Vererbung

Munch worked on this between 1897 and 1899, just after time in Paris where he had visited the Hopital Saint-Louis, a hospital known for skin and venereal disease. There he saw a woman weeping over her sick baby, and a wax model of an infant born with congenital syphilis. That is what he painted, a mother on a bench, her face swollen and red with crying, holding a child who is pale, spotted and already lifeless in her lap. It landed as a shock. Syphilis was everywhere in Europe then and almost never named in public, and here it was hung on a gallery wall. Munch also took the oldest and tenderest shape in Western art, a mother and child, and emptied it of comfort. The green wall behind her stays flat and cold.