Vampire in the Forest

1916 was a public year for Munch. In September the university in Kristiania, now Oslo, unveiled the murals he had worked on for years in its ceremonial hall, huge canvases built around a rising sun. That January he had bought Ekely, a property with orchards and woodland on the edge of the city, and he spent most of the rest of his life behind its fence, while Norway stayed out of the war across the North Sea. There he went back to a motif of 1893, a woman bending over a man's neck, which a friend in Berlin had nicknamed the vampire and which Munch had already repeated for more than 20 years. Here he took the pair out of the room, took their clothes off and set them among tree trunks, on a canvas about 150 centimetres tall.