Originally called Loving Woman, this picture can be taken to symbolize what Munch considered the essential acts of the female life cycle: sexual intercourse, causing fertilization, procreation and death. Evidence for the first is in the picture itself, an intensified, spiritualized variation in the nude of the 'mating' pose, the woman depicted as though recumbent beneath her lover. The ethereal beauty of her face was said to resemble both Dagny Przybyszewska and her sister Ragnhild Backstrom. Procreation was implied by the decoration of the original frame, later discarded, on which were painted drops of semen and an embryo. That Munch associated the image with death is clear from his own comments on the picture, in which he sees it as representing the eternal cyclical process of generation and decay in nature. He continually connected love with death: for the man, because it eviscerated him, for the woman, because, following Schopenhauer, he appears to have thought her function ended with child-bearing.
To call the picture Madonna is not in-appropriate if the word is understood metaphorically, for Munch, unable to accept Christianity or a personal god, regarded the continuous generation and metamorphosis of life in a religious light, subsuming its spiritual as well as its material components. The blood-red halo around the woman's head could be considered the spiritual counterpart to the touches of red on her lips, nipples and navel. She seems to float within curing bands of colored light suggestive of art nouveau. Far from deforming her, however, they look like a supernatural emanation, possibly deriving from the spiritualist notion of an aura, surrounding all individuals but only visible to mediums.   "Weeping Nude," painted almost two decades after "Madonna, is a superb work that has hints of a strong dash of Cézanne and a jigger of Matisse but a taste purely Munch's. It is quite magnificent as are a few other large works in which he concentrates on women, especially long-haired.











​

​

​

​

​

​

    Two of the greatest surprises in the exhibition are a large and bright painting of a horse galloping straight at the viewer in a snow-covered street as people turn and watch ("Galloping Horse, 1910-2, oil on canvas, 58 1/4 by 47 1/4 inches, Munch Museum, Oslo). A very bold composition, it is remarkable also for its highly abstracted mountainous background. The other outstanding work is a huge sunset (The Sun [study], 1912, oil on canvas, 48 7/16 by 69 1/2 inches, Munch Museum, Oslo) whose radiance seems a mixture of Odilon Redon and Georges Seurat. While staying within the realm of realism, it vibrant palette and almost atomic explosiveness hints at the surreal worlds that would be much later explored by Matta. Surprisingly, these works do not receive much attention in the catalogue's text.

The jury may be out on whether Munch was a great artist, but he did produce quite a few important masterpieces. This means that the great work of greatest artists' works some times forgotten due to ignorance of the people sitting in high level chair personalities.



     Munch's images of the Madonna are among the most haunting and evocative female icons in the history of European art. Originally conceived in Berlin between 1890 and 1892, the figure of Munch's Madonna stands at the crossroads between the symbolist art of the late nineteenth century and the modernism of the early twentieth century. The Madonna encapsulates all the ambivalence that exists between fear and desire in a single instantly memorable and resonant image. Munch's Madonna is an embodiment of the mystic nature of life and an evocation of the miracle of existence infused with love and expressive emotion.

Munch's intent was to represent "Woman" from the point of view of her lover at the moment she conceives a new life within; Munch described that precise moment as being when "life and death join hands", when "Woman" stands at the gateway between life and death reaches her apotheosis. She is then at her most desirable, her most majestic and her most fearful. In the artist's own words:

The pause as all the world stops in its path. Moonlight glides over your face filled with all the earth's beauty and pain. Your lips are like two ruby red serpents, and are filled with blood, like your crimson red fruit. They part from one another as if in pain. The smile of a corpse. Thus life reaches out its hand to death. The chain is forged that binds the thousands of generations that have died to the thousands of generations yet to come.

Madonna is depicted amidst a mystic aura of rippling waves of color that surround her and encourage a visionary interpretation. Womb-like and cavernous in their ambience, these billowing rings of color echo the blood red clouds that swirl around the terrified figure of Munch's other epic painting of this period, The Scream. With jet black hair falling in Medusa-like threads, Munch's woman is shown as if she were a holy apparition transfiguring in the center of a vortex with a look of mystic ecstasy. Her arms dissolve into the cosmic mist that surrounds her, while her ghost-like face radiates an impossible beauty. A rich blood-red halo adorns this sensuous embodiment of love, life and death, crowning her as Madonna.

The model for Madonna was Dagny Juel, a woman whom Munch met at Zum Schwarzen Ferkel, a pub that served as the headquarters for Berlin's avant-garde literary circle. Although it is unclear if Juel actually sat for the artist, her features are visible in much of Munch's art of the period, including its present work.









































​Sin, (Die Suende) c. 1893.

Images like Von Stuck’s [Franz von Stuck (German, 1863-1928).] Sin were part of Munch’s popular culture. Notice the seductive, curvaceous nude with a snake slithering around her, harkening images of the Garden of Eden. This is the quintessential heartless, cold femme fatale-temptress.

Munch was so fascinated by the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, in a letter, he claimed he was “racing from one exhibition to another.” Even though his 1890 painting of Rue de Rivoli, follows many impressionist techniques, the unique character of Munch’s brushstrokes creates an agitated ambience. Has he intentionally added a sense of anxiety to this scene?

​

Notice the striking similarity between Madonna and Sin. Yet this is Munch’s impression of a woman in the act of making love. Note the fertility symbols: sperm are swimming around her, a red halo and a fetus in the lower left corner.  Is she a femme fatale or an earth mother? When these two works are compared side by side, as they are in this exhibition, Munch’s conflicted sexual orientation become quite evident.

PLEASE GO HERE for continuation of this historical truth