Madonna is one of the most astonishing images created by the mind of the prominent Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, produced in several versions between 1892 and 1895.
This work depicts a half-nude woman with closed eyes, wearing a red hat, posing for us and the artist with a carefree expression and extraordinary confidence, completely indifferent to the surrounding world.
Her dreamlike face is both powerful and submissive, and her being is simultaneously sacred, provocative, and threatening. This has led some to interpret her as an expressionist image of the Virgin Mary, while others see her as a symbol of the astonishing beauty of an ideal woman from the artist’s perspective.
There are many versions of Madonna: some painted in oil on canvas (such as the image above from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway), and others as lithographs (such as the main image of this text, housed in the Ohara Museum of Art in Japan).
In the lithographic version, the decorative border consists of long, twisting strands resembling sperm, which wrap around three sides of the image and end in an ornament resembling a fetal pendant.
Munch himself referred to this series as both The Loving Woman and Madonna, but over time, Madonna became the common name among art audiences and researchers. The model for this series was the Norwegian writer and Munch’s friend, Dagny Juel, who in 1901—just three days before her 34th birthday—was shot dead in a hotel room in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Dagny’s death, although sudden and tragic, was not the only sorrow in the artist’s turbulent life. Munch’s experiences—including difficult relationships with women, multiple mental health struggles, and a childhood marked by the death of his mother and sister—wounded the young artist’s heart but also made his work more conscious.
This self-awareness, along with the cultural climate of the 1890s—a time when social conventions and the status of women were undergoing major change, and sexual freedom was both emerging and feared—combined to produce a work such as Madonna.
A work that, according to feminist critic Carol Duncan, portrays the image of a fatal woman. In her view: “Munch’s Madonna visually refers to the issue of victimization. The familiar gestures of submission (arm behind the head) and bondage (arm behind the back, as if restrained), when expressed gently, carry entirely clear meanings… This gesture of surrender subtly reveals the dark and dominant power of the woman. The same duality can be seen in the relationship between the work and the viewer: the woman can be seen as standing upright before the viewer or lying down beneath him.”
Other critics have also considered Munch’s depiction of this woman to be implicitly contradictory. From Robert Melville, the British journalist who says Madonna represents “ecstasy and pain in falling in love,” to Peter de, the painter and art critic who sees her as a potentially vampiric figure, interpreting the work as a duality between a terrifying image of a monstrous mother and an independent woman—something like an untouched, self-sufficient woman who enjoys her erotic emotions.
But perhaps the most honest interpretation of Madonna comes from Munch himself, where he reveals his inner world and his vision of a contradictory realm of pleasure and danger, life and death, love and lust. He describes Madonna as:
“Pause when the world stops moving… Your lips, as red as ripe fruit, gently part as if in pain. Now the hand of death touches life. It is a false chain that binds a thousand dead families to a thousand future generations.”
