Vampire

In Berlin in the early 1890s Munch fell in with a circle of writers and painters, Scandinavians and Poles, who met at a tavern they had nicknamed the Black Piglet and argued about love, death and Nietzsche until dawn. He painted this scene there. To him it showed nothing more than a woman leaning in to kiss a man on the neck, and he called it Love and Pain. It was the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, from that same circle, who looked at the red hair spilling over the bowed man's neck and saw something else: a vampire draining him. The name Vampire took hold and never left the picture, however often Munch insisted it was only a kiss. He painted the subject about six times between 1893 and 1895, and this is one of those versions. Notice how little the man does, his arms hanging, his face hidden, the whole weight of the embrace held up by that curtain of red hair.