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To the end of his life, Munch continued to paint unsparing self-portraits, adding to his self-searching cycle of his life and his unflinching series of snapshots of his emotional and physical states. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labeled Munch's work "degenerate art" (along with Picasso, Paul Klee, Matisse, Gauguin and many other modern artists) and removed his 82 works from German museums. Hitler announced in 1937, “For all we care, those prehistoric Stone Age culture barbarians and art-stutters can return to the caves of their ancestors and there can apply their primitive international scratching.” This deeply hurt Munch, who had come to feel Germany was his second homeland.



In 1940, the Germans invaded Norway and the Nazi party took over the government. Munch was 76 years old. With nearly an entire collection of his art in the second floor of his house, Munch lived in fear of a Nazi confiscation. Seventy-one of the paintings previously taken by the Nazis had found their way back to Norway through purchase by collectors (the other 11 were never recovered), including The Scream andThe Sick Child, and they too were hidden from the Nazis.



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Did you know that there are many talented artists go unnoticed and unknown to world? In fact Van Gogh wasn't discovered until years even after his death. He was a Dutch painter born in the year 1853.He was living for just 37 years only. He even did not begin his brush to start a painting even in his early 24 years. He died at the age of 37 years  from a gun shot wound and even someone  generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found)No evidence proof found yet. He was completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. No part of his great works were not identified or catalogued or recorded till many years after his death. Of course the photo camera had been invented before his birth period. His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still. His work was not known to the world till 20th century. Not only that much!!! Even though Van Gogh was a Dutch man his media works [ie: - paintings and artworks] were not catalogued and archived for many years still after his death. Normally, Dutch government during its past history even in 17 th century was a well versatile style of rule all over the world due to it’s world knowledge about trade and commerce. Basically, Dutch people/or Dutch dynasty was familiar in world trade before other European countries invaded foreign countries. For example according to History of Dutch trade record, it eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asia trade. Between 1602 and 1796 the East Dutch East India Company [VOC] sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. Compared to Portuguese and British people it is very high rate of trading and the Dutch government was the first colonial country which had the knowledge about all round world affairs. In this circumstances it’s a big wonder how come the record of great painter and their own citizen of Dutch, Van Gogh, a great painter of the world (say among top 5 rankers of global artists) had been omitted?

Van Gogh suddenly left his family home in the village of Nuenen, after a row with the village priest over his use of female models. The artist abandoned hundreds of paintings and drawings in a house where he rented a room as his studio similar incident happened  to ed munch in the year 1939 where he   was closely nearing by the Nazi's tough minded forces.

German forces were notorious for stealing and hiding priceless works of art during Hitler's reign. A 2006 book, "Rescuing Da Vinci," by Robert M. Edsel, chronicles the efforts of American soldiers who recovered thousands of pieces of stolen and lost artwork during World War II.

     This  type of incident happened to Hitler also ....

Hitler had reportedly ordered the paintings to be hidden in a monastery in southern Bohemia, but they were found by American forces during the war. Exactly how the paintings disappeared and ended up in the convent remains a mystery

The two titles of the picture – Loving Woman and Madonna – influence our reading of the work. The artist’s own words, even so, give us valuable clues: “The woman who abandons herself – and acquires the painful beauty of a Madonna.” The woman’s physical presence acquires a spiritual dimension. The picture was created during a time of upheaval – woman’s sexual power and social role were a subject of discussion and analysis, both within litera- ture, psychology and painting. Woman as the femme fatale was a favourite theme: The enticing woman who destruc- tively sucks all power out of the man. Another of Munch’s texts about Madonna dwells on transience and the life cycle, where woman has the nature-given task of producing new generations. “The pause when all the world came to a stop – Your face contains all the beauty of the earthly world – Your lips, crimson as the ripening fruit, part in pain – The smile of ​a corpse – Now death reaches out a hand to life – The chain is joined that links the thousands of gene- rations that are dead to the thousands that are to come.

The hand-coloured version was also printed by him, but here the artist has made an aesthetic change and had it printed on coloured cardboard. After this, Munch has added strong colouring by hand. The lips have been coloured crimson, as has the halo above her head and the symbolic edging. The flowing lines round her head and body have been given a mixture of yellow, blue and red, and the extremely beautiful picture almost looks like a painting. With its strong appearance the picture was perhaps an inspiration for the 1902 version, where Munch, using a demanding printing process, executed a three-coloured print. With one stone for each colour, he now printed Madonna in black, blue and red. As a further explo- ration of the motif he did variants without the symbolic edging – pictures where the self-abandoned woman is por- trayed alone. He concealed the edging and used the same printing stones for red, black and blue. In addition, there are versions where Munch printed a fourth colour, olive-green, which gives the naked body a different character compared to when she is only portrayed with the actual colour of the paper. He added the locks of hair that brush her hips with lithographic ink at some point after 1902.

  At the exhibition in Berlin in December 1893, Munch grouped six pictures as Studies for a Series: Love. The fourth picture of the series had the title Madonna-Gesicht. The picture is now lost, but presumably the five Madonna pictures we now know are a further development of the 1893 version. These paintings were executed in 1894–97 and form the point of departure for the 1895 lithograph. He started work on the lithograph at the same time as he was painting the first versions of Madonna, with the motif as we know it today. Munch’s obsessive portrait of the self-abandoned woman was soon to be given the title Loving Woman. She became a natural part of The Love Series which he later developed into The Frieze of Life – “The frieze is conceived as a poem about life, about love and death,”ii he wrote in his notes.





The naked woman is portrayed half-length, has a halo-like arc round her head, and flowing lines gently cling round her body as if in some ecstatic rhythm. With closed eyes she leans backwards, her dark hair cascading down over her shoulders and breasts. On three sides the picture is surrounded by a red edge with swimming spermatozoa. In the bottom left-hand corner a scared foetus sits, glowering up at the source of his existence. Originally, the painting had been placed in a frame with similar contents, but this was later removed. So only the lithograph retains the ambivalent and symbolic content of the motif.



When Munch made the first lithographs in 1895, it was rare for the Berlin workshops to do multicoloured prints. It was not an unknown practice, however, and in Paris in particular several printers were experimenting with this. In the years before Munch developed his works into colour prints, he added colour to the prints by hand.

   This can be seen as experimenting with colour, but also as a wish to make the individual prints into unique works of art, comparable with paintings. In terms of expression, the coloured prints appear to have changed their character and mood – something that may be the reason why Munch often exhibited several variants of a motif at one and the same exhibition.