Edvard Munch’s Vampire: A Scary Femme Fatale or a Tender Lover?

In 2013, the Norwegian minister of culture, Hadia Tajik, described Edvard Munch (1863–1944) as one of Norway’s, and the world’s, biggest artists. Her opinion is not isolated. Born in the village of Ådalsbruk, Edvard Munch was already considered one of the country’s best artists around 1915, and nowadays, he is regarded as not only an artist but a thoroughly canonized trademark.

During the six decades of his artistic career, Munch created thousands of works in different styles and techniques. Still, he remains best known for a small group of Symbolist paintings from the 1890s, belonging to the project The Frieze of Life, focused around themes of love and death.

One of these paintings, Vampire, is considered by many to be a metaphor for the femme fatale, fatal woman, sucking the life out of a man. The term femme fatale was widely used in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to the stereotype of a dangerous, immoral, and seductive woman who uses her charm and sexuality to deceive men. However, the full story of the painting possibly reveals a completely different meaning.

Berlin

Edvard Munch painted his first version of the motif in 1893 in Berlin. The Association of Berlin Artists invited him to the city to hold a solo exhibition a year prior. The show caused a scandal immediately after opening, and closed after only five days, making Munch’s name recognizable in the city. Finding the whole situation funny, the painter was prompted to open the show again by himself.

Thanks to the press, eager to slander him for showing “unfinished” or “lazy” paintings, Munch could afford to present his art in different German cities to crowds of people, tempted to see for themselves what the controversy was all about. Today, the scandal is called the “Munch Affair,” and is considered to mark the beginning of the secession in Berlin. Secession refers to an ideological and artistic break between young, radical artists, and the Academy, constituted mostly of older artists and strict, conservative rules.

Munch stayed in Berlin for four years, becoming friends with many artists frequenting The Black Piglet tavern. Among others, he befriended a Polish writer interested in satanism, occultism, and mysticism, Stanisław Przybyszewski, as well as a beautiful Norwegian music student, Dagny Juel, who would later become Przybyszewski’s wife. She quickly became Munch’s unrequited love, joining the list of women he portrayed in hundreds of drawings and paintings as either objects of desire and jealousy, or creatures such as sphinxes, mermaids, and harpies.

If one thinks of Munch’s tumultuous love life, the popularity of the femme fatale concept, and the many mythological and folklore beings portrayed by the artist, a more literal interpretation of Vampire seems to be correct. The interpretation fits the circumstances of Munch’s time. However, there are some arguments, pointing away from this idea.

Love, Pain, and Stanisław Przybyszewski

When Munch exhibited his first Vampire in Unter den Linden gallery in Berlin in 1893, the work was titled Love and Pain. The title Vampire was ascribed to the artwork a little later by Przybyszewski. Being a big fan of his Norwegian friend’s art, Przybyszewski described the masterpiece in three literary works: Psychic Naturalism (1892), The Work of Edvard Munch (1894), and On the Paths of the Soul (1896). Munch adopted the title and idea.

When he exhibited two versions of the motif in Stockholm in October 1894, he had already decided to not only title the works Vampire, but to include extracts from Psychic Naturalism in the catalog as well. However, he never completely abandoned his original vision for the work.

Showing yet another new version in the Blomqvist auction house in Oslo in 1918, the picture received the title Woman Who Kisses a Man on the Neck. Additionally, in 1933, Munch wrote about the painting:

Indeed, what makes this painting stand out from other portrayals of women in Munch’s art, is its subtlety, ambivalence, and mystery. No teeth nor blood are visible on the canvas, and it’s not like Munch was ever afraid to portray violence.

What we do have for interpretation are the faces. The woman is blushing and looks healthy, while the man is pale and corpse-like. We also have the woman’s hair. Though it has been described as a “bloody rain,” and thus could be viewed as a metaphor for actual blood oozing out of the male’s neck, it doesn’t exclusively suggest an attack, but perhaps a protective embrace. So do the pair’s poses, which resemble another motif of Munch’s known as Consolation. The dark shadow surrounding the couple can be viewed in two ways as well, either as a threat or a safe space between two lovers.

Finally, what is also interesting is that the first sketches of the Vampire motif date back to 1885 or 1886. Long before Munch met his decadent friends in Berlin and was familiarized with their ideas, and long before yet another one of his lovers, Tulla Larsen, shot him in the finger—an event that made Munch extremely resentful and paranoid. The first sketches of the motif were also before his art showed any clear clues of misogyny.

Vampire Throughout the Years

Edvard Munch worked with the motif until 1930. The versions we have today all differ in both technique and composition. In the Munch Museum alone, there are more than 90 versions of the motif. Most of them look similar or the same, often being graphic prints from the years 1893 to 1902.

During the 1910s and 1920s, Munch’s palette became brighter, and he developed the motif of Vampire in the Forest in which the male figure lost his signature pale face and received a certain bodily autonomy. One sketch of the motif shows the woman’s closed lips as she hugs the man.

Identities of the Figures

Art historians agree that the male model portrayed in the early and most famous versions of Vampire is Adolf Paul—a Swedish writer and Munch’s friend from Berlin. Paul described visiting Munch at his studio, and seeing him paint a naked female model. He was then asked to pose alongside her, still dressed in his elegant outdoor clothes. His recollection provides us with a surprisingly ordinary explanation of the contrasting states of both figures. The female model was probably one of Munch’s German models, but her identity remains unknown.

Despite this, it is suspected that in Vampire, Munch intended to portray himself and Emilie “Milly” Thaulow, his first love. 25-year-old Thaulow and 22-year-old Munch met in 1885, around the time the first sketches of Vampire were drawn. Due to Thaulow being already married, the relationship ended quite quickly, leaving the painter heartbroken. One can imagine portraying her in the role of a vampire as an act of revenge for choosing her husband over Munch, where the act of sucking the life force out of a man is a metaphor for taking with her his happiness and will to live.

Story of Two Drawings

Around 1885, Munch rented an atelier in Kristiania (today’s Oslo), where he and Thaulow could meet in secret. He described one of their meetings in his journal. In it, a man named Nansen, Munch’s literary alter ego, waits longingly for his lover in a dark room, on a late, lonely afternoon.

This note can be tied to two drawings—On the Sofa and Vampire/Consolation. The first portrays a figure sitting on a sofa next to a window. The second is an early version of the Vampire motif, differing from the later works through several elements, such as the woman being dressed and the presence of some sort of a bench she is sitting on. The composition and pose are also different, which tells us that the man holds a certain autonomy and decisiveness over the situation. Compared with the quoted note, both of these drawings may reveal the true origin, meaning, and location of Vampire.

The title Vampire/Consolation suggests that the presented scene contains elements of two different motifs. In the motif of Consolation, once again, Munch portrays two lovers’ embrace, but it’s usually the man embracing the woman, while she is visibly distraught.

Looking additionally at one of the lithographs from the Munch Museum from 1895 (below), one sees a window similar to the one from the On the Sofa drawing. The reading of the masterpiece as a secret meeting of two lovers becomes more and more probable. Their relationship is doomed and reaches its end, to the perhaps bigger (at least from Munch’s point of view) distress of the man.

Munch and Love

For Munch, love was a contradictory feeling that combined gentleness and intimacy with pain, jealousy, and suffering. As one can read in the exhibition text of Munch Museum’s collection exhibition, Infinite: “[Munch] once described it as a fight between two people. […] Where there is passion in Munch, there is also pain. Where there is desire, there is also loss.” This contrast is something one can feel when one looks at Vampire.

Artist’s Inscrutable Intention

For Edvard Munch, the hint of physical pain caused by a vampire bite could have been the perfect metaphor for his view on love and relationships. On the one hand, Vampire is a product of its time. Artistically, it ties into the rise of Symbolism and Expressionism, while historically it ties into the phenomena of fin de siècle (the decadent end of the 19th century) and the femme fatale.

On the other hand, through the lack of any decisive elements that would rid the work of its mystery and leave no doubt as to its correct interpretation, we can still view the work to be an image of love. This evokes a feeling that can be overwhelming and disastrous, in which one lover (in Munch’s experience, a woman) possesses the power to dominate and suck the energy or happiness out of the other. But this feeling can also be safe, intimate, and one of a kind. All in all, the masterpiece can be viewed as a portrayal of the complicated nature of love. That’s why it seems that Edvard Munch never wanted its puzzle to be solved. He made it unsolvable.

Author’s bio

Zuzanna Borowska holds a Master’s degree in Art History and a Bachelor’s degree in Norwegian Philology. She lives in Gdańsk and is most interested in modern Norwegian art and Edvard Munch, the main subject of her Instagram project Beyond Munch’s.