Edvard Munch: A Genius of Printmaking

Edvard Munch's haunting 1895/1902 lithograph, Madonna, is reproduced from Hatje Cantz's new survey, Edvard Munch: A Genius of Printmaking. Gerd Woll writes, "The first painted version of the motif, as we know it today, was completed in the spring of 1894 and when Munch began experimenting with printmaking that year, it was one of the first motifs he executed in a rather cautious drypoint. Surrounding the central image is a border depicting sperm and an embryo, and written sources reveal that one of the earliest paintings was equipped with a similar frame. Munch repeated this border in the lithographic version of the motif, but in several variations of the lithograph it was masked out during the printing process and thus deleted. The border, together with the title under which it would eventually be known, Madonna, rendered the lithograph highly controversial and on certain occasions the title was therefore compressed to read Monna. The lithographic version was executed in Berlin in 1895, drawn with a lithographic crayon and abundant applications of tusche on the lithographic stone. On the reverse side of the same stone is Vampire."