Vampir

In Berlin at the start of the 1890s Munch fell in with a rowdy circle of writers and artists who drank at a tavern they nicknamed the Black Piglet. Out of those years came this image of a woman bending into a man, her red hair pouring down over him, which Munch first called Love and Pain. It was one of his friends from that circle, the Polish writer Przybyszewski, who looked at it and saw instead a broken man with a vampire fastened to his neck. The darker name caught on, and Munch let it stand. He returned to the image again and again, painting it several times between 1893 and 1895. For his part he kept insisting it showed nothing more than a woman kissing a man on the neck.