the auction block this fall.
The 1894 work, which has been in private hands for more than 70 years, is expected to bring $35 million at Sotheby’s on Nov. 3. In May, Munch’s “Girls on the Bridge” sold for $30.8 million, setting a record for the artist.
The “Vampire” painting, also known as “Love and Pain,” caused a stir when it was first exhibited in Berlin in 1902. It was part of a 20-work project called Frieze of Life that explored themes of love, betrayal, death and sex and included his masterpiece, “The Scream.”
“Like ‘The Scream,’ it distills extraordinarily intense feelings,” Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art, said Tuesday. “The lovers, locked in their dark embrace, evoke love’s paradox as a source of tenderness and pain.”
An avid Munch collector bought “Vampire” in 1903. In 1934, it was purchased by a private collector, who has owned it since. It was on loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for about 10 years.
“Vampire” will be the highlight of Sotheby’s sale of impressionist and modern art.
sources: Yahoo News
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker, and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream is one of the pieces in a series titled The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy. As here, he often painted several versions of the motif. Similar paintings include Despair and Anxiety.
The Frieze of Life themes recur throughout Munch’s work, in paintings such as The Sick Child (1885), 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). Some say these paintings reflect the artist’s sexual anxieties, though it could also be argued that they are a better representation of his turbulent relationship with love itself.
sources: Wikipedia
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