Edvard Munch – Madonna

Madonna

Madonna by Edvard Munch is a painting on canvas made between 1894 and 1895, held under inventory number NG.M.00841 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 70.5 x 90.5 cm. It shows a woman, nude to below the hips, her head tilted back and her eyes closed, with a thin red arc closing above the crown of her head.

The figure is seen from the front and fills almost the whole height of the canvas. Her head is tilted back and slightly to her right; the eyes are closed and sunk in dark shadow, the face a pale greenish white, the mouth small and dark. Long black hair falls in heavy waves down both sides, over her right shoulder and past the waist, and a few strands cross her chest.

Her left arm is raised and bent behind her head, so that the elbow sits high at the upper left edge; the right arm goes down and back behind the hip. The body is painted in pale cream-yellow and greenish tones with soft modelling. The thin red arc above the crown is the only strong colour in the whole painting and is usually read as a halo.

The background is not a room but a vortex: long curving strokes in dark blue-grey, olive-green and brown-red circle the figure like currents. At the left edge and upper left the colour is warmer, a red-brown, while at the right it turns to a darker blue-green. A small dark red signature sits in the lower left corner.

Munch treated the motif in several painted versions and in a celebrated lithograph. Our reproduction follows the painted version in the National Museum measuring 70.5 x 90.5 cm. This is worth knowing: the printed version carries a border of spermatozoa and a foetus in the lower left corner, and the painted canvas has no such border. Anyone who knows the print will not find those elements here.

The paint is laid on thinly and in places the weave of the canvas shows through it. There are almost no contours; the body does not end in a line but dissolves into the surrounding swirls, so that figure and background are not separate spaces. The hair is made with long strokes that continue into the movement of the background, and the face is the only part with a denser, more worked application.

Ours is among our reproductions on canvas, hand-painted in oil, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. As a fine art reproduction the hardest passage is the body, where the cream has to run into the greenish shadow without a visible edge.

The format is upright and the composition is concentrated on a single figure, so the painting works best alone on a narrower wall, in an alcove or beside a doorway, where it has emptiness around it. Because the whole range is dark and cool apart from the red arc, it suits a light neutral wall that opens the dark mass up. Hang it at eye level or a touch above, since the head is tilted back and the scene gains from being seen slightly from below. The light should be warm and directed, so that the red arc lights up.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.

Photograph of the original: Nasjonalmuseet, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.