Vampire (Love and Pain)

What you are looking at

A man kneels with his head buried in a woman's lap and chest. We cannot see his face, only the dark crown of his head and his arm wrapped around her. She bends over him, her pale arms around his shoulders, her face pressed into the back of his neck. Her long red hair pours over both of them like a net, in streams that run down his back and arm.

The setting is a nearly abstract field of deep blue and violet. Behind the couple, a dark curved shape, perhaps their joined shadow, rises like a hood. Only the woman's skin and the red of her hair stand out against the gloom.

Love and Pain, or Vampire?

Munch first exhibited the composition in Berlin in 1893 under the title Love and Pain (Kjærlighet og smerte), as part of the cycle of paintings on love and death that he later called the Frieze of Life. The name Vampire came from his friend, the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, who described a man who has become submissive, with a biting vampire's face at his neck. The title stuck. Munch himself said the picture showed nothing more than a woman kissing a man on the neck.

Both readings are present in the image. The embrace is tender: she holds him, and he rests in her arms. But the red hair falling over him looks like blood, and his slumped posture and hidden face suggest a man drained rather than comforted. The ambiguity, love that wounds, fits the rest of the Frieze of Life, where desire is bound up with jealousy, anxiety and death.

Versions

Munch painted the subject six times between 1893 and 1895 and returned to it in woodcuts and lithographs (Vampire II, 1895) and in later paintings of 1916–18. Three of the 1890s canvases are in the Munch Museum, one is in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, and an 1894 version sold at Sotheby's in 2008 for a record price for the artist. This 1895 canvas in the Munch Museum (MM.M.00679) is the one most often reproduced.

Close looking

The paint is thin and scrubbed in many places, so the canvas texture shows through the blue. Look at the hair: it is laid in with long, flowing strokes of orange-red and vermilion, which continue down his arm and over the dark of his jacket, so it seems to bind him. Her arms are painted in warm, chalky flesh tones; his hand, by contrast, is greenish and gray. That difference in color is what led some viewers to see him as drained of life.

Where to see it

The Munch Museum in Oslo shows its versions in rotation. Compare Munch's other images of desire and despair, Melancholy, Anxiety and The Death of Marat, and see Symbolism and Dark Academia.