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Finding "the" Vampire - Saturday, November 4, 2006, Oslo, Norway
After celebrating
Halloween,
in an old and spooky Amsterdam canal house it was time for Martin Aas to look
for "the" Vampire, Edvard Munchs well known painting made in 1893-94. The painting was found at the Munch museum in Oslo, Norway, dedicated to the work and life of the painter Edvard Munch.
The museum was financed from the profits generated by the Oslo municipal cinemas and opened its doors in 1963 to commemorate what would have been the painter's 100th birthday. Its collection consists of works and articles willed by Munch to the municipality of Oslo, additional works donated by his sister Inger Munch, and various other works obtained through trades of duplicate prints, etc. As a result, the museum now has in its permanent collection well over half of the artist's entire production of paintings and at least one copy of all his prints. This amounts to over 1,100 paintings, 15,500 prints covering 700 motives, six sculptures, as well as 500 plates, 2,240 books, and various other items.
The Munch Museum
Maria C. Rygh and Sidsel W. Hovde
Vimel at the security check
In addition to its collection of works of art, the museum also contains educational and conservation sections. It has facilities for performing arts. The museum structure was designed by the architects Gunnar Fougner and Einar Myklebust. Myklebust also played an important role in the expansion and renovation of the museum in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of Munch's death.
Munch portrayed women either as frail, innocent sufferers or as lurid, life-devouring vampires. Vampires are mythological or folkloric creatures, typically held to be the re-animated corpses of human beings and said to subsist on human and animal blood (hematophagy). They are also the frequent subject of cinema and fiction, albeit fictional vampires have acquired a set of traits distinct from those of folkloric vampires. In folklore, the term usually refers to the blood-sucking undead of Eastern European legends, but it is often extended to cover similar legendary creatures in other regions and cultures. Vampire characteristics vary widely between different traditions. Some cultures have stories of non-human vampires, such as animals like bats, dogs, and spiders.
Martin Aas and Edvard Munch's "the" Vampire (1893 - 1894) at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway
Munch's means of expression evolved throughout his life. In the 1880s, Munch's idiom was both naturalistic, as seen in Portrait of Hans Jæger, and impressionistic, as in (Rue Lafayette). In 1892, Munch formulated his characteristic, and original, Synthetist aesthetic, as seen in Melancholy, in which colour is the symbol-laden element. Painted in 1893, The Scream is his most famous work.
The Scream (1893; originally called Despair), Munch's best-known painting, 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 with many of his works, he painted several versions of it. One version was stolen in 1994 and another in 2004. Both versions have since been recovered.
The Frieze of Life themes recur throughout Munch's work, in paintings such as The Coney Dog (1886, portrait of his deceased sister Sophie), Vampire (1893), 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 or as lurid, life-devouring vampires. Munch analysts say this reflects his sexual anxieties.
Munch; he would later say, "Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life." A number of modern sources have described Munch's illness as probably being bipolar disorder.
Inside the Edvard Munch Museum
In 1879, Munch enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, but frequent illnesses interrupted his studies. In 1880, he left the college to become a painter. In 1881, he enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania. His teachers were sculptor Julius Middelthun and naturalistic painter Christian Krohg.
While stylistically influenced by the postimpressionists, Munch's subject matter is symbolist in content, depicting a state of mind rather than an external reality.
Munch maintained that the impressionist idiom did not suit his art. Interested in portraying not a random slice of reality, but situations brimming with emotional content and expressive energy, Munch carefully calculated his compositions to create a tense atmosphere.
During the 1890s, Munch favoured a shallow pictorial space, a minimal backdrop for his frontal figures. Since poses were chosen to produce the most convincing images of states of mind and psychological conditions (Ashes), the figures impart a monumental, static quality. Munch's figures appear to play roles on a theatre stage (Death in the Sick-Room), whose pantomime of fixed postures signify various emotions; since each character embodies a single psychological dimension, as in The Scream, Munch's men and women appear more symbolic than realistic.
Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) was a Norwegian expressionist painter and printmaker
In 1892, the Union of Berlin Artists invited Munch to exhibit at its November exhibition. His paintings invoked bitter controversy at the show, and after one week the exhibition closed. In Berlin, Munch involved himself in an international circle of writers, artists and critics, the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg.
While in Berlin at the turn of the century, Munch experimented with a variety of new media (photography, lithography, and woodcuts), in many instances re-working his older imagery.
One of his great supporters in Berlin was Walter Rathenau, later the German foreign minister, who greatly contributed to his success.
In the autumn of 1908, Munch's anxiety became acute and he entered the clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobsen. The therapy Munch received in hospital changed his personality, and after returning to Norway in 1909 he showed more interest in nature subjects, and his work became more colourful and less pessimistic.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the National Socialists labelled his work "degenerate art", and removed his work from German museums. This deeply hurt Munch, who had come to feel Germany was his second homeland.
Munch built himself a studio and simple house at Ekely, outside of Oslo, and spent the last decades of his life there. He died there on January 23, 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. He left 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, 4,500 drawings and watercolours, and six sculptures to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen. The museum houses the broadest collection of his works. His works are also represented in major museums and galleries in Norway and abroad.
Norwegian 1,000 Kroner note
Dance of Life (1899 – 1900)
The Scream (1893)
Munch appears on the Norwegian 1,000 Kroner note along with pictures inspired by his artwork.
"From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity."
—Edvard Munch
Frieze of Life — A Poem about Life, Love and Death.
Frieze of Life motifs such as The Storm and Moonlight are steeped in atmosphere. Other motifs illuminate the nocturnal side of love, such as Rose and Amelie and Vampire. In Death in the Sickroom (1893), the subject is the death of his sister Sophie. The dramatic focus of the painting, portraying his entire family, is dispersed in a series of separate and disconnected figures of sorrow. In 1894, he enlarged the spectrum of motifs by adding Anxiety, Ashes, Madonna and Women in Three Stages.
Around the turn of the century, Munch worked to finish the Frieze. He painted a number of pictures, several of them in larger format and to some extent featuring the Art Nouveau aesthetics of the time. He made a wooden frame with carved reliefs for the large painting Metabolism (1898), initially called Adam and Eve. This work reveals Munch's preoccupation with the "fall of man" myth and his pessimistic philosophy of love. Motifs such as The Empty Cross and Golgotha (both c. 1900) reflect a metaphysical orientation, and also echo Munch's pietistic upbringing. The entire Frieze showed for the first time at the secessionist exhibition in Berlin in 1902.
Munchs studio and house in Åsgårdstrand, Norway where he painted (photos: November 7, 2006)
After the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China ended, Munch was the first Western artist to have his pictures exhibited at the National Gallery in Beijing.
Some art historians believe that the red sky in the background of The Scream reflects the unusually intense sunsets seen throughout the world following the 1883 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa.
Solefald wrote a song about him on their 2003 album In Harmonia Universali, titled "Christiania (Edvard Munch Commemoration)"
List of major works from Edvard Munch:
1892 - Evening on Karl Johan
1893 - The Scream
1893 - 1894 The Vampire
1894 - Ashes
1894-95 - Madonna
1895 - Puberty
1895 - Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette
1895 - Death in the Sickroom
1899-1900 - The Dance of Life
1899-1900 - The Dead Mother
1940-42 - Self Portrait: Between Clock and Bed
Visit Munch Museum's website
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