One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch’s painting of a man locked in a vampire’s tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin – created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago.
Some believed the Norwegian artist’s anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain – since known as Vampire – to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite sister. Some years later, Nazi Germany condemned it as morally “degenerate”.
Vampire has become one of Munch’s most sought-after and reproduced images, despite remaining in the hands of a private collector for the past 70 years.
The painting will go on the open market, The Independent can reveal, and is anticipated to smash the $31m (£17m) auction record for a Munch work. Vampire, which is often seen as the sister of The Scream, completed just months earlier, will be sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York for an estimated $35m.
The painting was part of Munch’s seminal 20-work series The Frieze of Life, which included The Scream. It is the most significant version of four Vampires he completed in 1893 and 1894, and was first exhibited in 1902 in Berlin, where his works caused shock and awe.(THE INDEPENDENT)