Edvard Munch (1863-1945)
Edvard Munch (1863-1945)

The Heart (Schiefler 134; Woll 135)

Details
Edvard Munch (1863-1945)
The Heart (Schiefler 134; Woll 135)
woodcut printed in black, greenish-blue and red, 1898-99, on thin cream Japan paper, signed in pencil, a very fine impression of this rare woodcut, probably printed by Lassally around 1913, the colours particularly bright and fresh, with margins, a deckle edge below, generally in very good condition, framed
B. 250 x 191 mm., S. 375 x 278 mm.

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Charlie Scott

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Lot Essay

Munch's fraught relationships with women were a recurring theme in his art. In 1898, the year The Heart was made, Munch began a passionate liason with Mathilda (Tulla) Larsen, the daughter of a wealthy Christiana wine merchant. Their affair was often tempestous, with tensions arising from Tulla's desire to marry Munch, which he resisted.
'I have always put my art above everything else. Most often I feel a woman would block my way. I decided at an early age to remain unmarried. Because of the inherited tendencies to illness, both from my father and from my mother, I always felt it would be a crime to marry.'

The relationship ended with an angry encounter in Asgardstrand in which a revolver shot severed the top two joints of the third finger on Munch's left hand.

The Heart calls to mind the religious iconography of the Sacred Heart, the apotheosis of self-sacrificial love but is viscerally different. Is the woman who cradles the bloody organ intent on kissing or devouring it? Is her head bowed in reverence, or stooped in preparation for a ghastly feast? The image of Woman as predatory and desire as perilous is powerfully expressed in other iconic images such as The Vampire (1895). The meaning of The Heart is perhaps more ambiguous. It does, however, eloquently distil the artist's deeply ambivalent experience of love, one in which fear and passion are not mutually exclusive.

Executed as a woodcut, a medium which Munch experimented with extensively, The Heart illustrates his innovative method of cutting the carved block into its component pieces with a jigsaw. These were then inked seperately with different colours, fitted back together again like a puzzle and printed with one pass through the press. This beautiful and rare impression is one of only six to have been offered at auction in the last twenty five years. It is an exquisite, if somewhat unsettling, Valentine.

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