Edvard Munch (Norway)

Contemporary with The Scream, Munch’s Madonna is rendered with softer brushstrokes and comparatively subdued pigments. Munch depicts the Virgin Mary in a manner that defies all preceding “historical” representations of the chaste mother of Jesus Christ. With a sense of modesty conveyed only by her closed eyes, the nude appears to be in the act of lovemaking, her body subtly contorting and bending towards a nondescript light.

Indeed, Munch’s Madonna may very well be a modernist, if irreverent depiction of the Immaculate Conception. The red halo upon the Madonna’s head, as opposed to the customary white or golden ring, indicates a ruling passion befitting Baroque-era renditions of the subject, minus any measure of religious discretion. While the artist himself never fully succumbed to his father’s religious fervor and teachings, this work clearly suggests Munch’s constant wrangling over the exact nature of his own spirituality.

The frequent preoccupation in Munch’s work with sexual subject matter issues from both the artist’s bohemian valuation of sex as a tool for emotional and physical liberation from social conformity as well as his contemporaries’ fascination with sexual experience as a window onto the subliminal, sometimes darker facets of human psychology.