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“Madonna” by Edvard Munch (Norwegian) – Lithograph on paper / 1895–1902 – Ōhara Museum of Art (Kurashiki, Japan) #WomenInArt #Madonna #art #artText #artwork #EdvardMunch #Munch #ŌharaMuseumofArt #OharaMuseumofArt #大原美術館 #NorwegianArtist #NorwegianArt #BlueskyArt #Symbolism #Proto-Expressionism
Created as one of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s earliest lithographs and issued in multiple color and compositional versions, “Madonna” belongs to the Frieze of Life, his series on love, anxiety, and death. A woman with warm, rose-beige skin tilts her head back, eyes closed and lips softly parted, as if exhaling. Her long black hair flows over bare shoulders and merges into a dark, oval halo that pulses with red-blue tonalities. She raises both arms behind her head, creating a supple arc through neck, chest, and torso. Light pools on the abdomen and sternum while the flanks dissolve into velvety shadow. The lithographic grain gives her flesh a living softness against the enveloping field. In color impressions like this one at the Ōhara Museum of Art, the aura reads almost atmospheric (part halo, part night) so the body seems to hover between apparition and presence. In variants with the decorative frame, three sides teem with wriggling sperm forms and, at lower left, a tiny curled fetus. This biology-as-border haunts the composition’s edges, charging the stillness with the sense of impending creation. Critics have long noted its deliberate fusion of sanctity and sensuality. The blue halo recalls Marian tradition, yet her body reclaims the divine feminine as source and subject of life itself, inviting us to witness “ecstasy and pain in the act of love.” The notorious border with spermatozoa and fetus turns religious iconography into an image on conception, mortality, and the eternal feminine. Between 1895 and 1902 when this was created, Munch was haunted by illness, death, and a failed love affair with Tulla Larsen. Living in Berlin among Symbolist writers and thinkers, he explored themes of desire, spirituality, and mortality within his Frieze of Life series. Madonna reflects this turmoil by fusing sensuality and sanctity as a meditation on love, loss, and the fragile line between creation and death.
October 16, 2025 at 2:57 AM