Vampira

When Edvard Munch first showed this in Berlin in 1893 he called it Love and Pain, and as far as he was concerned it was just a woman kissing a man on the neck as the two of them embrace. He worked on the motif for years, making six versions between 1893 and 1895. What fixed the darker reading was a friend, the critic Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who looked at the man bowed under that fall of flame-red hair and described a vampire's face fastened on his neck. The name stuck, and Munch let it. He was painting in the Berlin bohemia of the 1890s, a circle soaked in talk of sex, jealousy and the femme fatale, and the picture reads either way depending on what you bring to it. The woman's loose red hair spills down over the man like something between comfort and a wound.