"I am, my dear scholar, so learned in things voluptuous
When I smother a man in my fearful arms"
Charles Baudelaire (1)
This painting by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was originally titled Love and Pain, and is part of the Frieze of Life, a series of works of art broaching love, anxiety and death. Munch produced many variations of his Vampyr, so this lithography is difficult to date. But it was probably produced in 1902, using a new combination of engravings on stone and wood.
Munch's brunette, blond and redhead feminine figures haunt shores and forests like melancholic apparitions. His Vampyr portrays a woman with long loose hair embracing a man huddled up against her bosom. Their features are blurred in this symbiotic embrace and the woman's kiss becomes a vampire's bite. The man willingly loses himself in the thirsty beauty who drinks from his neck as if it were a fountain of desire.
"She lay his head on her breast – he heard her heart beat – felt the blood run in her veins – and he knew two burning lips on his neck – it gave him a shudder through his body – a chilling spasm so that he convulsively pressed her to him" (2)
The young woman's red, liquid hair crystallises the vampire's ambivalence. It is erotically enticing and flamboyant, reveals her deadly reflections, and becomes the garment that femmes fatales from Medusa to Salomé have worn. If it is caressing her lover's face, it is also sprawling like a river of blood. The pale, bloodless bodies are flooded with a passionate red that sharply contrasts with the light blue surrounding them in the background.
The temptress is opening her hair like tentacles encircling and clutching their victim. The serpentine locks, echoed in the abstract backdrop's curls, form an alcove as much as an inexorable trap.
(1) Charles Baudelaire, Les Métamorphoses du vampire in Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, Gallimard, 1972), p. 197.
(2) Edvard Munch, The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
