Madonna

A naked woman, eyes closed, head thrown back, wears an ecstatic expression.
Above her head, a red halo glows, and a sinuous border encircles the edges of the image.
In the lower left, a small, crouching figure.

This work, titled Madonna.
It stands as a pinnacle of late 19th-century Symbolist art and is one of Munch's most controversial works.
Created in 1895, this lithograph is characterized by its flowing curves and sophisticated design.
It has long been celebrated as a masterpiece that perfectly captures the mysterious essence of womanhood.

It appears as if this complete vision existed in the artist's mind from the outset,
and was then directly translated and fixed into the print.

However, in reality, this perfect composition did not take this form from the very beginning.

Recent scientific investigations have revealed a certain fact:
traces of the artist's hesitation and trial-and-error were discovered, hidden beneath this painting.

Recently, at the National Museum of Norway,
restorers Thierry Ford and his team conducted an investigation,
joined by curator Vibeke Waallann Hansen.
They examined the oil painting version of Madonna held by the museum using an infrared camera.

Unexpectedly, something was found beneath the paint surface:
an early sketch with a completely different composition, showing the arms hanging loosely.

The oil painting completed in 1894 was part of the very initial process of creation.
Munch was experimenting with the composition there.

In 1895, Munch was in Berlin,
at the center of an avant-garde group based at the 'Black Piglet' café.
At that time, European society was experiencing intense debates surrounding women's social advancement,
as well as their right to self-determination regarding sexuality.

Within this circle, discussions took place daily:
psychoanalysis and Nietzschean philosophy,
and the duality of women as both 'reproductive beings and femmes fatales'.

Munch sought to connect the Catholic Church's veneration of the Virgin Mary with raw eroticism.
He attempted to reinterpret modern female sexuality through the lenses of 'the sacred' and 'the premonition of death'.

In 1894,
the Polish novelist Stanisław Przybyszewski published a text,
inspired by Munch's pioneering oil study, The Face of Madonna.
He extolled the 'oceanic beauty' that women display in the ecstasy of conception and love.

Munch was deeply influenced by this analysis.

Through compositional experimentation in the oil painting,
he then perfectly refined the design for this lithograph in 1895.